About this usually dreadful subject I know a few easy and some harder suggestions, that
might be useful to some.
It's not necessarily hard to get loud in this time of technological advancement. Remember
those hand held personal alarm units or more contemporary smoke alerms, cooking timers,
etc, that work on a small battery but produce quite a tone when heard by human beings or pets.
Maybe it's another thing to try to beat a decent rock concert and create a sound that is
loud enough to be heard in such a situation, ob the other hand amplifier and also speaker
power isn't hard to get by, and pretty cheap: an amplifier of a few hundred watts is no
more than a few hundred euros/dollars, and a speaker system capable of producing sound
pressures up to the human threshold of acceptability of loudness isn't hard to get by or
use either.
So what' s the point of the question ? I could be asked from a certain context, which
would be necessary to know ! A frankly with so much ability for (at least most Western)
people to create loud sound on the cheap, a more important question should be how to
control all that power into a safe for the hearing and pleasantly usable system.
DAC reconstruction filters are usually in the way of easily reproducing certain types of
musical "loudness" analog equipment were known to create, thats a technical issue.
Perception-wise there's a lot to deal with when thinking about waves that do no make
people feel disoriented, give the intended impression of proximity (close or far), and
contain properly constructed properties that either do or do not warn the animal instincts
of the listener. So an alarm unit or megaphone blaring at you with an alarming tone isn't
the same as a nicely amplified snare drum coming from a big P.A., because the latter
should feel good to the audience, and not intruding or upsetting.
Acoustically, you'd need to analyze what your digital waves through the DAC, amplifier and
speaker are going to effectuate in the way of actual audio waves, based on your digital
signal. Sounds trivial, but lots of these types of components enforce a pretty clear
character on the produced audio beams reaching the listener through his or her listening
space.
The tricks of limiting, (multi-)compression and square wave types of signals usually in
this time lack a proper analysis of the actual signal coming out of the DAC, and how this
signal (perhaps through small and somewhat hyped speakers) is going to form beams,
reflections and resonances that make you form you opinion in the listening spot.
My personal opinion is that achieving proper, neutrally sounding power is way harder than
trying to get loud at any cost. And human binoral hearing capacity demands way deeper
knowledge to get a well working guitar amp on batteries or something, which proven by a
lot of digital products I've heard fail in that respect..
T.V.
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