How do you listen?

Blow out your hearing and it won't matter where you set the volume. 

I'm happiest at about 80db. Sometimes a bit south of 80. Sometimes a bit north. It all depends on the quality of the recording or the style of music being played. My days of wanting to blast my stereo are now long past.

Moderate volume is more accurate conveyance of the music experience...

Reason is simple, you dont want to hide some information behind some other information with volume higher level....Room acoustic accurate imaging for instance ask for moderate level in small room....


80Db is my anchor....I try to listen at 80Db max where i am sitting...

Some tracks sound best at a certain volume for the simple reason they were mastered to be that way. This is due to our hearing not being linear but corresponding to equal loudness contours mapped by Fletcher and Munson. We do not hear all frequencies equally well at all volume levels. Low bass and high treble in particular need to be at a fairly high level to be heard at all. This is why the Loudness control used to be so common. All audiophiles should know this but whether they do or not all recording engineers certainly do.   

Because of this, in mastering the engineer has some decisions to make. A frequency response that sounds flat at one volume won't sound right at a lot higher or lower volume. So they master for what they consider the most likely level of the more serious listeners. Obviously then playing it back will sound best, or at least have the intended balance, at that same level.   

This same feature by the way is why we can't rely on meters to EQ properly. Meters do not "hear" equal loudness contours. Meters measure pressure waves. What we want is good sound quality at whatever level we like to listen at. This may or may not be what the mastering engineers thought. May or may not be what the EQ police think. What we like is what we like.    

Gosh now that I think about it I guess an awful lot goes into how I listen.

Some tracks sound best at a certain volume for the simple reason they were mastered to be that way. This is due to our hearing not being linear but corresponding to equal loudness contours mapped by Fletcher and Munson. We do not hear all frequencies equally well at all volume levels. Low bass and high treble in particular need to be at a fairly high level to be heard at all. This is why the Loudness control used to be so common. All audiophiles should know this but whether they do or not all recording engineers certainly do.

You are perfectly right ...

But we must not so much compensate this difficulty of equal perception between frequencies with higher volume than with an adequate room acoustic control to make easier the clarity of perception...

The better a room is controlled relatively to the speakers/room response the less we need to increase the sound volume to perceive details and music..