Re: Headphone sound pressure level?

["Alain de Cheveigne'" <Alain.de.Cheveigne@xxxxxx>]

At 04:18 +0100 14/7/11, Dr JI Alcantara wrote:
> As far as the maximum output is concerned, this is a movable feast, 
> depending on whether you want to know when the transducers are 
> likely to burn out, or - more likely - when they start to produce 
> appreciable amounts of distortion so that they become unusable for 
> psychoacoustic tasks. The only way to be sure of the maximum usable 
> output level is to measure their output at a variety of sinusoidal 
> input frequencies of interest to you, and measure the total harmonic 
> distortion.

You might want to measure the level of intermodulation distortion 
between a pair of tones (at e.g. f2-f1,  2f1-f2, etc).

This is an important potential artifact in psychoacoustics, and you 
can't really predict it from harmonic distortion.

Alain