Why does treble seem so much louder than bass?

[budgetkiller 10+ year member]

Wow. I just learned a lot. Thank you everybody.

 

[T3mpest 10+ year member]

I'm on a phone so I'm only going to help with part of this.. home audio generally isn't louder than car audio. Especially subwoofers. Most of that is the environment. Cars have toad noise and nobody is around. In the home most people have neighbors and are more used to quiet rooms.. that being said most home audio midranges are better than what ppl use in a car.. and the subs sound cleaner.. so its a different sound between a normal car with audio in it and a home setup. However a good sq car can bridge most of the gap..

 

[audioholic 5,000+ posts]

Look at the free air sensitivity of a typical component or coaxial speaker. Is it something like 90db 1 W/1meter? Take a look at a typical 12 inch subwoofer: about 85-86dBs 1watt/1meter (if you see sensitivity being quoted at 89dB or higher, that's almost certainly based on a different measurement method). Yes, our ears are more sensitive in the mid and upper midrange region too. So, it's perfectly normal to run 2-3 times more power to sub stage compared to front stage.

While your conclusion is correct, you have to keep in mind that you cannot compare efficiency specs of a mid or tweeter directly with a subwoofer. This is because the standard frequency at which a speaker's efficiency is measured is 1khz. For many of the reasons listed earlier in this thread, a subwoofer is inherently less efficient at 1khz than it is at its normal operating frequencies. Its true the mids and tweeters are generally more efficient than subs, but not exactly by the amounts that their efficiency specs suggest.

Home audio systems tend to be more efficient not only due to wave propagation (called projection in this thread), but also due to the design of the speakers and their enclosures. Car audio speakers tend to have to be crammed in to tight spaces, enclosure sizes tend to be smaller (especially for subwoofers). Hoffman's Iron Law tells us this: high efficiency, low frequency extension, small enclosure size... pick two. So since home audio speaker/enclosure combinations have much less space restriction in their design, they generally utilize the low freq extension and high efficiency aspect of HIL. This is a lot of why a 200 watt home system tends to sound louder than one in a car (along with other reasons mentioned earlier, like higher background noise).

 

[m3dia_lab 10+ year member]

makes sense i guess. So a home amp doing 50wrms at 60hz @4ohm does the exact same power as a car amp doing 50wrms at 60hz @4ohm?

The watt (pron.: /ˈwɒt/ WOT; symbol: W) is a derived unit of power in the International System of Units (SI), named after the Scottish engineer James Watt (1736–1819). The unit, defined as one joule per second, measures the rate of energy conversion or transfer.

This will not change. power is power regarless of where it is.