??? Listening Levels & Musical Styles ???

.....Don't jump into the pool.....

I like to listen to music at the same level as it would be if performed live.  A solo classical guitar should not be cranked up louder than it would be if played in my listening room.  Same goes for an acoustic jazz combo or small classical ensemble. If you go to great pains to achieve accuracy in every other parameter of sound reproduction, why should volume be any different?

All that said, I don’t listen to rock music at the same loud levels as I did when I was in my twenties.  I’m trying to save what’s left of my hearing.

@tostadosunidos  - I think you have it right here.

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. 

With all due respect, the AI explanation that jastralfu kindly generated earlier in the thread explains a lot without saying much : ) - simply put, almost everything of music enjoyment has to do with its sense of realism.

In friendship - kevin

I have noticed my volume levels changed as my system changed over the years.  I regularly play music with dBs peaking in the mid 80s for all genre.