Those ''Hi-Fi'' Review Chaps With Their Volume!

[Macca]

My Celestion A2 were 90dB for1 watt/ 1 meter but I did find using them with a 50w Linn amp (in a big room and sat 20 feet from the speakers) that I was clipping it on peaks - not all the time, just on peaks. That's why I got the XTZ which had more than twice the power output. You might only need 2 watts for adequate base volume but If the recording has, say, 12dB of dynamic range, you need 24 watts at the peaks. If you need 4 watts at base then that is 64 required for peaks and so on. So it does matter but I find a some people are not concerned that their amp clips on peaks since it is usually only momentary and they either ignore it or think that is how it should sound.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

That is voltage clipping Macca, there is so little understanding, it is soft or dynamic clipping that makes things sound "loud". It is far from the same effect as you do not recognise it as clipping in the sense you mean. It is subtle distortion of the wave form that only happens with music into a complex load structure so is impossible to duplicate on a test rig. But I understand a program has been written to simulate it digitally.

[Macca]

You're talking about a sort of clipping that can be happening constantly, not just on peaks?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

You can tell when it happens as your brain says "Ooo that is loud" and you have a desire to turn it down, unless you are trying to impress someone It also tends to make you feel you are pinned back. You can get it from a 5w radio but mostly that is hard clip. As I said I could put you in front of a 10kw PA rig and turn the volume up, it would not get "loud" it would get powerful until your ears would physically distort (there is a bone in the ear that whips) So it is then you are on or into the border of ear damage. You are *really* in trouble if your ears start to bleed. A couple of roadies have been killed by PAs back before the health and safety thing. One of whom I knew back in my pro days. He got stoned and had a nap in the mouth of a fold out bass bin to get out the rain at an open air concert set up. He was still in it when they fired up the first sound check. They found him dead with blood coming out from his ears.

[Macca]

I used to work in event security and have attended a few sound checks. It is different when the venue is empty, no crowd to soak up the bass.

I usually work on the basis that if the sound starts hardening up and the sweetness is lost, then I'm pushing the amp too hard. Then again I've had (and heard other's) set ups that sounded like that at any volume.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

My normal way of explaining it is to ask why do people think that with a transistor radio with a couple of watts you can be told it is "too loud". The answer is that "loudness" is more a factor of distortion than power. An over driving distorting transistor radio puts out quite a large SPL but it is more the distortion and how our brain react to it. If sound distorts our mental protection program kicks in as we think it is our ears being damaged, so we wince and react to it.

This is part of psycho acoustics which white coats and forum objectivists laugh and sneer at, but I am afraid it is *our* reality. We are programmed to react to stimulus, and distortion is a stimulus that tells us something is wrong and we shouldn't do it as our ears may be harmed. Now the real nasty distortion of hard (voltage) clipping is obvious, but the more subtle effect of soft (current) clipping is not so, and it is that we perceive as loud without really knowing why.

Lots of other facets of psycho acoustics or our genetic programing, one important one is tonality and being "in tune". Some people are mentally tone deaf and others are mentally pitch perfect, this is Darwin selection in process, do we need it to survive? BUT even the tone deaf *feel* when something is wrong, and all hi-fi equipment makes all music *wrong* to a lesser or greater degree. How this balances out in a system is what we call synergy. For us music appreciation is an *energetic* experience, i.e. it stimulates our energy paths in our body, those that stimulate movement (dance) those that stimulate emotion, and those that stimulate thought. We like stimulus like this, as a species we look for it and call it entertainment, or the seeking of pleasure. Sooooo to cut the story short as I could go on for hours about it as I have been trained by masters for over 30 years in the understanding of the energetic arts, which is why I run a group called the art of energetics I will wrap this up.

It is my transposing of this data to the design of hi-fi which is the reason I seem so bonkers to some people and talk about hi-fi design differently to other people, that is because machines are only a means to an end not an end, it is ONLY the music (i.e. the stimulation) that matters, and what achieves that is the only thing that is important - the rest is just and .