curious about what peak level everyone else aims for when mixing (for something that is being recorded to a digital recorder as well as online broadcast). probably an age thing (when I first started PPMs were uncommon outside a legal radio station desk, and every piece of kit was analogue) but I tend to push it a bit, you could get away with it then!

I noticed though that Biotech has got the peaks on his last show to -20dBFS (SMPTE standard). I set mine to -18dBFS (EBU/UER standard) but have a habit of pushing the mix to as strong as -6dBFS (at -4dBFS the CLIP light is set on my meters). EBU used to have a max of -9dbFS but that was originally to keep the audio out of everyones telephone lines when it was still sent down copper as analogue (very unusual today).

Should I leave slightly more headroom? Been reading a paper from a chap in Denmark at EBU who warns about MP3 encoding being easy to clip at -5 dBFS and that engineers now instinctively push levels up due to excessive compression starting from the recording studio.. I’ve heard a lot of other online stations especially folk using Virtual DJ and similar where there is clearly a compressor on the mix before the MP3 encoder (don’t do this, it sounds crap on any decent equipment, you are not trying to play out ads at a large family watching the idiot-lantern..)

I try to keep the levels sensible because a mixer with 60mm faders is really easy to slightly put over the level you want and its not as if there’s a big noise floor to get through but -18dBFS seems too low…