How Loud is Too Loud?

Is it loud enough, and is it intelligible. These are jobs of a good public address system. Many factors contribute to this including quality of equipment, speaker and microphone placement, room acoustic, and event the humidity in the space. It’s important to take time to think about all these factors. If your audience cannot hear you or understand you, its much more difficult to create engagement. How loud is too loud? The decibel can help us out with that. The decibel was invented by Alexander Graham Bell and is used to measure the sound pressure refracted by an object. Those over at noisy planet.com have a great breakdown. Anything above 110Db weighted is doing permanent damage to your hearing. 80 Db is a comfortable music performance, and your standard noise floor usually around 42Db. For conferences, we try and amplify presenters around 14Db above the noise floor.

Also keep in mind that an audience member’s ear can get fatigued as they listen to high volumes over long periods of time – so more often than not, we want to avoid going to loud at the start of a program. So how loud is too loud? Remember to have your sound company use a decibel meter to make sure you are in a comfortable volume level, then walk through the room with the meter to make sure the space has equal coverage. You will be doing a great service to your patrons by doing so. They will be happy they did not receive hearing loss at your even, but also happy that they could hear your message clearly.

David Warren is the founder of David Productions a production resource group located in New York City. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, is CTS certified, and is a proud member of Local One IATSI.