Voiceover Tech: Competitively Loud Audition Recordings – Tuesday Tech Tip

How can we make sure that our auditions are at the right volume? Delivering competitively loud audio should be approached on a case-by-case basis. Since audiobooks have an established delivery spec, the ACX Peak and Loudness values have become a de facto target when sending in auditions. As I mentioned last week, that is one voiceover audition venue where delivery volume is pretty straight forward and provides confidence when sending our auditions.

Outside of that genre, audition volume targets become much less clear – often obscured with incorrect requests. In one instance, I had a number of clients being asked to deliver commercial auditions with “Loudness at -6 dB” in order to “not play back too quietly…” Some had employed significant Compression or harsh Limiting to boost their RMS to -6 dB, while others increased their volume. All methods resulted in highly compressed and distorted audio. 

The poor results stemmed from a bit of miscommunication. Strictly speaking, the request was not possible. Consider that Spotify uses a maximum Loudness value of -14 dB (LUFS – which is similar to RMS) for fully produced music tracks. Boosting the Loudness of a voice-only recording well above that is clearly asking for trouble. Adjusting Loudness (RMS or LUFS) to -6 dB causes unlistenable results. 

Confirm your delivery specs

Perhaps that request was a bit like the old game of “Telephone” where a story is told to the first person, who then relates it to the second, and so on. By the time the tale is transferred, person by person, to the final individual, it bears no resemblance to the original description. In the above example, an audio engineer probably shared that they wanted nothing “louder” than -6 dB. In other words, they wanted Peaks to be under that value. Pushing the Loudness up into that range would not be usable. 

Ultimately, in delivering our auditions, we need to rely upon what seems reasonable and sounds right to us. If the applied processing causes things to sound worse, that should be a huge red flag. Luckily, in that case it was easy to determine something was wrong. It gets trickier as we move on to general, non-audiobook auditions.

The key takeaway here is that if the audition volume you are being asked to deliver seems strange, it’s important to confirm those specs.

How loud should other auditions be?

One of the more consistently shared guidelines for auditions is the idea of Peak normalizing to -3 dB. As near as I can determine, this idea comes from a recommendation on the upload page of a popular online voiceover marketplace site. At that step in the process there was a highlighted sentence that stated “We recommend Normalizing to -3 dB when uploading your audition.” 

Our challenge is that Peak value provides an imperfect target. As mentioned in an earlier article, a recording with a momentary peak of -6 dB can actually be louder (going by RMS) than a separate recording with Peak of -1 dB. The key idea here is that we use Peak only as a quick reference. When we’re using Peak for deliverables, it’s as an imperfect shorthand. 

Using Peak as a shorthand

If we handle our recording consistently, that shorthand method for audition volume can work for us. Using a waveform editor with good detail such as Twisted Wave, Adobe Audition, or Ocenaudio, we can easily see the contrasting height from two or three waves in a raw take that jumped up higher than the rest. By manually attenuating those “tall trees” in our “forest,” we’ve controlled the spurious Peaks and left the performance dynamics intact. I teach this step as a practical workflow for getting auditions out the door quickly.

Peak Normalizing that slightly modified audio to -3 dB (or even a bit closer to -0 dB) lets us deliver a very natural sounding recording at a higher Loudness value. It’s going to sound competitively loud while maintaining the dynamics of performance which keep the listener engaged. Most humans are wired to perceive volume positively – it’s why turning up a song makes it sound better.

Balancing volume and dynamics in voiceover auditions

This approach lets us reduce the amount of processing and maintain the naturalness in our voiceover auditions. Since the spec for almost everything trends toward “real”, “conversational”, and “non-announcery”, finding a balance between presence and naturalness remains a worthy goal for many types of commercial and narrative auditions. 

The benefit of this approach is that it tends to tighten up the range of Loudness on auditions we are delivering. Crunching the numbers on my commercial auditions from the first few weeks of this month, almost everything lands between -20 and -24 dB RMS. That was the end result of lightly attenuating a few randomly tall Peaks, then Peak Normalizing, which ensures nothing is above -0 dB.

Next, I’ll talk about whether that can work for other types of auditions.

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