Subject: Re: Headphone sound pressure level? From: "Alain de Cheveigne'" <Alain.de.Cheveigne@xxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 09:14:53 +0100 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>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