Noise complaints are the worst – just one from your otherwise pretty chill neighbour is enough to leave you walking on egg shells for the rest of your lease.
So to help those who simply must listen to music at raging volume, one very smart mastering engineer from Spain has patented a system, Masn’live, that allows one to raise the volume while keeping the dBA (A-weighted decibels) at a maintainable level.
It’s all very complex, but creator Xergio Córdoba explains it like this in layman’s terms:
“It’s as much about the physical sound-wave as it is about how the brain interprets the same sound-wave. It’s pure psychoacoustics. To give an example, it’s like when you listen to an mp3 through headphones and there’s a drum or a bass, but the headphones are too small to reproduce it correctly. This is instead done by evolutionary compensation. It’s something that we use a lot in mastering and have applied to our system in order to accomplish what we were after.”
Right. Since Córdoba is still in the patent phase of his creation, it’s unlikely we’ll get a clearer explanation of just how it works.
The key takeaway is that Córdoba’s system was able to double the loudness of what was playing without increasing the dBA levels. Most importantly, the process doesn’t sacrifice audio quality, which makes it very attractive to club owners and music venues who are increasingly subject to limits on decibel output.
“We can achieve real wonders with next to no sound issues. It’s basically the same as audio mastering, but at a venue instead of a studio. Pretty much everything sounds better, higher, sharper and there’s much more detail,” says Córdoba.
As for damage to your ears, well, that can’t be saved by technology.
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