Balancing the Levels of All the Voices

It’s not pleasurable to listen to a podcast episode where one participant is really loud and the other is at a much lower volume. As a podcast engineer you want to avoid this on your episodes.

The typical old school way to balance the voices is to simply listen back and forth to each of the different voices and adjust the level of each until they all appear to be at the same loudness level. Of course you’ll probably be adjusting EQ’s and compressors along with the overall volumes of each track.

Another way to quickly balance the levels of various participants is to process each participants track to be the same LUFS level. This will make them close to level, but you will always want to adjust the levels slightly using your ears. Because even when the LUFS level of two different voices is the same, the perceived loudness of each voice can differ due to things like proximity to the mic, dynamic range, frequency response of the mic, the timbre of individual voices, etc. So it’s a handy practice to set the LUFS level of each participant to the same value, but then you still have to use your ears 😉

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