Have you noticed as your system improves?

Fletcher Munson Curve

"Loudness" Control

Gotta turn it up? I got my system 5 yrs ago. Streaming was new to me. I was using the volume on the Bluesound and I really didn’t know it bit stripped, but it didn'tsound good til 90 dB.. Now, whatever volume I choose sounds good. I’m still a musical gear head, you just have to step on the gas once in awhile.

Hello! My experience with relatively non expensive equipment (about 1500-2000€ for a component): in the beginning without any warm up and wrong placement of speakers in too big room for bookshelf speakers I wanted to turn up the volume louder and louder every time. And it really had some effect! But after severel tens of hours of warming up, placing speakers in suitable room on stands and with right positioning, finding suitable speaker cables (silver plated for more highs) everything became normal. It was no need to turn up the volume any more. Also I thik that one of the important exponents of quality of an amplifier is an ability to play well exactly at low level of volume, which cheap equipment can not have.

When working, and just have it on, it's around 60db, doing some critical listing, 80-90 db. Sometimes, I want the house to shake, to have the neighbors have a listen. 

100+ db happens at times, but usually I'm moving around the house wanting to feel the music. 

My system really starts to wake up around 80db. I go one or two notches on the volume, it feels like the speakers are pumped with adrenaline, fully waking up.

I’ve found that the constant adjustment of volume is absolutely essential to my listening sessions, because every song and it’s delivery as a recorded track is different - some begin very softly to explode into incredibly loud and dynamic highs, others maintain a steady output all the way through; some songs are intended to be played loud and brash, while others are so nuanced, they are sung like a whisper, as in Inger Marie Gundersen’s ‘Sebastians waltz’. The range of adjustment I make between those two may be as much as ten decibels. Tracks have differently recorded volume levels - I cannot listen to ‘bohemian rhapsody’ at the same level I listen to Tori Amos’ ‘icicle’; and I generally listen to almost all classical music at a higher level than most other genres. For the full impact of its performance, I listen to tchaikovsky’s violin in D by Perlman and Ormandy at about the same level as I do with ‘bohemian rhapsody’. Occasionally, I even adjust the volume between tracks on the same album, sometimes up or down by just a decibel. The starting track of ‘Friday night in San Francisco’ has to be heard at a higher volume level, but it starts much more gently, so that balance has to found at the very beginning of the track. I guess what I am trying to say is that the realistic experience of each and every track I play is so very determined by volume control. 
 

In friendship - kevin.