![]() ![]() Mark down where that level sits on your main mix or master fader, and give yourself a bit of headroom for the moments you want to feel a little bass in your chest. Tip! You should try to calibrate your system using a pink noise signal generated in your DAW at -18dBFS so that your reference monitor may produce 78dB SPL (A) in your sweet spot. Once everything is in the box, the same rules don’t apply, it’s just a matter of capturing your audio properly the first time without clipping. How should I be levelling my audio for recording and listening? What about headroom? How much and where? Understanding this can take a bit of time, yet it’s important to know that there are operating level standards for each scale and its serving purpose (taken after ITU EBU R 128). It is a standard unit of measurement in audio engineering because it can cover a large range of levels, just like the human ear, and it can be represented in and converted to many applications be they electrical, digital or physical. For example, a logarithmic scale that is factored by 10:1 or 20:1. The decibel is a unit of measurement that logarithmically represents a change between two ratios of power. This may have an effect on your production mixing or cutting decisions when listening at different intensity levels! What does this mean for me? Consider the fact that you will hear different frequency bands at different amplitudes according to the sound pressure level. What Fletcher and Munson found out was that the human ear does not perceive loudness equally across the frequency spectrum, and that for very low and high frequencies, a greater sound pressure level is required to hear them with the same loudness. The first is dependent on an organic perceptive element, whereas the latter is just an arbitrary measurement of physical phenomena moving through mass.Įver heard of Fletcher and Munson? They wrote a pretty neat paper about this topic back in 1933 entitled “Loudness, its Definition, Measurement and Calculation”. These two are not interchangeable, though they were once thought to be the same thing! Loudness refers to the psychological perception of sound relative to the function of human hearing (pressure given in Pascals), whereas Intensity is a physical quantity which measures the units of sound energy moving through an area in a unit of time (Watts per meter squared). This means that the logarithmic scale is a great tool to represent the very broad range of perception that the ear can cover in terms of loudness.įigure 1: Various scal es: lin - lin, lin - log, log - lin, and log - log. (Wikipedia source). ![]() This is because the human ear functions very much in a logarithmic fashion, whereby the threshold of perception occurs at a doubling of level. įirstly, it’s important to consider that whenever you refer to a scale related to the amplitude of a sound wave, it can be represented either linearly or logarithmically. This document is going to give you a quick run down of the most important concepts to be understood, and make some suggestions for optimising your listening conditions based on the science of hearing. You may already be familiar with some terms and concepts, but it’s easily one of the most misconstrued topics that we encounter in the field, simply because it can be understood and represented in many different ways. There are many many parts to understanding sound levels. It has a definition (or rather a couple thereof), and it’s important to understand it if you want to steer clear of damaging your hearing, or work towards improving your audio workflow. LOUDNESS! It’s not a relative thing, contrary to what you or your neighbours may think. ![]()
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