What decibel level do you listen at?

Funny you'd pick Miles, I was listening to "Kind Of Blue" this afternoon at 72db and it was very enjoyable. Was that the best db level? At 70db-74db my system starts becoming dynamic enough to have energy/life.

As Almarg points out, if one listens mostly to classical or other types of acoustic music, the decibel level will be constantly changing, often over a very large range. Many audiophiles like to listen to their systems much louder than is actually necessary (I am not saying this is a bad thing, by the way - there are good reasons for as well as against). As I get older, I'm sure I will turn mine up more, but as a professional orchestral musician I am guaranteed to lose at least 20% of my hearing over the course of my career as it is, so I tend to try to avoid other really loud environments. Sometimes I will really crank up the volume on my system, but normally I try to listen at as low a volume as possible and still hear everything clearly. I have never used a decibel meter at home - I can tell you that I certainly don't listen at the decibel levels I constantly experience at work, which are definitely on the upper end of the range we are talking about. As Almarg said, this quite often reaches above that 105 mark - often more like 120 onstage depending on the piece. You don't always notice it, because we are used to it, and there is something about the physicality of helping to produce that volume that seems to mitigate the effect while you are doing it. The really bad ones are the pops shows where they amplify everything inside the hall completely unnecessarily, to the point where it is extremely loud even when wearing ear plugs. We usually beg them to turn the onstage monitors off or at least way down, but the so-called "sound men" never understand that they are actually making the ensemble problems much worse by cranking the volume up louder and louder. It just becomes noise after a certain point. If they would just turn everything way down, everyone could hear everyone else. Anyway, this is turning into a rant so I will shut up, just wanted to explain one very good reason why many musicians listen at lower levels than other audiophiles.

My Bloody Valentine live @136 db was pretty intense. I'll measure later today.

It depends on the dynamic range of the music. Where the db level is nearly constant - a lot of rock and roll for example - somewhere around 85-90. Jazz and blues - 80-85. Classical, barely audible at 60 or so up to peaks over 100. By the way, I have taken an spl meter to the front row of symphony performances at two different halls a number of times. The loudest peaks I have ever measured was 102 db for Verdi's requiem and slightly over 100 for Tchaikovsky's 6th. Many years ago I worked on military jet aircraft. Stand next to an A7 turning up - that's loud. On last audiometric testing a few years ago my hearing is well within the normal range. Also of note, the relative level against a background heavily influences what "sounds loud." In a lot of classical pieces (Tchaikovsky's 6th for example) several minutes of low volume sound followed by sudden increase of 30 decibels will be percieved as louder than a constant level higher than that peak. This is somewhat supported by medical research which tends to show, at least with animal subjects, a neurological protective response to loud noise. These research results have been interpreted as meaning that a constant environmental noise actually protects one against damage by a sort of conditioning. So it is probably not only the db level that is important as far as what is percieved as loud but also the immediate history of db levels. In other words, the signal elicited from the anatomical structures that sense hearing and are sent to the brain depend, at least in part, on that history (a few minute history if I recall)- at least in test animals. Of course the test animals are notoriously poor music critics, aside from the canine love for the blues (i.e. Howlin Wolf).