What is loud?

Public

This is both a clinical question and an audiophile question. Judging by comments from colleagues over the years I am sure there are some audiophiles amongst us.

I often find myself remembering the liner notes from the Rolling Stones, "Sticky Fingers" album released in 1971. The band who were no doubt worn out by the project said, the production of this album has taken 10,000 man hours and the engineers say it meets all the latest engineering standards, but if you don't agree turn it up. And of course that is generally true, turning up the volume does make music sound better.

I am also reminded of George Carlin. In one dialogue he said, I don't know about this neighbourhood I live in, but every morning when I go out to my car I find someone's broken into it and turned up the radio.

A recent article on http://www.wired.com dated Oct 29, 2007 caught my eye, titled "Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin". Here is a tiny link, http://tinyurl.com/2b6fzl.

Here are some snippets:

"Not only are vinyl sales way up but pressing plants are ramping up production."

"Many of today's music fans buy vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3 for their portable devices."

"Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs."

"Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound."

Other articles I have read by music engineering expert, Bob Katz, also draws attention to the "loudness war" and I am sure many of us have noticed that the volume on CD's don't always match the levels of other CDs. Katz graphs the trend over a number of years and shows how there has been a steady increase in the loudness of productions over time.

He also explains sound levels as measured in decibels (dB) with a Sound Pressure Level (SPL) meter and compares the standards used for levels by the motion picture industry and the levels found in contemporary music CD productions.

I have experimented with sound calibration in my listening room and have also compared different albums for reference.

When one compares earlier CD productions such as the 1985 release of"Flaunt The Imperfection" by China Crisis and the 1993 release of "Ten Summoner's Tales" by Sting with later CD productions such as the 2003 release of "Powerless" by Nelly Furtado and even more recent productions such as the 2006 release of "The Dutchess" by Fergie and the 2007 release of "Black Rain" by Ozzy Osbourne (which btw has fantastic lyrics that everyone should hear or at least read) there is little doubt that CD productions have become louder.

In fact, this morning as I was listening to the 2006 release of "This Binary Universe" by BT, I was surprised by just how loud this production is while fitting in the ambient genre.

It made me wonder about some research I remember but did not keep the reference for. People listening to portable devices were stopped in the street and asked if the sound levels of their headsets could be measured to determine what listening levels they were using. And of course some were found to be in the danger zone for damaging hearing.

I wonder if anyone can point me to such references and if it might be worth doing similar research again.