That's good information, thanks. My comment is mostly directed at the misleading blog post. I have no direct reason to believe that the study itself was comprom

That's good information, thanks. My comment is mostly directed at the misleading blog post. I have no direct reason to believe that the study itself was compromised, though it would be great to have confirmation from the authors that it was not. The part about matching volume levels in the ITU recommendation seems to be talking about making sure the source recordings were balanced. All their clips might well have been exactly at the ITU recommended level of -26 dB, but if Lyra introduced a level mismatch this would have to have been corrected at a later stage, and it's at least possible that it might not have been. The Lyra paper does explicitly say that they didn't follow the ITU rec for "data collection". Interestingly, the Opus and Reference sources are almost exactly -26 dB relative to full scale (according to several measurements of loudness), but the Lyra clip is about 6 dB hotter. So the source (the reference clip) exactly follows the ITU rec. Did they remember to fix the levels on the Lyra clips? I hope so!