Do You Need to Turn Up the Volume to Hear More Music Details?
For the same song played on the same equipment, higher volume does indeed reproduce more details.
Recording quality and playback system capability both affect the reproduction of musical details. But with the same equipment, does higher volume mean stronger detail retrieval? This involves both the playback capability of the equipment and the reception capability of the human ear.
Explanation as follows:
A historically significant experiment on human sound perception yielded results known as the Equal-loudness Contour. Pioneered in 1933 by Harvey Fletcher and W.A Munson of Bell Labs, this type of experiment was later confirmed by others. In 2003, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) combined results from various experiments to publish the ISO 226:2003 standard.
The figure below shows the ISO 226:2003 Equal-loudness Contour standard graph.
Figure 1: The left vertical axis represents Sound Pressure Level (SPL), the horizontal axis is sound frequency. The red lines are Phon value curves (Phon is the unit of Loudness), with the number above each line indicating its Phon value. Figure 2 reverses the vertical axis of Figure 1.
As shown in Figure 1, for the human ear, a 1kHz sound at 20dB SPL achieves a loudness of 20 Phon. However, a 100Hz sound requires a sound pressure level of 50dB SPL to achieve the same loudness [3].
Conclusions from the two figures:
Humans are most sensitive to mid-frequency signals. Across different SPLs, mid-frequency signals are generally perceived better.
Human perception of low and high-frequency signals is significantly affected by SPL.
Higher loudness results in flatter perceived frequency response; meaning, the louder the sound, the easier it is for our ears to perceive low and high frequencies.
In music, low frequencies provide a sense of power, while high frequencies are associated with brightness, clarity, and airiness. Therefore, higher loudness naturally reveals richer details in the music.
As stated above, with the same audio and playback equipment, increasing the volume does enable the perception of more sonic details.
Recording quality and playback system capability both affect the reproduction of musical details. But with the same equipment, does higher volume mean stronger detail retrieval? This involves both the playback capability of the equipment and the reception capability of the human ear.
Explanation as follows:
A historically significant experiment on human sound perception yielded results known as the Equal-loudness Contour. Pioneered in 1933 by Harvey Fletcher and W.A Munson of Bell Labs, this type of experiment was later confirmed by others. In 2003, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) combined results from various experiments to publish the ISO 226:2003 standard.
The figure below shows the ISO 226:2003 Equal-loudness Contour standard graph.
Figure 1: The left vertical axis represents Sound Pressure Level (SPL), the horizontal axis is sound frequency. The red lines are Phon value curves (Phon is the unit of Loudness), with the number above each line indicating its Phon value. Figure 2 reverses the vertical axis of Figure 1.
As shown in Figure 1, for the human ear, a 1kHz sound at 20dB SPL achieves a loudness of 20 Phon. However, a 100Hz sound requires a sound pressure level of 50dB SPL to achieve the same loudness [3].
Conclusions from the two figures:
Humans are most sensitive to mid-frequency signals. Across different SPLs, mid-frequency signals are generally perceived better.
Human perception of low and high-frequency signals is significantly affected by SPL.
Higher loudness results in flatter perceived frequency response; meaning, the louder the sound, the easier it is for our ears to perceive low and high frequencies.
In music, low frequencies provide a sense of power, while high frequencies are associated with brightness, clarity, and airiness. Therefore, higher loudness naturally reveals richer details in the music.
As stated above, with the same audio and playback equipment, increasing the volume does enable the perception of more sonic details.