Integrated loudness helps you judge the overall loudness of programmatic material-of a song, a film, an episode, etc. If youвЂ™re mixing a podcast or a dialogue scene for a film, momentary readouts help you judge the consistency of the voices, thus helping you make decisions to juice the gain so you donвЂ™t lose a word at the end of a sentence. I donвЂ™t have room here to relate how loudness metering came to be, how a loudness unit (LU) was established (think of it like a dB that takes the context of frequency and dynamic history into account), but I have no qualms in telling you that it is my preferred method of level metering, because it is so versatile.ДЄ LUFS loudness meter always gives you three different readouts-momentary, short term, and integrated-and theyвЂ™re all incredibly useful. In these cases, engineers used to use PPM meters but we have largely migrated to loudness metering for averages and true-peak metering for catching the quicker hits. Your DAWвЂ™s RMS meter serves a roughly similar function, as it aims to portray the average strength of a signal, rather than its moment to moment peak value.Д«ut these kinds of meters arenвЂ™t as helpful for seeing, measuring, or quantifying the momentary transient, which is necessary for making sure you donвЂ™t overwhelm your mix/master, or hit your digital ceiling. You might not have a conventional VU meter, like the one pictured below, in your DAW, though youвЂ™ll see them still on many outboard compressors. This makes them credible tools for taking the average temperature of a signal, be it a mix or a single element like a vocal or a bass. Conversely, they take longer to register when a signal has dropped to a lower value (again, usually around 300 milliseconds). They show us a signalвЂ™s strength put another way, they display how level a signal happens to be at any given moment.Д«ut how the moment is given to us, and how this moment of signal strength is quantified and measured-therein lies a world of confusion.Д«y definition, VU meters, implemented long before the digital epoch, tend to take longer to read the level of a signal (around 300 milliseconds). TheyвЂ™re found in DAWs, outboard piece, and physical mixing boards. Level meters are arguably the most prevalent meters we come across. With this established, letвЂ™s get into a brief overview of the meters we use. As such, meters help us make better decisions, particularly regarding levels, frequency content, stereo spread, and dynamic range. Meters donвЂ™t help us judge aesthetic concepts rather, they measure events pertaining to the science behind. To some extent, the answer is simple: Metering, in these contexts, is any visual aid (preferably established by our forebears) that shows us where we stand. Such talk leads us to our question du jour: what is metering in the mixing and mastering process? Here I might ask myself, вЂњAm I filling the meters?вЂќ Meter talk even affects my recording parlance: Say IвЂ™m running a guitar through a preamp whose sweet spot occupies the top of its LED-segmented meters. 'How does that look on the meters?' I might say to myself, usually after midnight, when IвЂ™ve been mixing so long that I have no idea if things feel squashed in the mix or merely in my head.Д¬onversely, if IвЂ™m compressing the drum bus, I might ask myself, вЂњhow much gain reduction is this showing on the meters?вЂќ When mastering a tune, I might think to say, вЂњhow loud is this reading on the meters?вЂќ In the twin practices of mixing and mastering, we often speak of the meters, particularly after making bold decisions.

Audio vu meter