radiorog said:
davedotco said:
radiorog said:
Cheers DD, yeah just realised my question wasn't specific enough. Your answer was very interesting though, and surprising.
I think want I was wandering was, say I'm listening to a track and the Max dB recorded is 70db, what frequency is most likely to be producing this Max loudness? Or is it a combination of all of them? Thinking now, I may have realised the answer....something comes to mind about something I once heard maybe on this forum, where say one person clapping, producing a dB of "x" , if say 50,000 people are clapping at the same level in a football stadium, the loudness is obviously louder than the single person clapping. I'm not sure of the exact equation for this though, maybe you do?
Does this mean that the Max loudness of a track is created by all the frequencies combined? Although from what you have previously said, you estimate 90% of it is from the bass, especially in dance. It's funny, I think I would have guessed that the midrange would be loudest, but that's prob just me taking the MOR option.
My answer was really a reflection on modern pop music, a solo violin will be rather different an acoustic guitar too, though I suspect the bass power will be much higher than might be suspected.
You also need to be more precise in your language, 'loudness' is an entirely subjective notion and subject to, among other things, the Fletcher-Munson equal louness curves, that may explain why mid and upper mid notes seem more prominent.
Wow! I thought loudness was the actual physical measurement where dB was the unit! Had no idea it was a subjective term (google agrees with you Dave). Learnt something today!
Indeed, loudness is a subjective term if you are being accurate with your language. Sadly any kind of 'science' is deemed uncool and precise language nerdy. All part of the dumbing down of the (non) working class.
There really are just two terms that you need to understand, SPL (sound pressure level, a physical measure of compression in the air) and loudness (an individual, subjective evaluation of the SPL).
Mechanically the ear is a horn, (in reverse compared to a speaker horn) and like all horns follows the laws of physics, the most important one being the simple fact that air does not compress in a linear manner.
High SPL in the ear canal will have a high harmonic distortion for this reason, but rather amusingly if a signal at lower SPL has an inherent distortion of a similar nature, the ear mistakes that for the distortion produced by a high SPL and interprets the lower SPL signal as loud. (though it still measures low SPL).
Take a moment or two to understand that, it is pivotal, and the primary reason valve amplifiers appear to go louder than their solid state equivilents. The ear (ear/brain in reality) is easily fooled in other ways too, for example it is frequency selective, much more sensitive in the mid band than at, say, low frequencies, look at the Fletcher-Munsen equal loudness curves for more on this.
Also the ear has a kind of automatic gain control, ie sustained exposure to high SPLs will cause the sensitivity of the ear to decrease, hence the tempory deafness after a very loud gig. It also explains why, at a party with high ambiant noise levels, turning your hi-fi up so that it is audible results in over driven amplifiers and blown speakers despite it not sounding (subjectively) very loud.
This is all pretty basic stuff, you can go into greater depth if you like but the simple explanations above give a basic handle on what is going on.
The next thing you need to understand is the word 'exponential'.
It is the explanation of why, once you step out of the cosy world of background level music replay, and ask a little more from your system, your power requirements go through the roof.
Save that for another time.
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