There is no doubt that the volume of your podcast is an essential element in which you have to take special care, since this, along with the other elements of audio post production, are a reflection of the quality of your company or person.
The correct quantity of volume allows listeners to receive your message clearly, precisely and safely, thus taking care of both the quality of your podcast and the health of your audience’s ears.
The process by which we can handle this volume issue is called mastering and it is the end point of the post production chain that we have already told you about in this Blog. It is important to mention that if a good job has not been done on the other elements (editing and mixing) there is no way that the mastering will go well.
So once we are sure that we have an impeccable editing and mixing job, now we can worry about the master. And it is right here where we appreciate that the “volume” goes beyond just the gain levels and we must worry about these three elements:

Tonal Balance
This is where we can apply a final EQ to the entire mix as a whole. Normally, if the EQ in the mixing process has been done well, small adjustments will be made here to achieve a tonal balance between most of the possible podcast playback devices, such as headphones, a car sound system, a home audio system, smartphones, etc.
Dynamics
Dynamics is a key element to achieve a good intelligibility of the content of your podcast, where you have to take care that the differences between the softest sounds or words are not so great with respect to those of higher levels. This is done so that it is very easy to understand the entire content and that the audience does not suffer from problems such as not hearing what is said very low or hearing distortions due to very high volumes. For this, the mix is subjected to a compression process, taking care that it is not perceptible to the ear (allowing variations in gain so that it does not lose naturalness) while decreasing the dynamic range.


Standardization
How loud should my podcast be? At what volume should it be heard? These are complex questions that fortunately it seems that they will finally have an answer, and this is because digital platforms are trying to regulate volume levels, and more and more of them are doing it in the same way, using LUFS ( Loudness Units Full Scale). Soon we will talk about LUFS in another blog post, but for now it is enough to know that, for example, Apple podcast uses -16 LUFS or Youtube -14 LUFS as a reference level. Thanks to this, we can have this data as reference when mastering so that your podcast complies with the standards and can be listened to comfortably and easily.