I did some measuring at my listening position today with some jazz music that is piano, drums, and a bass. I turned it up loud by my standards using an FFT application on my iPhone measured peaks in the mid 80s and the average was probably the user 70s.
Does It have to be loud?
Are you also under the impression that when people (or
manufacturers) demo their equipment, they maintain sound pressure levels
between 90-100 Dba. In general this is done in rooms being too small, and
therefore the room will heavily interact with the sound heard in that room.
Often, when you ask to lower the volume, the actual result is better, and –most
likely- provides you with the information you were looking for. So, my question here is, do you also prefer
to listen in the 90-100 dba range? Or do you –like myself- like to listen in
the 70-90 dba sound pressure range? Of course, I’m referring to sound pressure
levels at the listening position, which –in my case- is about 4 meter away from
the speaker.
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A comment on the dB thing and size of ’room’. Shoot a big caliber handgun outdoors and it is kinda loud, but soundwise not a big deal. Shoot it in a bathroom or a closed car and it might blow your eardrums out. (not known from experience at all) Same thing playing music. (think of the tiny acoustic space in earbuds...) People are always asking how to compensate for oddball entryways in a music playback room. The opening mess up the flow of the sound pressures. And having a big opening is almost like having a bigger room. |
Another point is that I was talking about SPL at the listening position. (in my case 4.0 meter) @han_n Hello han. Just letting you know that I’m aware that you are referring to sound pressure at the listening position. You clearly stated that as the first post in the thread. However..... In a subsequent post you made in this thread, dated 03-04-2018 8:57am, you wrote "....people admit listening at levels up to 100 or more dba at the listening position. I’m not sure how they measure, but believe me, most speakers won’t even go that loud, or if they do, they will distort tremendously...." I took that to mean that you are now stating that most speakers cannot achieve 100 db without tremendous distortion, irrespective of the listening position. And this is simply not true, despite the Soundstage measurements submitted by shadorne as evidence. And, I previously responded to rebut the measurements by stating that (a) the distortion is at the high frequency range only and is in fact linear at the lower frequencies, which has substantially greater impact on the ability to produce high sound pressure levels, (b) "tremendous" can be a matter of opinion, and if one believes a 1db deviation from linear is tremendous then that’s okay too, (c) live rock music at high levels also features a degree of distortion and (d) maximum speaker sound pressure level can be inferred from manufacturer specifications of sensitivity and maximum power handling capability. Now if I were to use manufacturer specification applicable to my speakers, Golden Ear Triton Reference, I could conclude that they could produce (approximate) 125db! Of course, I do realize that likely isn't possible (and certainly not practical), however, reducing that number by say 10db (to 115db) I do believe is very doable. And I’m sure there are many other speakers that can produce those levels as well. |
@gdhal The Triton Golden Ear Reference seems to have a linearity problem at quite modest volumes (90 dB). It looks like the AMT ribbon suffers from the problems that have always plagued these designs - lack of ability to produce even modestly high SPL without distortion. Infinity solved this problem by using arrays of the AMT but Triton Ref only has one. You can see what I mean on these plots from Soundstage particularly the deviation from linearity. http://www.soundstage.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1770:nrc-measurements... Of note also is the comb filtering of the AMT tweeter above 4KHz - this is due to the fact that the diaphragm is too large to produce these higher frequencies without interference and hence the comb like appearance of the frequency plot (lots of wiggles). The advantage of comb filtering is it can give a pleasing expansive effect - electric guitar players use it all the time to make guitars sound big - it makes it hard for the ear that detect the origin of the sound and will reduce pinpoint Soundstage on a stereo but conversely will make higher frequencies even bigger and expansive. The Stereophile plots better show the comb filtering. Note that off axis is the first to be affected which is because of the different distance the sound travels from either side of the large (compared to a conventional tweeter) diaphragm of the AMT. https://www.stereophile.com/images/118GETRfig4.jpg |
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