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Lots of discussion about hiss lately, how perceptible or annoying it is, and if it matters.
I've created a sheet with Sound & Recording measurements of hiss in active loudspeakers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n62hGAdKptSSKC74_fIT_R7DxFJ60YR2_O9C8x-vYQI/edit?usp=sharing Viewers can comment if something's off or missing.
S&R measures hiss in dB SPL (A-weighted) at 10cm in a calibrated anechoic chamber. Using the basic rule of 6dB decline for every doubling of distance (or the inverse square law), the chart below shows how far away you have to be for hiss to reach 0dBa. It's a simplified model since it doesn't take into account critical distance, reinforcement through reverberation, room noise, spectrum or masking.
A-Weighting was originally developed to assess speech intelligibility, but has since become a standard metric for environmental noise because it broadly centers around the most sensitive area of our hearing. @sweetchaos also measured the hiss of his JBL 305P Mk2 here and here, with the result centering around 2kHz, for example.
Room noise tends to rapidly decline from the bass region onwards, and falls close to 0dB SPL once you get into the kHz range. There is of course a lot of variation in ambient conditions and you can expect some hiss to be masked, most prominently by the music itself when it's playing.
Some other stats of the set:
I've created a sheet with Sound & Recording measurements of hiss in active loudspeakers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n62hGAdKptSSKC74_fIT_R7DxFJ60YR2_O9C8x-vYQI/edit?usp=sharing Viewers can comment if something's off or missing.
S&R measures hiss in dB SPL (A-weighted) at 10cm in a calibrated anechoic chamber. Using the basic rule of 6dB decline for every doubling of distance (or the inverse square law), the chart below shows how far away you have to be for hiss to reach 0dBa. It's a simplified model since it doesn't take into account critical distance, reinforcement through reverberation, room noise, spectrum or masking.
A-Weighting was originally developed to assess speech intelligibility, but has since become a standard metric for environmental noise because it broadly centers around the most sensitive area of our hearing. @sweetchaos also measured the hiss of his JBL 305P Mk2 here and here, with the result centering around 2kHz, for example.
Room noise tends to rapidly decline from the bass region onwards, and falls close to 0dB SPL once you get into the kHz range. There is of course a lot of variation in ambient conditions and you can expect some hiss to be masked, most prominently by the music itself when it's playing.
Some other stats of the set:
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