In , on 01/17/06
at 10:56 AM, "Mr.T" MrT@home said:

[ ... ]

I have a 500 mW transistor radio with 3" speaker that "blows you out
of the room". Yet my Hi-Fi needs 100 times that much to do the same
:-) Of course the actual measured SPL in the latter case is about 20
dB higher. Isn't the human brain an amazing thing!

I think we tend to equate distorted with "loud".

I often think that we could save ourselves a lot of trouble if an
amplifier would "bend" things a bit before clipping. This way the
system could sound "loud" without damaging anything.

In my college days we had a small room and a system that could play
(cleanly) at enough levels that one needed to cup one's hands and yell
into a person's ear to be understood -- yet we would receive requests
to "turn it up" because it didn't seem "loud". The same group of
listeners in a different venue using a dreadful little "box" playing as
loudly as it could, unimaginably distorted and no one said "turn it up"
-- it was "loud" -- yet conversation was easy.

In one situation I received numerous complaints that the system would
not play "loud" enough. When I visited the site, everyone was hoarse
from trying to talk over the sound, and the customer's comment was,
"see, that's all the louder it gets." (It was clean sounding and I
never imagined he could get that kind of level without blowing
something up.)

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