Loudness Range of Final Episodes – What’s Good and What’s Bad?

I speak a lot about controlling the dynamic range of podcast episodes in order to provide a good listening experience to all listeners.

Loudness Range (which is similar to dynamic range) is the average difference between the loudest parts and the quietest parts – and it’s measured in LU (Loudness Units, similar to dB).

If the loudness range of an episode is too great (like around 10-20) that means the loud parts of your episode will be EXTREMELY loud and the quiet parts will be VERY quiet and difficult for your listeners to hear if they’re listening in an environment that has ANY background noise, which is basically ALL listening environments, of course.

In my experience an ideal Loudness Range for spoken word podcasts is around 4-5 LU. To me this level sounds nicely compressed but still contains enough natural energy and life. Even 3.5 sounds good sometimes.

Auphonic and iZotope RX are two applications that I know of that can measure Loudness Range, and Auphonic can even process your audio to be whatever loudness range you want it to be!

Have you ever measured the Loudness Range of one of your final episodes? It’s eye opening for sure.

FYI, from the iZotope RX Loudness Control User Guide:

The loudness range is computed from the distribution (histogram) of Short-term loudness over time. First, signals more than 20 LU below the average Short-term loudness are thrown away. Second, 10% of quietest and 5% of loudest remaining signals are also excluded from the computation. Finally, the difference between the loudest and the quietest of the remaining signals is called the Loudness range and is measured in LU (equivalent to dB).

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