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Nate,
Haven’t forgotten you. My curiosity has led me to some new-to-me info that I’m digesting before I nail the answer to your dilemnaa. A couple things seem obvious so far. Those with deep experience in record making don’t pay much attention to the LUFS. It’s like the plumber who can diagnose the problem and fix it in 15 but charges a couple hundred for the knowledge. Better yet, the analogy of Picasso pulling out a blank canvas and making a minimalist masterpiece in seconds because of all his previous work completed, having technique down cold, and then… intent. Those of us stumbling around in LUFS land currently will one day get it. So sayeth the alread -knowers.
I’m also thinking it’s possible to cheat the loudness numbers to make the Integrated number lower so as not to have the song turned down by the streamers. Because that Integrated number is averaged over the entire song, any EXTENDED sections that are above the threshold level of the noise gate will be included in the overall measurement and thereby “dilute” the time weighting of the loudest sections. Your reference track (Greater Heights) Integrated LUFS number was diluted by 2dB according to my experiment….I deleted the quiet intro and outro to that song and low and behold, the Integrated LUFS level jumped up by 2. This MAY be why you heard your track lower in comparison. If we’re only listening to which is the louder thing we hear and dismissing the quiet bits, we might could get fooled.
I’m not committing to that quite yet but am enjoying the exploration.
PT