Fear of volume control

Stereo5,

Thats a big YES!

Yep, the refrigerator goes off, especially on Saturday nights when doing some serious listening.  It does make a difference for the noise floor.  I always wright a small note "Fridge" and leave it on the kitchen counter top.  I'll always see that before turning off the lights and going to bed.  Only once I made the mistake of forgetting the turn the refrigerator back on.  In  the morning it was obvious as the milk was not so cold and the freezer side fared better but still not a good idea.  I now always use the note on the counter.  Lowering the noise floor just makes for a more pleasant listening experience.

A unit called a phon is used to describe human hearing numerically. When phon curves are displayed on a decibel - frequency graph, the curve is ’U" shaped. The higher the decibel level the more the phon curve flattens out.

At very low volume levels we are more inclined to hear only midrange frequencies and not very low or very high frequencies. As the volume increases our hearing changes and we start perceiving low and high frequencies also.

Hearing | Physics (lumenlearning.com)

Pauly, thanks for that, explains much in the global sense. And then on the micro front, I find individual recordings or cuts, even on same album/cd (recording levels variable within that single album/cdn) require individual volume settings, something not too loud or soft, somewhere that's just right. On top of that, genre of music demands different volumes, electronic dance music for instance loud, folk not so much. Yeah, the volume control is so damn important, rather than being fearful of it I'm in awe of it.

@sns

You touch on a very interesting topic. Any complex (multiple frequency) sound, whether it be conversation, music or birds chirping outside; a change the decibel level results in a change of content of the sound we hear. In short a song at 81db is not the same song at 90db. Our brains do a good job at hiding that from us, for very good reason.

You altering the volume for different songs means you are, perhaps only subconsciously, aware of a change in content as you change volume and actually “tuning” the content of the material to what sounds best to you.

I’m grossly oversimplifying, but we do more than alter the volume level when we change volume. From the perspective of human hearing, we also change the content of what we hear.

To your point, yes volume control is a real biggie.