One of my pet peeves with recorded classical music is that you have to turn the volume way up to hear the soft parts (a nice oboe solo) but then be ready to crank it down when the whole orchestra chimes in. In the concert hall, the soft comes out very clearly and the loudest loud doesn’t hurt the ears.
I suppose it is a combination of a very quiet environment and the fact that the orchestra never gets that loud. Amplified music can get very loud. I wonder if the actual dynamic range is compressed somehow in the hall. I doubt it. I bet it is a phenomenon of the quiet of the hall allowing you to hear the quiet and the loud never being as loud as top volume on the iPod.
Do you think that you need special speakers to pick up the lighter sounds?
I did an experiment the other night to get to the bottom of this phenomenon. I put on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones and sat in the quiet living room and listened to a recording of the concert. I could hear the quiet parts fine and did not have to adjust the volume on the louder parts. From this I conclude that it is a phenomenon of the local ambient noise.
Makes sense. With a complete surround-type speaker system you could probably adjust things even with the ambiet noise, but that’s a lot of work for some music.