I'm a musician, and play in wedding bands. I think I've seen enough weddings to suspect that you're probably right about causation.

Something people don't realize about wedding music is that it's not just for dancing. If done well, it can also serve other purposes as well. There will always be a mixed crowd at a wedding, including people who are either unable to fully participate in the socializing for the duration of the party -- e.g., the elderly and children -- or who are shy, or outsiders, whatever. They band can provide them with a focal point and source of entertainment.

At some weddings, the dance floor was taken over by children just tearing around, and at first it would annoy me, but I eventually realized that I was taking pressure off the parents so they could enjoy socializing with one another instead of trying to restrain their kids.

So maybe the real solution is for people to start trying to figure out why the norm for concerts is to have the volume painfully loud. It's possible that guests just might enjoy them more with quieter music.

Self indulgence and ignorance among the performers, including the sound crew if there is one. Everybody believes that their instrument, or their musical style, is the one that needs to be loud. And I freely admit that playing loud is fun.

I've also noticed a sort of ratchet effect. The musicians gradually get tired, and turn up the volume so they don't have to play as hard. Then they get excited and start playing harder. Then they get tired, and turn up the volume. I think that's one explanation for the ever-escalating volume levels.

> The musicians gradually get tired, and turn up the volume so they don't have to play as hard. Then they get excited and start playing harder. Then they get tired, and turn up the volume.

I think you answered it yourself. Also, from someone who played in a local band for a while (And a not-quite-so-local band thereafter), people who actually know how to use a PA are few and far between. I think most of the time people are lazy and just set the master volume to something that cuts over the chit-chat, then they just don't bother to go back and readjust that when things are quieter/louder.

Seriously folks. If you're performing live, or you bring people in live, make sure at least one of you hires a dedicated, trained PA technician. It's the difference between a mediocre band and a great band (One where you can hear all of the performers), and also helps a lot with ear safety. The performers and the attendees will thank you for it.

At one venue, we just pretended that the house PA was broken.

But I avoid restaurants and places with live music unless the sole purpose is dancing. They advertise live music as a feature but sadly I treat it as a negative.

Maybe it's just me, but I have never been at a restaurant/bar playing live music where I've thought "this is playing at exactly the right level of volume."

It's always set to 11. One louder than necessary.

Sound engineers often suffer from a significant degree of noise-induced hearing loss. Hearing loss is highly dose-dependent, so working with live sound equipment on a daily basis is far more damaging than going to the occasional loud concert. As a result, they tend to set the house volume too loud. Noise-induced hearing loss affects the high frequencies first, so live sound is often extremely shrill and trebly to compensate. Those engineers who don't have noise-induced hearing loss have made a habit of wearing ear protection, which has basically the same effect.

The unfortunate solution is to wear ear protection to any amplified live music event. I recommend the Etymotic ER-20xs [2]. You'll hear a better, more balanced sound at a much safer volume level.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

[2]https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/hearing-protection/er20xs....

I used to wear ER-20s and they were fine. Alpine MusicSafe Pro were good too. Both comfortable, and did they job.

Alpine PartyPlugs didn't sounds as good to me, but they were more discrete so great for house parties and stuff.

I switched to Ear Peace HD's about a year ago.

Ear Peace are mentioned below the article. I don't know if it was sponsored. I'm certainly not sponsored by them.

I love EDM, DnB especially, but I'm a mosher at heart. The EPHD's don't hurt as much if an errant crowd-surfer happens to smack into my ear.

The EPHD's are even less noticeable than the Alpine PartyPlugs too.

I started wearing earplugs when I started working with VoIP systems a decade and a half ago. I'd be going to a few metal gigs a month and it was always painfully loud. I'd have ringing in the ears after every gig, and I'd sleep badly and feel almost hungover the next morning.

I have similarly sensitive hearing to the lady in the article, even restaurants and cinemas will cause me to pop my earplugs in. I keep a set attached to my keys. (The EPHD's come with a black metal tube keyring case.)

