Turn down the Volume!

I received some great audio advice early in my 20’s from a 75 year old, tone deaf, audio store owner who built his own speakers.  In his store, he had an LED watt meter so when we cranked the music, we could see how many watts we were really listening to.  We were amazed at how loud 1-2 watts could be!  His advice was to turn the music lower and save our ears, they are the only ones we get.  
 

As a result, I’ve always had a preference for low wattage gear.

To me, one of the most important subjective measure of a system is how it sounds at low volume.   As a system improves, one can enjoy the sound at lower and lower volume levels--it still sounds vibrant and rich and seems to fill the entire listening room.  High efficiency systems, particularly horn systems seem to do this better than other kinds of speakers.  That might explain why Japanese audiophiles have huge horn systems in their tiny apartment rooms (being culturally polite, they would not play the system so loud as to disturb neighbors).  It is, to me, wrong headed to seek a large horn system because that size suggests high volume capability--that may be the case, but, I still prefer horns that sing at quite low volume.  I have recently heard multi-way systems built around a wide-range driver (e.g., Cube Audio Nenuphar Basis) and even some single-driver systems that pull this off successfully (e.g., Charney Audio Companion).  

as with everything in hifi (and life in general), the key is finding the right balance, the correct degree of moderation, avoid excess

for me, low level sound quality is important, but we of course understand how we hear, and the fletcher munson effect, so we need to realize low level listening has its own challenges - still we live in domestic environments, and so low level listening for many is a must, so their systems better to tuned to sound good at levels they listen at

otoh, reproduced music can and should take on a scale and impact somewhat approximating a live performance... so to experience that, one needs to have the volume to a level where a piano sounds like a real piano, a real bass has the body and weight of a real bass, and so on... this requires a decent level of spl’s

for me, i do try to listen in the range of 80-85 db peaks, and do alot to try to preserve, and protect my hearing, which is obviously essential to our continuing to enjoy the hobby