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Bands, DJs, clubs, concert venues, festivals (almost) all insist on playing music much louder than needed for reasons I'll never understand. The choice between

Bands, DJs, clubs, concert venues, festivals (almost) all insist on playing music much louder than needed for reasons I'll never understand. The choice between "play music on a decent level for everyone to enjoy without causing hearing loss" and "play music too loud, requiring everyone to either wear ear protection or suffer hearing loss" has somehow been decided in favor of the latter. It's ridiculous. For some kinds of music it is more or less ingrained in the culture -- think of the "It goes up to 11" in Spinal Tap. But in fact it's worse than that; almost all music is played way too loud. During the Covid period I attended a number of smaller scale events, that for some reason used a lower sound volume. It Was So Much Better. Those events proved what I already heavily suspected: you do no need those high sound volumes to fully enjoy music.

jiggawatts 2y ago
There's like... two of us. For the life of me I am unable to understand[1] why all musical playback devices must have their volume turned up well past the point of distortion. I really don't want to hear some poor over-stressed subwoofer making chuff-chuff noises as it struggles to play back what must be a square wave because of clipping. [1] Sigh, actually, I am able to understand but it's just sad instead of funny: the experienced professional musicians have all partially lost their hearing from years of too-loud music. They don't trust the juniors to set up the equipment, so they tune it to their deafness level. This then damages the hearing of the juniors, so by the time they get to be senior enough to be trusted with the volume knob, they're half-deaf themselves.