Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

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Re: Finally an Honest Answer................

Posted by morricab (S) on June 20, 2006 at 08:43:18

In Reply to: Re: Finally an Honest Answer................ posted by Dan Banquer on June 20, 2006 at 04:54:03:

Considering the noise floor of most home environments and the noise floor in many recording venues, I would say that 70 or 80db seems to be enough. Why don't you feel this is adequate...assuming of course that we are not talking about modern 10db dynamic range recordings but wide bandwidth recordings. BTW, I have some completely uncompressed material, one being a stereo mic recording of Prokovifiev's Romeo and Juliet. No compression and done with a single Royerlabs stereo ribbon mic (blumlein configuration). Now this recording is a ball buster for most systems,which make it sound like a jumbled mess a few do it ok and I have heard one or two sound glorious with it. I heard the same piece live (different orchestra, different hall, different order of the parts) and it surprised me how much this minimalist recording sounded like live.

Now the recording was made digitally and I looked at the recording on the computer to see what the widest range between soft passages and loud ones were and the difference was around 45db. Even with no music the range was in the mid 50s simply from background noise in the music hall. However, I have no doubt that we can hear below that noise floor but it cannot be seen graphically very easily. If you follow the decay of sounds into that background then maybe you need another 20-30db before they are completely inaudible (the noise will affect how low in level you can hear). This would support something like 80db as about all we would need, would it not?

This is the best recording I have in the regard of measureable dynamic range (I looked at a few others that were in the 40db range as well), maybe better ones exist but I haven't heard them. So I don't know how deep we can really hear into recordings.

Maybe you know if this exists but is there an SPL measurement system where one can zero the background noise and then measure the sound level of a recording in the room. With UV spectrometers one can correct the signal with a blank background measurement and then the data is starting with essentially no background noise. This would then give some idea how low the real sound levels from one of these recordings really goes...of course it is important to set the peaks at a realistic level. Once this is done you could easily see what kind of low level resolution your system has. As it is now I can only measure in my room to about 40db because that is the background noise level. If I could zero that out then I could have the contribution only from the system.

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