These references are the best examples I found so far for objectively loud and occasionally harsh top end (10 kHz and above). I’m not talking 0.5 dB extra, I’m talking 3 dB or more. In the playlist below, you should be able to perceive all the tracks distinctly louder (in the high-end) than the first track (which is our true reference). Listen at quiet, medium and max volume, and notice at what point the differences are obvious.
The main take-away is that if you don’t hear any differences, you should investigate your monitoring. A lack of proper high end monitoring will either bias you into overly bright mixes, or end up with an uneven top end for the various tracks in the mix (because you don’t hear them properly). Generally it will be difficult to have consistency from mix to mix.
Starting with Sabrina Carpenter’s Taste, a track that’s bright but very carefully balanced, with smooth high end, nothing pops out as harsh and all the sibilance is under control. If Blow Your Mind is somehow at the very edge of having harsh hi-hats and top of the claps in the chorus, the New Rules is obviously shooting up “crystals” (not sibilance, but spiky harmonics at over 10 kHz) right from the intro vocals. You can compare both vocals in the intro, Blow Your Mind is audibly tamer than New Rules.
Gorgeous is overall excessively bright (instrumental and vocals all together), and Que Mal Te Fue has the instrumental (hi-hats and the top of the kick) very forward in the top end.
Fyordh - Kerala Blues (from Buddha Bar 27) has really piercing hi-hats at 15 kHz. They’re not harsh, but they’re very loud, to the point I can’t listen this track with my monitors at max volume - they become so very piercing.
All these tracks sound normal on smartphone speakers. I have a Bose speaker that doesn’t seem to catch any of the extra brightness. My monitors (Neumann KH120A) do reveal it. And I have a pair of almost 20 years old Sony 5” Hi-Fi speakers that always react pretty violent to loud high-end (they simply start distorting).
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Click the top-right down arrow to disclose the playlist. Then the bottom-right up arrow to bring the player for seeking purposes, because apparently we can’t have them both in the embedded player :))
Fidbak plays the wave audio at full quality, but if you want to download the files (or if the embedded playlist below doesn’t work), here is the link.
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https://fidbak.audio/thesimpletomreferences/embed/8506f0522351/732cba77e19c
I had a long conversation on this topic with another mixing engineer friend, very smart, very knowledgeable, and his opinion is that most likely these were creative decisions, so he would rather accept them. It’s a valid perspective. But mine is too: when my old Hi-Fi is distorting the top end, and I instinctively reach the EQ because my ears can’t deal with that much top end, I’ll rather do something to mitigate this. As for you, it’s up to you how you want your high-end to sound. These references above are the loudest high-ends I could find, so probably it’s for the best not to get louder than that.
A good reason to keep the high-end under control as much as possible, is to minimize distortion when limiting. Even though through commercial speakers all the songs in the playlist show no sonic issues, for the mastering limiter each dB in the spectrum matters: less dBs = less distortion. All of the mixes above are also really good (except for the high-end issues), so they can take more limiting punishment before disintegrating. But if your mixes are not quite Top40-level, it makes sense to pay attention to the low-end and high-end, and avoid unnecessarily loud levels. Good practice doesn’t break mixes and masters, quite the opposite.