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RE: volume

If you are intimately familiar with the sound of live music in a variety of concert venues and seating positions, then you will know that the sound (e.g. tonal balance) of instruments depends on how loud they are played and the listening volume and tonal balance depends on the seating position and hall acoustics. It is possible to sort out the hall acoustics by listening to the end reverberations of the music. With this in mind, one then knows, intuitively, how loud the music should be for it to sound real. If music is played back at a different volume it can not and will not sound real.

If one plays the music back on a system with limited head room and cranks the volume up, then one will get dynamic compression and distortion. In this case, the playback may sound better (and more realistic) if the volume is turned down. It is also possible that a recording was made from a perspective (close to the players) that makes the natural volume excessively loud, relative to the listener's hearing. (I have in mind sitting eight feet from a duet between a soprano and a contralto, and this caused me serious physical problems.) In this case, the recording may not be for you, regardless of its quality and regardless of your system.

If a system lacks tonal balance in the bass, i.e. it is not flat down to at least 30 Hz if a full range of instruments are used then it may sound better if playback volume is turned up, because of how human hearing perception works. The perceived tonal balance may be better at a louder setting, but again there can not be serious realism in this case if the musical performance has any serious dynamic range, because the louder volume will start causing "ear bleed" in the loud passages if the quiet passages are turned up to achieve tonal balance.

One can have a nice system with limited bass extension and limited sound volume. It can sound excellent on solo guitar recordings and the like, but it will still need to have flat frequency response and low distortion at the volume levels used. Such a system will not be suitable for large scale orchestral music, where peak SPL levels in concert seats reach over 120 dB.

The starting point may need to be relatively high to hear low level details if there is a lot of background noise in one's environment. The best way to deal with this is to deal with the noise by prevention, isolation or moving to a better location.

I make no comment as to realism in regard to playback of amplified music and artificially produced studio recordings. I try to avoid these musical genres and these types of recordings. I certainly lack experience in this regard. If we are talking about different musical genres, then we are talking past each other and not disagreeing.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • RE: volume - Tony Lauck 09/27/1509:35:24 09/27/15 (1)

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