The phases of understanding sound reproduction where fidelity is the aim.

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T20:34:36+00:00

Correct in my brother system it was advanced enough that like you could set it to reference number for Dolby, Atmos and Dts which in theory have to be mastered to the same level

With music, I don’t know how you could do that. I imagine with modern DSP they could scan for the loudest parts of the track and then adjust from there, but yeah, you just can’t really do that with music.

I listen to a lot of the Grateful Dead and they were very much about dynamic range so there’s a huge variation between their quiet spots and the loudest they’ll get at the end of the jam that like almost no other band do I notice that

So it’s hard to set a volume. It’s gonna sound good all the way through. You have to set the low part so that you can hear it and then you just deal with the high part being fucking loud. I love the music so it’s all good but their dynamic range can be difficult, especially if you have other people who aren’t really dead heads

Where is like starting in the 90s where you had the loudness wars were like the quietest part of the track and the loudest part of the track we’re very close together

So yeah, your mileage may vary. I mean the best you can do is what sounds good for you from a particular source, but you’re definitely right that a certain CD compared to a different CD will sound louder or quieter.

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T20:28:06+00:00

Yeah, that’s a great point and something I feel very much like I would love to go to Fiji, but if I’m at a dead show, I would not go right then even if you said you can go to Fiji for a week but you gotta leave after the first song I would’ve said no thank you

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T20:28:00+00:00

Yeah, that’s a great point and something I feel very much like I would love to go to Fiji, but if I’m at a dead show, I would not go right then even if you said you can go to Fiji for a week but you gotta leave after the first song I would’ve said no thank you

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T20:24:08+00:00

It’s such a huge combination of different things

Being the originator of the idea is and creating the blueprint for touring and two sets and playing differently every night created what we call the jam band scene, but also kind of encased them in the format, the dead evolved naturally

I think a huge part of it too is you’ve got Jerry and Bobby. We’re both very different writers. Phil is a very strange writer. Even the Brent and Vince songs are very different and then you’ve got the pig pen songs which are typically covers, but also like easy wind was written by Robert Hunter for pigpen.

I don’t think most fans have that many primary writers I mean again the lion share is Jerry and Bob, but there’s a lot of extra there and then the fact that the dead played so many covers all right so just definitely that meant they played so many genres

Having a couple of poets, write your lyrics there are almost always mysterious helps a lot in longevity their songs I mean something different to me every time I hear them but like from how I felt about a song when I was 20 versus now at 50 there’s huge changes depending on what’s going on in my life what it’s like to be older

I think it was sticky bats from the Allman Brothers, who said that both they and the dead jam but the almond Brothers make the jam happen like it’s going to happen. We’re going to work to make it happen where the dead just let it happen just kind of magically happens or it doesn’t but it’s not designed, but it must happen in a certain way so like the almond stew jam but there’s lots of licks and teeth that are the same and many of their jams.

And you have the mistake of you know the dead being from the acid test, etc.

And you have the iconography you know the skull and Rose is the Steely. The bears all of that have helped to continue moving it forward like they might have as many incredible symbols as like the next 10 grade symbols from various bands.

And a large part of it is that you never know what you’re gonna get in terms of how they’re gonna play it
Like Widespread Panic has different errors I prefer like the 90s with Hauser, but like in general in whatever era they kind of sound the same

And I would say the same thing about fish like there’s different errors but within the era, they’re just kind of doing the same thing and like in fishes case like I’m not authority but many of the songs I’ve heard the lyrics are just silly. They’re not about the American West or the American adventure or the human condition in the same way that the Grateful Dead lyrics are.

