I had a bit of a play around with a very high quality sound level meter recently. My mother is an audiologist, so I get nagged to have a hearing test every now and then. Needless to say I have a slight hearing loss around 4-6K, I can now adjust the EQ to cope not only with the acoustics of the car but my own hearing response, but I digress…

The meter measured both dBA and dBC. As I understand it dBA is the standard for measuring loudness with respect to the human ear. dBC is similar but used for high levels i.e. 90-140dB.

Anyway I found several tracks that I though were representative and tried to correlate the measured level and the –dB level displayed on the empeg. The results where interesting, basically as close as I could tell the scale on the empeg maps directly with the dBA scale.

I ended up using 3 tracks and did the test a few times. It’s not that accurate because the reading fluctuates up to 10dB while you are watching it but you good at averaging it. Also I didn’t go into the overdrive range because I didn’t want to damage my equipment, (or myself). Here are the, averaged, results.

empeg (-dB), level (dBA), permanent hearing damage after (min)
0, 114, 1
-10, 103, 15
-20, 93, 150
-30, 84
-40, 73
-50, 59

It drops off a bit at the low end, but that might be speaker response.

Another interesting observation was that bass thumps didn’t influence the level as much as I thought it would. The most representative and loudest track had a frequency range that is all over the spectrum (Killing Heidi – Class Celebrities). There’s one to chew on for all the SPL lunatics with a dozen 15” subs. Actually I don’t know how they measure level in SPL competitions.

For what it’s worth I like the empeg scale as it is.