The Science of Loudness (worthwhile link)

[shuppatsu]

Amos Wenger of Faster than Lime and Self Directed Research is one of my favorite blogger/podcaster/YouTubers, mostly for computer science-related topics.

But he goes far afield on nerdy topics all the time and just released a blog post/video essay on the different ways loudness is measured and used, and how they relate to each other. In ~12 minutes he covers dB SPL, dBFS, dBA, K-weighting, the loudness wars, intersample overs, and more.

Blog
Video (recommended)

We’re not his target audience, so some of it will be remedial, but he goes off on some interesting tangents and is just generally entertaining in a nerdy/engineery/autistic sort of way.

 

[shuppatsu]

And as a followup, The Etiquette of Thread-Bumping.

When is it appropriate on this site to bump a thread that never seemed to get off the ground? Should that be viewed as a topic that failed in the marketplace of ideas, or is it just bad luck/poor timing?

 

[Keith_W]

About the only thing I gained from that video is that the loudness wars are over because the engineers have finally agreed on a standard - LKFS. I did not know that.

And he sort of goes into loudness without delving too much into psychoacoustics. He does not explain what "Phons" and "Sones" are, and why a "Phon" is different from a decibel and why a different unit of loudness is needed in the first place. All I know is that microphones hear SPL in dB, and humans hear Phons and Sones. The relationship between the two is determined experimentally and published as ISO226. Like you said, we are not his target audience so maybe another video would be better at discussing that.

 

[shuppatsu]

This thread was moved to the psychoacoustics forum, which is totally fine with me because it’s a basically moribund thread that got no traction. I only bring it up because I considered putting it there in the first place but decided that while it touched on perceptual matters, it was more about physics.

Is there and/or should there be a specific forum for matters of sound measurement and reproduction, or should the scope of this forum be broadened?