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Minus 23, Minus 24, Minus 16: The Loudness Numbers in Your Briefs, and Who Wrote Them

Nate Holloway · October 24, 2026 · 8 min read

Every few months a brief lands with a number in it: deliver at -23, master to -16, peaks under -3. Those numbers aren't the client being fussy. Each one comes from a body that publishes it, for a reason you can read, and once you know who wrote which number, a delivery spec stops looking like a riddle. Here's the reference card, sourced line by line.

This is a bookmark piece. It covers the targets a working voice actor is most likely to be asked for, from audiobooks to broadcast commercials, streaming drama and podcast ads, and it quotes the documents themselves so you can check the wording before you argue with an engineer. Specs change, so the date each was read is in the Sources line.

For decades, levels were set by peaks. The trouble is that two files can peak at exactly the same point and sound wildly different in volume, because one is a quiet read with one loud word and the other is squeezed flat and loud all the way through.

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