45dB ambient SPL sounds completely normal for someone living in the city without special windows. I live on golf course and I just measured 45dB SPL ambient with no TV or radio on in the house, no HVAC. I think the ambient level in many apartments in large cities would be much higher than that-60-65 dB SPL is not crazy.
Studios need to get the noise floor down so they can deliver noise floors of 10 to 20 dB SPL. They use floating floors, sealed doors and properly treated HVAC. Pretty difficult to achieve especially at low frequency (a truck driving by leaks into everything). In a home its almost impossible because no one wants to spend that much money on doors, windows and HVAC. A nice quiet door in a studio can be $30,000.
The point of all this is dynamic range. If you have a noise floor of 50 or 60, you need enough system power to get over that by a significant margin- at least 10dB but more is better. Its when you cannot get over the ambient noise that your system doesn’t work well and you still hear the ambient noise when the system is playing.
Its pretty hard to imagine you don’t want more dynamic range. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to reduce this, as just about no one has a system that mimics real life. Here’s a case where high efficiency really helps deliver a high dynamic range system.
Brad
Lone Mountain
Studios need to get the noise floor down so they can deliver noise floors of 10 to 20 dB SPL. They use floating floors, sealed doors and properly treated HVAC. Pretty difficult to achieve especially at low frequency (a truck driving by leaks into everything). In a home its almost impossible because no one wants to spend that much money on doors, windows and HVAC. A nice quiet door in a studio can be $30,000.
The point of all this is dynamic range. If you have a noise floor of 50 or 60, you need enough system power to get over that by a significant margin- at least 10dB but more is better. Its when you cannot get over the ambient noise that your system doesn’t work well and you still hear the ambient noise when the system is playing.
Its pretty hard to imagine you don’t want more dynamic range. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to reduce this, as just about no one has a system that mimics real life. Here’s a case where high efficiency really helps deliver a high dynamic range system.
Brad
Lone Mountain