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You're probably listening too loud

After many years of being a professional musician and spending hundreds of hours in the recording studios on both sides of the glass, I believe that most listeners undermine the pleasure of the listening experience by listening too loud and deadening their ears.

As a resident of NYC, there are a million things here that make the ears shut down, just the way pupils close up in bright light. People screaming, trucks, subways, city noise. Your ears keep closing up. Then you go home and try to listen on the hifi, but your ears are still f'kd up to get to the point. Try this experiment.

Hopefully, you can all have some degree of quiet when you can sit down and listen. Start with a record or CD of acoustic music with some inner detail and tonality. I like to use the Naim CD with Forcione and Hayden, or the piano/bass CD with Taylor/Hayden. Just simple, relaxing music. Real instruments doin' real things.

Start by sitting back and leaving the volume just a little lower than you find comfortable. Just like you want to turn it up a bit, but leave it down. Sit back and relax. I would bet that in 7-10 minutes, that "too low" volume is going to sound much louder. That's because you're ears have opened up. Now, without changing anything, that same volume is going to sound right. Step out of the room for a second, but don't talk with anybody. Just go get a glass of water and come back - now, that same volume is going to sound louder than you thought.

Sit back down and listen for a minute or two - now, just the slightest nudge of the volume control upwards will make the sound come alive - the bass will be fuller and the rest of the spectrum will be more detailed and vibrant.

Try it - every professional recording engineer knows that loud listening destroys the subtleties in your hearing. Plus, lower volumes mean no or less amplifier clipping, drivers driven within their limits and ears that are open to receive what the music has to offer.

Most of all - have fun.
chayro
mrtennis
3,295 posts
 
sound pressure level is a measure of stimulus intensity.

there is support in the journals for an optimal level of stimulus intensity and complexity. the optimal level for an individual is related to personality factors and the physiology of one's nervous system.

thus, it should be no surprise that the population of music listeners will contain varying comfort levels for maximum spls.

it has nothing to do with realistic levels and everything to do with personal taste.

i find anything above 85 db as unpleasant, regardless of the performance of a stereo system. when i go to audio meetings, i usually tell the host to lower the volume.

comfort before realism makes sense.
detlof
1,899 posts
 
OK MrT, instead of "realistic", I should have said "real life as in a given concert hall"-levels and for the rest you are stating the obvious. If you find 85db plus unpleasant, well that is your personal thing, you must however allow the thought that you either shun concert halls as places of suffering or have no real clue of what a good stereo system in the right room could sound like and again - just for the finicky and anal -I am talking peaks. That our personal tastes vary, that we should enjoy what we like and that our likes and dislikes are shaped accordingly is so obvious that you seem to me beating that dead donkey here again for the umtieth time and that is what I find a tad irksome, because, although repeated again and again by you, it teaches nothing new.
katharina
56 posts
 
aw detlof, why not just ignore him or at best write: YAWN (:
jimjoyce25
215 posts
 
Learsfool: Interesting that you should take my comment as referring to musicians such as yourself. Instead, I intended my comment to refer to people who attend concerts and do not play instruments in their home, and therefore have little or no experience with how the dynamics are changed within a small space.

Your comment notwithstanding, I would suggest that most non-musicians do indeed have no idea of the sound levels of instruments played in a small space such as a home.

For example, I believe that most people who have never heard a violin or piano played by a competent musician in their living room have no idea of the dynamics of which that instrument is capable in a small space.

Similarly, even most people who do have a piano at home have no idea of the difference in dynamics that would result if their piano was replaced by a concert grand.

I would also suggest that most people have no idea how loud instruments played in a home sound compared to the level at which most home stereos are played. The story told by Unsound is particularly interesting in this regard, since he said that his friend was a musician, and even he was astonished at the relative difference in sound level between his instrument and the stereo system.

Let me further suggest the following: Like a musical score, the written word is often ambiguous and susceptible of multiple interpretations. Most people learn relatively early on that if their interpretation of someone else's words results in the sense seeming "bizarre," there is usually another, and more likely, interpretation that makes more sense and does justice to the speaker's intelligence and intent.

And most people also learn early on as part of their basic social-skills training that it is often useful to think for a moment what that other interpretation might be, before blurting out that the speaker has said something "bizarre."
learsfool
1,215 posts
 
Jimjoyce25 - nice comments. I am very sorry indeed for the misunderstanding, and the subsequent "blurt" I made. I really need to quit reading and posting stuff so late at night, but that's usually the only time I have to do it. Agree 100% with your post. As I have said before, it's a good thing I became a musician instead of a writer....enjoy the music!
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