1. Our goal is to create the best experience we can BUT the best experience is ABSOLUTELY NOT a 0dB noise floor and peaks of 120dB!!! HOW ON EARTH can a potentially dangerous/damaging dynamic range be "the best experience"?
Once again, all of our impressions of what is "dangerous" is reading SPL charts online and not realizing they are a) averages b) weighted c) for wideband noise and not tones in music and d) they are rough figures and not based on any specific research. Importantly unless someone here has actually used a peak measuring technique -- which I assume no one has -- you are most likely exposed to such "dangerous" SPLs and actually liked it! I know I have.
In my entire library of research papers, I think I only have 3-4 papers that use peak SPL measurements. Every other place such data is averaged and hence not appropriate for this conversation.
On the noise floor, again, we cannot speak of single value SPL numbers. We must, must look at the spectrum. SPL numbers of 40+ db can be dead silent to us as a result! As I show in my article on
quietness of our listening rooms based on Fielder's reference room, people have rooms that are this quiet:
The solid line is threshold of hearing. As we see, at 20 Hz it can be as high as 65 db and we still consider that dead silent!!!
The best measured room easily qualifies for such. This research is from 1990s. Today, there are many state of the art rooms built at far lower noise levels. So if survey was done today we would uncover many such rooms. And regardless, as long as these rooms can be built, then we owe it to those people to use a distribution format that delivers noise free experience to them.
As an aside, notice how the threshold of hearing at mid-frequencies where we are most sensitive is actually a negative SPL! Not zero. Our hearing is quite sensitive when it comes to that region (likely for the need to understand each other's voices).
Furthermore as I have explained, noise coming from speakers is point source and is more audible than ambiance which is diffused. As such, it is not sufficient for it to be the same as ambient noise to be inaudible. It needs to be lower.