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RE: 30 dB peaks

It depends on musical genre. For loudness wars compressed junk it might be less than 10 dB. For average small scale acoustic recordings it is more likely to be around 18 dB. For large scale orchestral classical music, it is likely to run up to 24 dB. For high resolution recording of the sound of car keys hitting a stone floor, it could be more than 30 dB. Many recordings have a certain amount of limiting or compression in them, but the higher quality ones have little or no compression or limiting and the best audiophile recordings have none, so you get the full dynamic range played by the musicians. The peak to average ratio will depend on the instruments and their number.

Anyone with a computer audio system can get an audio editor and look at the actual waveforms recorded on a CD or high resolution digital file. The figures listed above come from looking at many files in my computer and using the statistics function of my audio editor to look at peak and RMS levels. My experience is that any recording that has a peak to average ratio as low as 14 dB is going to sound mediocre at best.

As to live music, I have heard people report peak SPLs of 121 dB during a Mahler symphony sitting in the front rows.



Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • RE: 30 dB peaks - Tony Lauck 21:12:06 03/06/14 (0)

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