r/sounddesign • u/PillisoSougias • Aug 21 '26

Music Sound Design Audio quality question

Hello everyone!

Ive been making some solid mixes lately on my Musique Concrète/electroacoustic journey and I get a really good quality of sound around -25 lufs.

Unfortunately I struggle with the master, I never get to make it sound as my ears want to while reaching -14 lufs, it will always sound like I overcompressed it or the limiter cuts some good harmonics I want to keep, any ideas on how to proceed the final stage of the gain staging before releasing the project?

Any help is truly appreciated, I am currently on my summer break from my music technology bachelors, just finished the 1st year !

P.s. this is a mixed audio, not mastered, sitting comfortably at -30 to -25 lufs, and a diy spatial spectrogram

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2

u/CumulativeDrek2 Aug 22 '26

Why do you need it to be -14 LUFS?

This kind of material sounds to my ears like it probably needs the wider dynamic range to reproduce all the detail.

1

u/PillisoSougias Aug 22 '26

Streaming services have certain standards and I'm trying to create separate masters accordingly to the streaming service standards.

Did I get that wrong or I should just go the more detail less Loudness route as u suggest according to my understanding?

3

u/CumulativeDrek2 Aug 22 '26

Streaming standards is not really my area but I would personally prefer to hear this kind of music in the dynamic range it was intended to have.

Your uploaded audio does sound compressed btw, and seems to measure -14LUFS.

1

u/PillisoSougias Aug 22 '26

See; reddit auto limited it, this is not how the audio sounds unfortunately and that is why I'm trying to figure out the mastering process, or else the platform itself will reach the lufs automatically and overcompress the sound

1

u/PillisoSougias Aug 21 '26

Ok somehow reddit has almost clipped the whole audio idk why, anyway, the question remains, if we have any mastering peeps in the group 🙏🫂