Does loudness play a part in your appreciation?

A single violin player, a sax player and some percussion playing in a 25 by 30 room, which pretty much happens every weekend or so in my house will easily be the loudest thing guys on this thread might hear, it appears... if they are listening @70db and calling it loud.

I have been in several studios with artists and mastering techs at the instant some final listening tests happened before what is deemed as a final product...If you all are thinking that your 70db levels are the artists’ intent, you are flat out wrong again. The studios get relatively loud even for me.

i don’t invite ’audiophiles" over or do any listening with them anymore for the same reason/one reason.... It is  a..lets just leave it there...and no, the collective set of all musicians in the world didn’t all go deaf by now. They have much better hearing than the regular masses. I am in my 50s and have the same hearing i had in ny 20s, last i checked.

This thread appears to be completely detached from the world of real music or musicians.

04-07-2025 at 05:32pm 

0 -70dB Normal piano practice

70dB    Fortissimo Singer, 3’

75 - 85dB Chamber music, small auditorium

84 - 103dB Piano Fortissimo

82 - 92dB  Violin

85 -111dB Cello

95-112dB Oboe

92 -103dB Flute

90 -106dB Piccolo

85 - 114dB Clarinet

90 - 106dB French horn

85 - 114dB Trombone

106dB   Tympani & bass drum

94dB    Walkman on 5/10

120 - 137dB Symphonic music peak

150dB   Rock music peak

 

This is just wrong in that it considers neither distance nor directionality.

The sound emitted from a woodwind expands in a whole different set 

I remember as a schoolboy going to an all-Bartok concert at the Festival Hall in London.  The conductor was Antal Dorati and the performance of Bluebeard’s Castle was recorded, I think by Mercury Living Presence.  Anyway, the singer taking Judith’s part managed to ’drown out’ or at least cut through the entire orchestra playing fortissimo, when heard from the rear of the auditorium.

Subjectively, I think about 90% of the sound we hear at a symphony concert is reflected from the venue.  Even outdoor venues need reflective shells over the orchestra to project the sound forwards.

If you ever get the chance, get yourself into an anechoic chamber.  The absence of reflected sound is totally disorienting.  The closest I have come to this in nature was sitting on the top of Iron Knob in South Australia looking out over the Nullabour plain, where only the ground reflected sound.  The only sign of life was a dust trail on the far horizon as a lone vehicle headed for Perth, thousands of km away.  Near total silence.

(I remember a review of a Jaguar being driven from Perth to Melbourne.  On leaving Perth the GPS said ’at the roundabout take the second exit’. The roundabout was 980 km ahead).

@rvpiano  - there is a related post on this to which I responded…..

For what it’s worth, every evening I’m listening to music, I adjust the volume of almost every track that’s being played, sometimes even those on the same album. The reason isn’t purely because of the ‘style’ of music, but how each style relates to what I have come to identify as its most realistic presentation. Of course realism has found debate in our hobby, but for all intents and purposes, the approximation to realism is what defines why we are in the hobby to begin with. And every track of music has its sense of presentation, of what we each may have experienced and sensed at live music performance and attendance to understand relationship to that auditory realism which stirs our emotions. Rock realism IS loud, in precisely the same way that you’d never listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ with any volume than akin to her singing within the small intimate setting of a smoke-filled club or alike recording studio. And still, at a live rock concert venue, Extreme’s ‘more than words’ will have more atmosphere than loudness, all subtle dynamics still in place. Orchestral pieces get a little more latitude - how some tracks are recorded lend themselves to being heard at volumes one would hear from the first two rows or, preference calling, further back at the twentieth row and sometimes even from the upper balconies.

As such, there isn’t a specific loudness i can listen to with any particular genre or style of music, simply because that closeness of resemblance to realism for even various tracks of one genre, may suggest different volume levels for its closest approximation to the presentation that makes it most realistic to me. 

The volume i listen to for realism of presentation is typically over a 17 decibel range.

In friendship - kevin

I was a classical musician who “lived in the world of real music.”  
My perception in the world of classical music was that in a musical space, like the stage in a concert hall, I was not deafened by the volume of the music.  Granted it may have been a little louder than my stereo, but not to the levels outlined here.

It should also be noted that the space in which you listen music in a concert hall is vastly bigger than your home listening space.  The music reaches you from a much different perspective.  80 dBs in a concert hall is not the same as 80 dBs in your living room.