![]() ![]() I try and keep my shows at or around the 105db C-weighted mark. ![]() If you see 100+db of A-weighted media, it is pretty darn loud. I peek at the A-weighting to get a sense of how bad I could be hurting people. As mentioned, it is really only useful for measuring above about 90db. A very hard limit to heed to! I prefer C weighting because it does show you a little more of a picture of what is coming out of your PA. Where I live we have an 80db A-weighted limit at any adjacent property line. The only time I pull out my dB meter is when I have the volume police in my area. In fact, many of the better powered speakers remain pleasant even into full clip. In general, more expensive (especially powered) speakers are capable of putting out higher output levels while sounding good doing it. Seems like this is a great dream to have, but for now, we are left doing real world ear testing and requesting opinions of others that have heard many different speakers. If there was a way to force a speaker to put out a balanced sound and then to measure that with a flat scale, it might make a nice measurement. There really needs to be another measurement that ISN'T so subjective. Many people (especially the many highly knowledgeable people here) can use either speaker processors, or even a multi-band eq on a mixer to "tame" most speakers to make them decent sounding however, what you find once you have done this is that while the speaker now sounds much better, it can't put out much SPL at that quality of mix. with lots of annoying HF, and lots of holes in its frequency response can show very impressive numbers. A speaker with a very unbalanced frequency response. SPL is a weighted average of a bunch of frequencies. Now, the real problem is that SPL is just a poor way to assess a speaker. As a result, little to no LF is considered. The original purpose of the A weighting was to assess SPL levels that would damage the human ear. Pretty much any cheap crap HF horn can put out TONS of HF noise (even if it is REALLY bad noise) to make an A weighting show impressive SPL numbers IMO. For PA speaker measurements, I generally advocate for C weighting which (as Caleb pointed out) actually takes into account the lower frequencies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |