Even with places like YouTube, where LUFS level is strictly defined, there’s sooo many creators who have no earthly idea what LUFS is, which levels YouTube enforces, and how it corrects for it. They post their videos with quiet narration and wonder why viewers get annoyed at all of the turning up and turning down of volume on each video.

See, YouTube enforces LUFS on videos by reducing volume on loud videos down to -14 LUFS. But, it doesn’t do anything to quiet videos. If you ever bring up the “Stats for Nerds” and look at the “Volume / Normalized” value, you might see something like “content loudness -5.9dB”. That means it’s -5.9dB quieter than it should be, and the creator should have amplified the video to normalize the volume levels before uploading it to YouTube.

So, you end up with a video that’s about -6dB quieter, and you have to turn up the volume to actually hear the narration. Then your TV or whatever device you’re watching will get blasted by the next video, which is properly normalized at around 0dB, and you’re forced to turn the damn volume back down.

YouTube has finally started to acknowledge the problem by introducing the Stable Volume feature. But, really, creators should educate themselves on how to properly mix their audio. I know editing is hard and there’s so many moving parts to deal with for YouTube uploads. But, audio quality is everything in a YouTube video. Nobody cares about whatever random B-roll video game footage, or PowerPoint slide presentation, or watermarked stock images, or videos of you presenting the narration with a lapel mic tied to a tree branch you’re using on the video side. It’s all about narration and audio quality.