General Asylum

Posted by Hafdef (A) on May 24, 2002 at 15:37:12

In Reply to: Re: Loudness Control posted by Estes on May 24, 2002 at 10:09:20:

Basically loudness controls allow the listener to percieve the same overall tonal balance when listening to music at low volumes. Ideally loudness controls should be eq'd to counteract the non-linear nature of hearing as demonstrated by Fletcher and Munson and later refined by Robinson and Dadson and graphed as equal loudness contours.

Our hearing sensitivilty is not linear across all frequencies and these non-linearities vary depending of loudness. Generally if a piece of recorded music is engineered to have all frequencies have the same percieved loudness at say a listenable 85 db, as the SPL's decrease the bass and the high end become realively less loud than the midrange. As SPL's increase from the particular reference of 85 db the bass and high end will dominate the balance.

Results of Loudness control are obtained by doing more than just generating distortion.