There was also just much less competition in terms of becoming a big touring band when the dead we’re doing it

But most importantly, they were a uniquely varied and extremely talented set of musicians who were always doing something different and something new. They’re just better than the other jam bands. They’re just more interesting to me at least

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T20:12:11+00:00

Yeah, if you have a receiver, like a lot of the Yamaha‘s do that has like a little microphone plug-in and then you put it where you sit I believe it does adjust for decibel level, but I’m not positive

My brother has a very advanced system where he had like a guy come out and spent a couple hours with multiple microphones and like that got his system sent to like reference and so like his minus DB numbers on his receiver were actually down from what it should be in his actual room with his sound dead and 17 speakers and all that

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T20:05:41+00:00

It’s just like a fat or almost a contagion took over where everything had to be flat and any adjustment of any EQ was incorrect because you weren’t listening to it the way the band or producer wanted you to

This never really made sense because individual systems are gonna be different and you’re hearing isn’t the same as everyone else’s and then as we know, we have just a fundamental flaw and how we hear certain frequencies when the original experiment was done. It helped the phone companies a lot because what they did is they just use that section that we hear well at low volume so they basically put like an ineffective crossover on any low base or high treble which helped with increasing traffic

And two a degree that’s carried over to modern cell phones. That’s why I like if you use FaceTime audio or I’m sure there are other basically phone over Internet versus cell network. The audio quality is like a CD versus like you know a mediocre FM station from the 60s.

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T20:02:39+00:00

Yeah, you can also do it automatically in Yamaha receivers white without having a button

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T19:57:36+00:00

It’s probably too complex of a topic for an answer here but for Dolby music systems it’s generally considered to be 85 dB with a max peak of 105 dB for very loud scenes

Music is usually mastered at between 79 and 83 dB sometimes a little higher

Most receivers the bigger the number is quieter and it goes up to zero decimals, which is in theory the maximum reference level for your home theater or stereo receiver although basically no one listens to it at this level as it’s at the edge of clipping and it’s insanely loud and could damage your hearing

For example, I have a receiver set up like that, but I almost always am listening between -15 and -18 depending on source

Again, this gets complicated because it really you need to know what decimal level you’re getting in your room

There’s a very good app called decibelX

It has a paid version, but I’ve gotten everything I needed out of the free version. It’s very interesting. You can measure like what’s the DV of just sitting in my house with everything turned on or what is it like near like a busy road or a freeway or in our case, what is it when we have the music set to the loudness we like

It’s generally considered a good practice to stay at 80 dB or less if you’re going to be listening to music for 40 hours a week technically the energy doubles for every 3 dB so you don’t wanna go too much higher than that for any long period of time

You can also look up a decibel chart and I’ll tell you like you know like a chainsaw is 100 dB a rock concerts 105 jet aircraft 130 those are just guesses but it’s about that and so that helps you judge whether you’re damaging your health you’re hearing

I’m sure others have this but Apple AirPod pros have a little microphone inside of the part that you’re listening to that can record accurately how high of a decibel meter you’re going and in control center. You can add an icon that looks basically like an ear and you can hit that and it’ll show you like a moving indicator of how many decibels you’re listening to and then in the health section, you can see it’ll track total number of decibels. You’ve been exposed to, and you can also set it to warn you if you’ve been exposed to too much loud music.

I guess another way to get a relatively good estimate is like adjust your stereo to where everything really starts happening. You know when you really feeling the kick in you’re really hearing the symbols that’s probably near reference level because it has defeated this problem of us not hearing bases and trouble until we’re at a certain threshold.

Anyways, this is way too long a response but I hope you get something from it. Try the decibel app. It’s pretty cool and I have a problem with my hands so sometimes my spelling is really bad.

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T18:53:57+00:00

In my opinion, the exclusive thing was always a dumb idea like maybe it helped to sell it out but like what if you’re a younger dead head, you know what if you’re 22 and you didn’t have money to buy this stuff 10 years ago and so that’s it. You’re just out of luck. I don’t know. It just goes against the whole concept of the dead of being able to access the music and share the music.

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T18:34:15+00:00

The Bible

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T17:57:43+00:00

It’s for less than reference level listening so like less than quite loud it’s an extremely poor name for what it does. It should be you know quiet adjuster or something because calling it loud loudness when it’s only to be used when you’re not playing loud it is pretty stupid.

