[Dana Nielsen]

Awesome, Mike! Once you get your adapter cables for the speakers I like to push them together so they sound like one “mono” speaker, and then situate them on the other side of the room or off to the side, way out of the sweet spot, to give the impression of listening from afar. Kinda like when I’m listening to my Sonos Move speaker in the kitchen while cooking.

I’ve never seen that MWTM Jaycen video, nor did I know he’s a HEAT fan, but we’re on the same page, tonally, with that setting, haha. I play around with the setting on every session to see what I like. But yeah, 9 times out of 10 I end up with the main knob around 9:00 and the tone knob around 3:00, give or take. Also interesting re vocal setting — 9 out of 10 times, similarly, I don’t end up using HEAT on the vocals. I will say, however, I’m almost never setting my HEAT-enabled channels to “Pre”. Once in a while I will if I feel like Post is too crunchy, but that’s pretty rare. I’m a big HEAT fan tho, for decades, on almost every mix.

Loudness and normalization and mastering and all that is a tricky nut to crack. If you make your master loud AF for non-normalized listeners (or CD, Bandcamp, etc.), will it be penalized and quieter when normalized on DSPs? And if you’re mastering for normalized playback, will you sound quiet against other tracks for folks (like me) who listen with normalization turned off?

There are no simple answers yet there are dozens of compromises – each compromise feeling like a loss. Amiright?

Here are a collection of things I know and have observed:

1. No one masters to normalization spec (-14 LUFS etc.). Not that I can tell. I listen to everything with normalization off, and am always watching my TC Electronic Clarity M meter (optical in), and everyone’s masters are loud AF. The loudness war rages on. At least in stereo mixing for albums. (not so for film, TV, immersive, ATMOS, etc. .. those industries and specs will reject files that don’t follow the RULES haha)
2. ADPTR Streamliner is a wonderful, powerful, feature-packed tool you can use while mixing or mastering – in realtime – to audition your loud masters “through” various codecs and normalization specs. Highly recommended if you’re committed to (obsessed with? 😵‍💫) cracking the loudness vs. normalization cheat code.
3. Izotope RX also has some incredible analysis tools that can help identify areas where your audio file might be penalized and/or areas where you could make some gains. Unlike Streamliner, RX’s loudness tools are more “rendered analysis” rather than real-time. My friend Dale Becker has a very informative walkthrough of some of these features here. This is a fantastic video for anyone interested in learning more about loudness and DSP normalization!
4. Everyone struggles with this conundrum. Even the pro-est mixers and fanciest mastering engineers. So just try to enjoy the obsessed, passionate, quest for knowledge on the subject. Become continually more aware of how normalization might affect the perceived loudness of your mixes and masters. Keep that growing treasure-trove of normalization-information handy in the back of your mind as just ONE of the million things to consider when deciding that you are FINISHED with your mix or master. But… all that to say …and I mean it…
5. DON’T LET LUFS RUIN YOUR LIFE! F#$k ’em. Kick those LUFS to the curb! Normalize THIS: 🖕😂.

Seriously, just do what’s best for the music; make it as loud as feels right to you for the given genre, checking it against non-normalized reference mixes done by our heroes; and then call it a job well done. I’d take “the best” mix over “the loudest” mix every day of the week. And I think most listeners will too. 😊