writes:

My answer to Andreas' question was not specific to the human ear.

LOL.. Nice try. You're being defensive...which is actually kind of
fun!

Indeed, it didn't refer to the human ear at all. It could just as
easily been referring to a microphone.

But you should concede on this nit...see, once you used the term
"twice as loud" you were screwed. NO biggie, though--it's a technical
nit, and I'm feeling geekier just talking about it.

Your folly is threefold. First, because loudness and what's seen in a
WAV editor are not directly propotional, two because the ear _is_
involved by the very definition of "loudness" (for which there are
actually units...Phons), and third, because these scales are
logarithmic so the quantification of a linear scale number 5000 being
"twice as loud" as 2500 was then wrong too.

Hence, you can't speak of what you see in a graphical WAV editor and
equate its dimensionless amplitude scale it to loudness without
Fletcher-Munson curves which correlate dB SPL at a given frequency to
perceived loudness in Phons. And the F-M curves wouldn't exist if
there weren't ears...because well, ears were kinda involved in the
"perceived loudness" scale studies that created the curves.
Microphones alone can't do that.

Best Regards,
--
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