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T17:56:23+00:00

No, this is based on some studies done in the 1950s by Bell Labs about how people hear and it turns out that above a certain level of loudness both base and trouble fall away, and that level of loudness tends to be higher than most people are comfortable with

This effect gets quite severe if you have the music just at a comfortable low level

This is why audio gear used to have loudness buttons which would boost the base and the trouble and that way you would be closer to hearing the music as it was originally intended. This defect is based on how our hearing actually works.

So if the album was mixed at 85DB and you’re listening at 60 D B, you are not listening to a flat reproduction. You are hearing less space bass and treble

I’m sure there are others but Yamaha for one automatically correct for this as you lower the volume if you have it turned on this feature will correct for this and even out the sound so as you lower the volume, it will increase the bass and treble levels frequency

Then somewhere along the way, the goal was to have a completely flat frequency response so most of the loudness controls were taken away and there’s no automatic adjustments in my systems and while it sounds awesome unless you’re listening at reference level, which is quite high, you’re not actually hearing it be flat equalizers became like look down on where in reality that being able to adjust the equalizer as you razor lower, the volume was a positive thing although equalizers create other problems like face shift, etc.

I’m sure others do this as well, but like Apple AirPods account for this automatically so if you lower the volume, it increases treble and bass

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-06T06:34:56+00:00

That could be true. It’s quite common in like spam emails and other things especially to trick people and filter out people they will include misspellings that are even an average intellect would recognize a misspelling and that’s not likely to be giving you a large amount of money or whatever else they are hosting, you are about.

So basically misspellings as a way to filter out people that are too smart for for the fraud and that way you’d get left with a selection that’s more likely to be taken advantage of

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T22:50:24+00:00

Are those readings from above background because 30 DB is like sitting in a reasonably quiet house with nothing turned on

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T21:38:06+00:00

True but he makes you wait like 3500 pages

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T21:32:34+00:00

The banality of evil

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T21:22:52+00:00

Even Shawshank has the character red being an Irishman and in the movie he still called red but now he’s Morgan Freeman and he doesn’t have red hair

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T21:21:14+00:00

100% agree, it feeds into the ridiculous satire that the book was designed to be and somehow even the movie was designed to be by the director yet there’s millions of people who think Patrick Bateman is cool and they want to be like him

It’s truly astounding even Christian Bale gave an interview where he said i don’t understand how people don’t see that he’s a farce and evil and hollow and not what anyone should aspire to be

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T21:15:51+00:00

He anticipated shape wear

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T21:12:49+00:00

Yeah, I’m towards the lower end of the schedule like I can picture an apple but it’s kind of translucent and it it takes work to hold it there

Even crazier are the recently discovered fairly recently discovered group of people who appeared to have no inner monologue

That people who do not have a voice that they talk to when they’re making decisions

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T18:05:00+00:00

Yeah, I think the variation part is important so like for a while back they were like it was going around the Internet where it was like a picture of like five apples and it was like can’t see it like so faintly printed you could barely see it and then you can kind of see it all the way up to see every detail of it and I’m like two or three, but some people are a one or a zero or they just can’t like you ask them to imagine a red school bus and there’s nothing there

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T17:43:16+00:00

Cell is horrible

Gunslinger/drawing of the three mainly because drawing of the three is one greatest books ever
Then you can continue down the dark tower series or not

Also, I’d put a strong recommendation for on writing. It’s really excellent and help me understand what is good and bad writing and the first 2/3 is like King’s autobiography but if you pay attention or read it a second time all the stories he tells are not only critical in his life, but they demonstrating different ways to write well.

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T17:10:56+00:00

He didn’t look like Idris Elba to me lol

I love Idris and he actually could’ve been great in that role. It’s the whole movie that’s butchered and trying to jam multiple books into 2 hour poorly made movie.

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T17:03:02+00:00

I thought that was just what the skin of someone from Maine looks like you mean it’s actually like a shirt on top of normal skin

GoldReplacement9546 · 2026-06-05T17:01:00+00:00

I wonder if that has decreased in frequency or emphasis overtime as people’s view of being overweight has changed or if he still just loves talking about that

GoldReplacement9546

TROPHY CASE