Loudness button: what's it REALLY good for?

[beans]

I keep my Yamaha CR 620 on "flat" since that is for work listening. On the Yamaha loudness knob, "flat" is designed for low-level listening.

This is the Yam I have experience with, but it's been a long time. Isn't FLAT on this one at the far CW position? My brother has this receiver and I haven't used it in a long time, so I may have gotten confused.

 

[Trance88]

I once in a while use the loudness button but I normally like to hear my music the way it was recorded, Bass and Treble on flat with no loudness. I believe the loudness button adds an unrealistic quality to the audio. A decent system should sound good on total flat.

 

[Susurus]

I don't use the recommended procedure:

1. Volume always set to preferred daytime SPL
2. turn Variable Loudness (VL) down from there to compensate, in effect it is your Volume Control.

Used to think all loudness buttons were icky. :tears:

But tarior's Sansui G-9000 sounds fine with loudness On (maybe they employ a milder form).

Now I've got 25 pr. of speakers and they all sound different!

I don't change loudness with different SPLs--but when I flip to different speakers, I have a favorite VL level for each (still mostly off).

VL on Yamahas and Concepts can tailor the sound quickly without screwing with the separate bass/midbass/mid/midtreble/treble knobs, or the cutoff levels switches on Pioneers and my Yammi Pre's. No graphic equilizer in the sig. path.

If I had only one genre or speakers, probably wouldn't use VL.

Go active Xover and all bets are off.

 

[onwardjames]

when i was a kid .
i used the loudness button
prodigiously.
along with the bass boosted separatly.
i had a pair of klhs(80s) with four 8 or 6 inch woofers.
talk about bass. cleans your ears while your at it.
they had a high damping despite being ported.
they didnt really need it(boost)
but hey i was young. and they took everything i threw at them.

That eloquent post had the rhyme scheme and flow of classic Ezra Pound!:

 

[budgetaudio6]

thank you. those werent my first speakers.
they were my second pair.
ultimatly their down fall was shipping them one too many times.
and removing the tweeters just to see how it looks like. had a nice voice coil.(dumb move)


im not sure how the post turned out the way it did. maybe its that i like singers when they rhyme their lyrics. consequences of the early rap music tunes(before they turned to crap. some may beg to differ tho) i listened to as a kid. rhyme within reason. i like to think of it. i still listen for tunes with a rythmic balance to it. find it in blues. and some times jazz but not as often

edit: who is ezra you piqued my interest?!

 

[Cleve]

Variable loudness = awesome and very useful.

On/off button loudness - can be pretty bad - too much boost or too little.

 

[onwardjames]

Ezra Pound is a very awesome, very dead poet/writer. You should check out some of his work.

He went bat-**** crazy in later life, some say, but ol' boy could write.

 

[dshoaf]

As a former 70s sales guy, Loudness was used by salesmen desperate to make quota for the month to pay the landlord. I worked with 'em.

Other tricks were to use the early Direct to Disc recordings like Sheffield's stuff on small, low-cost systems. Made them sound great! Imagine one of those LPs right out of the box played on a small Toshiba compact system with a ceramic cartridge.

Thank goodness I sold the upper end stuff of the day and didn't have to resort to that sort of mess. :yes: Most of my customers brought their own recordings and were technical enough to discuss things intelligently.

Cheers,

David

 

[Susurus]

Tizz and boom* assault gets your attention in the showroom but in the long run I like non-fatigue town.

Course I'm all for competition... if it's fair. When salespeople A/B'd Bose vs. Infinity or Klipsch, Bose had a Bovine. Now I heard there's a minimum distance 'rule'. Wonder what the 'ignorance bubble' radius is.

*[not to be confused with Flash and Awe.]