Eelco Grimm is researcher at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and works on loudness normalization topics. He wrote a “Recommendation for loudness normalization by Music Streaming Services”. This document is the summary of a large survey that Eelco conducted on 4.2 million albums of the database of music streaming service Tidal.
A protocol was based on this analysis, which was then tested with 38 subjects. 80% of the subjects preferred the proposed normalization style, which is album normalization with the loudest track aligned to -14 LUFS. Tidal has adopted Eelco’s proposal and an AES workgroup that writes a new standard for audio streaming is taking it into account.
