How loud was your mix four minutes ago?

Over the last few years, I've done a lot of corporate work - panel discussions on medical, tech, and science topics in big ballrooms and convention centers - plus music gigs everywhere from 50-seat rooms to stadiums.

No matter the room, the same question is always running in the back of my head: how loud should this be?

Volume is part preference, part requirement. A band wants the room to feel it. A client or venue might cap you for compliance. An EDM show and a jazz club are not the same target. But underneath all of that, there are really only three ways to get volume wrong.

Too loud is the obvious one everyone thinks about. It's distracting and, past a certain point, it's damaging. You don't need to be in an arena to get to this point - put a drummer or a guitar amp in a smaller venue, and you'll hit some painful numbers fast.

Too quiet is easier to forget. Picture a ballroom with the HVAC running and a hundred quiet side conversations. All of that compounds into a wall of broadband noise. For speech to actually land, the average listener needs your mix sitting about 10-15 dB above that noise floor. Get only 5 dB above it and half the room misses what was said from the stage.

Inconsistent is the sneaky one. If one panel runs loud and the next runs soft, the audience works harder to follow both and it's distracting on top of that. Same with a worship set that jumps cue to cue. When the level holds steady, people stop noticing it, which is exactly what you want.

Here's the thing I kept running into on these shows.

Almost every SPL meter only tells you how loud you are running right now. Not how loud you were during the last song. Not how loud this panel is compared to the one before it. And the meter is almost always a separate app or a separate box sitting off to the side, away from where I'm actually mixing.

So I built the tool I was looking for and I’ve had a team of audio engineers testing it for months.

It's a VST3 plugin.

Drop it on a track in Reaper or Pro Tools while you're multitracking, or on an empty rack in SuperRack Performer, LiveProfessor, or Yamaha VST Rack right alongside your live plugins. Prefer not to run a DAW? There's a standalone app too, same meter, same calibration.

Route your measurement mic audio, load your mic's calibration file, calibrate with an SPL calibrator and you're reading real, calibrated dBA and dBC, the standard professional sound level meters show.

But the part I'm most proud of is the radar.

It shows you 15 min of history at a glance, using dBA Leq 3s - a 3 s rolling average with an A-weighting filter. That history is the whole point: now you can see, song to song and cue to cue, exactly how loud you've been instead of just where you are this second.

Export a clean PDF for a quick summary or a full CSV with every data point. It even keeps a running log in the background, so you're covered up to 24 hr even if you forgot to hit record.

I'll go deeper on measuring SPL, A-weighting, and how to actually read your metering over the next few weeks. For now, the best way to understand it is to put it on your own mix and watch.

There's a free demo on the page: the full app, no payment required. If it works for your setup, it’s a one time purchase. No subscription, available on Mac and Windows.

Until next time,

Drew

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