What do you consider "loud" for your system?

A person shouldn't present their personal anecdotal experience as a recommendation for the rest of the population. A few people have smoked a couple of packs of cigarettes a day and lived into their 90s, but that is hardly a foundation for telling others that smoking doesn't have a risk of lung cancer and other cardiopulmonary diseases. Most people suffer serious problems after years of smoking. You can substitute a number of other exposures in which the average person suffers damage while a few lucky ones don't.

The medical community and OSHA have good studies on the issue of how loud is too loud. NIOSH recommends that the average continuous exposure not exceed 85 dB and OHSA's PEL (permissible exposure limit) is 90 dB. As volume increases, the exposure time decreases -- OSHA says 100 dB exposure should not exceed 15 minutes. Most employers with loud work environments require employees to use hearing protection.

For my home listening these days, 80 to 85 dB is plenty loud for me. In fact, I rarely go to live rock concerts these days and use hearing plugs if I do attend one. I've even walked out of a few simply because the levels were so loud they were uncomfortable.

mesch -- I don't think the dynamics of most modern digital recordings -- particularly pop & rock -- support a 20 dB peak in the recording format. And, it its not available on the recording, it can't be heard in your system.

I've used Adobe Audition for many years and looked at thousands of recordings and I can tell you that that 90+ dB dynamic range on a CD is largely unused. Most modern recordings (especially victims of the "loudness wars") are heavily compressed and allow only a few dB for peaks, and sometimes not even that.

Classical and some jazz does make better use of the available dynamic range. Back in the 90s it was common to see the average volume on a classical CD much lower with lots left for headroom. I've noticed the modern classical recordings don't do that as much as they used to.

Just to clarify, dynamic range can be looked at in more than one way.

My comments above were directed toward the original post -- the perception of how loud the music seems when listening -- richmos said he is listening at 90 dB with 96 dB peaks, using a classic rock album.

I looked at the song "Money." The Audition statistics showed a 59 dB dynamic range, with periodic peaks 10 dB above the average level. That's pretty good for a rock record (but it is an "old school" recording.) So, you can see that there is nowhere close to 20 dB in peaks above the average listening level.

The other thing good dynamic range can do is let you hear instruments and sounds that are much softer and in the background while the overall volume level is loud. A poor dynamic range will leave these softer sounds buried in the background noise.