YouTube normalises loudness, so louder isn't better
Like Spotify and most podcast apps, YouTube measures how loud your upload sounds on average and adjusts playback to its own target. Mastering a video hotter than that target doesn't make it sound louder to viewers. It just gets turned down again, and you're left with the squashed dynamics that heavy limiting introduces along the way.
The target to aim for
- Around -14 LUFS integrated. This is commonly used as a practical working target for video, and it is the figure Spotify publishes for its own playback normalisation. YouTube does not publish it as a required upload specification, so treat it as a sensible working level rather than a rule.
- -1 dBTP true peak ceiling. Leave at least a decibel of headroom so YouTube's own transcode doesn't introduce distortion on your loudest moments.
- Don't chase the decimal. Being a LUFS or two off target isn't audible. Being ten off, either a whisper-quiet upload or a brick-walled one, is what viewers notice.
Viewers can also change playback themselves with Stable Volume or Voice Boost, which are separate features that cannot both be active at once. Here is what each one does, and why neither replaces a proper master.
Delivery format
Upload the highest quality source audio you have, a WAV or high-bitrate AAC track baked into your video file, and let YouTube's own encoder handle compression. Don't pre-limit or pre-compress a file to "sound louder" before upload; it only removes headroom you'll want back, and normalisation erases the advantage anyway.
Where this actually goes wrong
- Mismatched intro music and voice. A punchy, loud intro track followed by a quiet voiceover reads as two different loudness levels; normalise them as one piece, not separately.
- Over-limiting to "compete." There's nothing to compete for. Normalisation means the loudest channel on YouTube and the quietest both play back at roughly the same level.
- No consistency between uploads. Viewers bouncing between your videos notice level jumps far more than they notice any single video being slightly off target.
Optivox hits the target on every upload
Optivox measures your recording, balances speaker levels, then masters to a broadcast-standard loudness target with true peak headroom intact, so every upload lands in the same place without you setting a single number by hand.