Master Levels - Resolved

This is a basic question but it never came up before.  I have Master Bus limiting on a song with quite a few tracks.  The master meter never hits red, but the L-R master meters do.
 
In other words, looking at the Master at the bottom of the Track View, all is well.  When I click the Master Bus and look in Inpsector, the Master meter on the left is fine but the L-R meters on the right side of Inspector are peaking.
 
What does this mean?
 
By the way, I am having a lot of trouble with overall level on this one.  Lots of stuff is going on and when I work track by track to get the levels right, the overall result sounds weak compared to my other mixes form the album.  I can work that out, but not until I understand what is going on with the metering.

The reason is that you are not adopting any type of system levels wise throughout your productions. You need to get into something like the K system approach to levels. VU metering on tracks and busses and masterbuss. The idea is to keep rms levels consistent on tracks and busses and don't worry about the peaks. They take care of themselves with the built in headroom available within the K system approach. Limiters are not required in the mixdown stage. If they are you are doing something very wrong.
 
You could choose K-20 as your ref level and everything will be the same except the average level of the music will end up lower but with even more headroom. K-20 masters will have to come up higher though in the mastering phase in order to reach commercial levels.
 
You need to:
 
Choose a ref level and work at that eg K-14
 
Calibrate your system so when you play back an rms test wave with its peaks reaching -14dB the VU meters will show 0dBu. (plenty of great VST VU meters to choose from)
 
Ensure your tracks are all at K-14, your busses are at K-14 and your final mix is also at K-14. It does not matter how big or busy or dense your mix may be you can still satisfy these requirements.
 
I don't see any peaking anywhere in my system ever. No red lights coming on anywhere. As it should be.
 
Don't try and make your mix loud. That is where people go wrong. Keep everything at your K ref level and turn up the monitors in your studio to be the SPL ref level eg 85 dB SPL.
 
All of your tracks will end up the same level prior to mastering. You then wait a week and master all the tracks together and it is here you can raise the overall rms level of your tracks upward toward the higher commercial levels you may be after.
 
You definitely need the VU meter VST's because DAW's do not (normally) provide accurate rms metering especially at K reference levels (except Studio One does however)
 
What you have to do is to pull all the tracks down that are feeding a buss so the buss just reads the K ref level on the VU's. Then mix all the busses to the master so the master is just reaching the final K ref level too. When you get this right you are well away from any peaking or clipping anywhere.
 
Turn your monitors up and stop trying to make your mix loud. Mixing is NOT the time to do this, mastering is.
 
 

Hey, John.  Master and L-R are unity (0 db).
 
I appreciate all the good opinions and advice.  The question here is just why these meters do not match, which is something I have never seen before.
 
The Bob Katz's method is great, especially for those seeking a greater dynamic range in their product, but I am trying to get the last couple of tracks done on an album and this is not a good time to adopt a completely different methodology and recalibrate everything (although this is good information to consider for the future).  Folks may be making some assumptions about what I am doing or what my loudness perceptions are.  I have a compressor/limiter on the master bus for a specific reason unique to this track.  Consider also that people sometimes release online previews of music that will be mastered and pressed later, so the process steps may be different.
 
Thanks.

Jonathan, I think I misread what John was saying and you have pointed me to a good possibility.  I do have a quirk that sometimes tracks go to Main (VS-700) instead of Master and since the project has a lot of tracks (63, in fact), that is really a good possibility--and could explain why I am getting frustrated with the mix and peaks.
 
I have another song loaded now, but will absolutely check that later.  In fact, I am a bit embarrassed I didn't think of that; but, after all, I am The Mighty Konrad, not The Perfect Konrad.
 
And thanks again to the others who took time to make other good suggestions.

John, You made my day.  Take care, bro.

If you have an effect on the master (such as compression) that can lower the dB level, wouldn't that produce the exact situation you are describing.  That is the buses feeding into the master would be hotter than the master itself after the master effects are applied.

OK, you guys solved it!
 
I had recently replaced the original bass with Scarbee Rickenbacker (Kontakt) and also replaced the Acoustic Legends mandolin with one from Bolder Sounds.  In both cases, the tracks defaulted to VS-700 Main instead of Master, which was causing the level discrepancy and a great deal of mix confusion.  Obviously, the bass was the big contributor.  (Not sure why the tracks did not default to Master: I have it set up as the default bus.)  This particular project has 63 tracks and several buses (orchestra, female vocals, etc.) so I stupidly missed this routing issue.
 
In addition to solving the problem, I think we had some excellent discussion here.  Many thanks for the great conversation.

Glad you got it sorted, Konrad.
 
It's so easy to miss things like this and spend hours trying to track them down.