I couldn't go back to not wearing earplugs. If anything, they made gigs sound better to me.

>If anything, they made gigs sound better to me.

As I mentioned in my comment, the sound engineer is almost certainly either wearing ear plugs or half deaf. Either one causes a substantial roll-off of high frequencies, so the engineer is likely to subconsciously compensate by boosting the treble in the mix. If you've got plugs in, you're hearing something much closer to his intended mix. It's a totally perverse situation, but gigs almost always sound better with ear protection.

I've visited festivals that obviously hired professional people for their sound and had rather well-known bands on their line up (Iron Maiden and Hammerfall, for example) and that had terrible sound.

The volume would be cranked up way to much, proving to be even beyond the limits of the equipment, which led to the sound mostly being very obviously oversaturated. All the while I couldn't imagine being near the place without ear protection, which made the whole thing even more pointless.

Honestly, setups like that only ruin the experience of the paying customer. I can't fathom the idea that no-one who is organizing such events isn't having a sincere word with their sound crew after the first song.

It seems very like colour profiling to me. Graphic designers seem to match to objective standards though, whilst sound techs seem instead to use their own perception at the time?

The problem is that good live sound is highly dynamic. If you ran the PA at exactly 85dBa all night, it would sound very flat and unengaging. You want to push the volume during lively upbeat songs and bring it back down for an intimate ballad, you want a bit of a lift during the chorus, you want natural crescendos and diminuendos. Really good engineers can maintain this sense of dynamism while keeping the overall levels under control by using time-averaged metering, but systems capable of that are quite costly.

Achieving a consistent volume level throughout the venue is much easier said than done. Normal loudspeakers follow the inverse square law, so the sound will be much louder close to the PA system. You can't just put a bunch of speakers all over the room, because you'll get weird phase effects - sound moves at about one foot per millisecond, so additional speakers tend to cause very unpleasant delay and comb filtering effects [2]. This can be mitigated by the use of electronic delay compensation for the additional relay speakers, but not eliminated entirely.

The inverse square law can be evaded by using a line array loudspeaker system [3]. Theses systems use multiple loudspeakers in a phased array, which produces a cylindrical rather than spherical wavefront. Line arrays give a much more even distribution of sound and also reduce the amount of energy that is reflected from the ceiling and floor, providing a much clearer sound with more accurate transient response. Historically, line arrays have been expensive and difficult to configure, so they have been confined to large venues and high-end touring systems. Compact integrated line array systems are now available from many manufacturers, so hopefully we should see an improvement in the general standard of live sound over the coming years.

[1] https://noiselimiters.co.uk/scx-noise-limiter-and-contactor-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comb_filter

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_array

I was thinking more having an RMS max target dBA/dB(SPL) and a cut-off above that to limit instantaneous volume rather than requiring a particular level for the night.

I'm in the UK; I know a little about phase effects having set up a few room level PAs (5 instruments, 3 mics, 6 speakers, single board; that sort of size). However, I'm not familiar with large set-ups as I've only attended smaller concerts of the order of 100s-1000s of people.

There was a music festival about 2 miles from my home a few years ago. On the night the Foo Fighters played we could hear some noise occasionally but never for more than a few seconds. It went up and down. The second night Avicii played. I could hear it clear all night. It wasn't louder (as it was in a residential area so volume was limited) but it was at the peak level for most of the night.

There is a big and varied universe of electronic, most of which is a lot more dynamic than radio-pop artists like Avicii.

If you listen to classical music (e.g. recordings of "Das deutsche Grammophon"), you'll realize that often, the opposite effect is true: The music has such a high dynamic range that you inevitably have to raise the volume in order to be able to discern the details in a pianissimo-part, which makes the fortissimo-parts deafening. So, there are not only upsides to low compression ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvKTMv4E09Y

After he and the sound system moved in, I listen to music (of all kinds) quite a bit louder in our living room: My earlier crappy sound system just didn't sound good at high volumes while this system sounds beautiful as high as we care to crank it before we decide that we're being too unreasonably inconsiderate to our neighbors.