I doubt the difference between the mastering level and his maximum SPL at listening seat will be significant. And what will he do then when the musical content goes quiet? You can't assume he's going to listen to super-compressed club music.
EDIT: Only bass needs to be adjusted anyway. The relative treble sensitivity stays pretty much the same.
You said the artist does the adjustment. So I assume you allow the artist into your home where he or she adjusts the volume control.
Is that right?
Or do they control the loudness (and the equal-loudness contours) you experience at home by telepathy?
BTW, there is no way to get Carnegie Hall or anybody's control room a living room or to sound much like. Of course in a few trivial ways you CAN duplicate the same frequencies, tunes, etc.
Yeah, they told Edison his cylinders sounded exactly like the real singer as if they were singing in the room. I guess they recognized the singers were being reproduced in the same language as they originally recorded in. Barely.
No, I intended to say that the artist controls the frequency response of their musical performance so as to achieve the desired overall response. Changing this (boosting the bass to make it louder at lower levels) is difficult to do accurately and will probably hurt rather than help.
I also believe that he is under the impression that as overall SPL goes up, you need relatively more bass to "keep up" with the mids and treble. Actually, it's the opposite - at lower SPLs, the ear is much more sensitive to mids and treble, and the disparity decreases as SPL goes up.
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Not possible to make the sound of The Met in your living room except as a partial replica. Headphones come closer, I suppose. And there are folks who are ga-ga over headphone binaural with Neumann-heads.
The singer's tonal balance changes with level in your living room - not to a mic but to your hearing, whether you try to intervene with an act of will or not.
I can't say if our brains or aesthetic sense is bothered by this phenomenon or if the sound seems anomalous but the phenomenon IS there... unless you think equal loudness curves are phony. I don't know any audiophile who cranks up the bass when playing softly - let alone uses the ill-conceived "loudness" controls. Maybe they should?
When you look around in the dark of night and see no colors (no kidding), do you say "that ten dollar bill looks gray"? When you see your cousin down the street do your say "golly, Jack is only two inches tall"? When you play organ music softly do you say, "ummm, no pedals"? Maybe not, but you sure don't hear them either.
Footnote: in the trade, we call that "constancy" something your brain just has to do to keep the same thing invariant.
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I don't think the equal loudness curves are phony. I do think it is a bad idea to try to manipulate frequency response to "set" an arbitrary frequency sensitivity for any given SPL - e.g. to kill the bass as the SPL goes up or vice versa, depending on what your set point is.
Your ears, your choice, you do it.
I have never successfully set my woofer input except by ear. Do you?
As I said earlier, it sounds pretty obvious to me when playing softly that the Fletcher-Munson phenomenon is acting, but like everybody else, I don't fuss with the bass with every change in level.
With my system I have a whole lot of things electric controls I can diddle with to influence the woofing: amps, variable e-crossover, pre-amp with choice of turnover frequency, LF filters....
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I believe that what you are talking about is completely different from what I am talking about. I am speaking of dynamic frequency response modulation based on instantaneous loudness levels (however you determine that), not just static frequency response tailoring... why would I care what somebody does with their tone?
Google was no help to me with "dynamic frequency response modulation." Can you explain that, please.
Sure. Let's say our aim is to ensure that our hearing's relative frequency response (loudness of the bass relative to mid and treble) is something that we want to fix (not in the sense of repair, but in the sense of constancy). That is easily attainable with no effort whatsoever on our part, if the music being played has a constant SPL; if the SPL is constant then the frequency response of our ears does not change. It is when the SPL changes that our hearing changes. Thus, to maintain the same relative response, we must decrease the level of the bass as the SPL goes up and increase it when the SPL goes down, compared to some reference level. This is what I mean by "dynamic frequency response modulation". By doing so, our perceptive loudness of the bass is the same no matter what the SPL is. In contrast, conventional setups seem to have more bass as SPL rises and less bass as SPL drops.
Make sense?
Well, well, well, that is a highly imaginative rendition of psychology.
My understanding is more like this. When an organ pedal note is soft, it barely audible and hardly adds to the sound, whatever the loudness of the rest of the sound and before and after. When you crank up the volume, THAT same note is relatively louder AND it contributes more to the whole sound.
So when louder, the organ sounds different because that pedal is RELATIVELY more audible due to the Fletcher-Munson phenomenon. If the louder performance of that note is close to real church level, then you'd say, "Gosh, isn't Ben's hifi awfully good." But when played softly, you'd say, "Gosh when I heard that 5 manual Aeolian Skinner organ in the church, the bass seemed a lot more prominent than at Ben's house."
Simple?
You may think you rise above such human "non-linearities" by dint of superior cognition and are not a victim of such "illusions" and frailties. But I don't and I can't. Do you?
Does that prove my point about the value of correcting for the contours when you play softly (even if none of us bother)?
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My understanding is more like this. When an organ pedal note is soft, it barely audible and hardly adds to the sound, whatever the loudness of the rest of the sound and before and after. When you crank up the volume, THAT same note is relatively louder AND it contributes more to the whole sound.
So when louder, the organ sounds different because that pedal is RELATIVELY more audible due to the Fletcher-Munson phenomenon. If the louder performance of that note is close to real church level, then you'd say, "Gosh, isn't Ben's hifi awfully good." But when played softly, you'd say, "Gosh when I heard that 5 manual Aeolian Skinner organ in the church, the bass seemed a lot more prominent than at Ben's house."
Simple?
You may think you rise above such human "non-linearities" by dint of superior cognition and are not a victim of such "illusions" and frailties. But I don't and I can't. Do you?
Does that prove my point about the value of correcting for the contours when you play softly (even if none of us bother)?
Bookmark this page.
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