balancing act/final gain volumes

[KeithJames]

Until I was educated about looking at the loudness meter, my sole guide to a good volume was listening to my projects on handheld devices and more importantly on the stereo streamed to the car.  My reference point was to simply find how loud/soft some of my commercial listening picks were when stremed on the car system at any given volume level and shoot for that on my own creations.  Current project is music unlike I have recorded before, I have a collection of live recorded Renaissance guitar (lute) w/voice music that I made in the 80's on cassette and have now remastered, and they sound pretty nice.  But also included newly recorded material on good equipment, examples of the same music style, my voice with classical guitar, and these recordings came out very nicely.  The modern recordings are easy to level for the car and the loudness meter has them in the mid to low teens below the zero on the loudness meter.  But the older recordings have more extraneous sound I guess and just sound louder, no matter how much gain I reduce for listening in the car; yet on hand-held devices but "eras" of recordings have had a fairly even perception of volume, even before going down this rabbit hole.  But now that I've reduced gain repeatedly on these older tunes they are reading VERY low on the loudness meter (-40s to -20s) yet still sound louder in the car than the new recordings, yet are starting to sound a little soft on the handheld devices.   Should I forget about this approach and just pick a level on the loudness meter for a median level per song to be matched across all songs and forget about how they sound next to each other in consecutive play? 

Edited December 11, 2023 by KeithJames
clarity

[KeithJames]

I realize my question is hard to answer because I'm revealing a lack of understanding on certain things and applying this to a broad and complicated topic.  In the interim, since reading online about the Apple LUF meter, I have set the target line on the meter to 18 (I didn't know it was moveable) and am going to just set the gain to each song to come up with similar readings and go with that.  But I'm def still interested in feedback to this question, especially if it might change my tack here before finally submitting these for publication.    

[wonshu]

Back when I used to produce albums and my material didn't end up in another mix engineers DAW I've sometimes just added all mixes to a new blank Logic project and jumped back and forth between them and adjusted their perceived volume just by the quick impression the jumping around gave me.

Nowadays I would just select them all and hit Edit (local edit menu!) -> Normalize Region Gain - set it to individual regions and Loudness (leave it at -23). Then at least you see how the perceived volume difference is between those pieces.