Actually on the contrary, based on my experience coming from a living room at 45dba previously vs 20dba now, I notice it’s quite the opposite
When the room is not controlled, u have a lot of energy, the power response going into the room from say 7 to 11 or even more speakers. With all these uncontrolled reflections, as you increase the volume levels, it takes enormous amounts of time to decay off/dissipate. The sound becomes unbearable and muddy, cranking the volume up, makes it worse actually.
On the reverse, when the room is controlled, u can actually crank up the volume, because now, the rise of the energy is quick plus it decays very fast. Suddenly, it doesn’t sound as loud. Because the energy is no longer lingering around. They have decayed. U are then able to crank up the volume, when the room noise floor is lower .
This is where it makes a difference because now , you can crank up the volume and hear tiny whispers and leaves and footsteps clearly, the sound clearly separated from the rest of the sound. It becomes effortless and u don’t have to listen hard for it, it just presents itself naturally. Because the first and late reflected energy has all decayed off. This is how I am able to tell how good the system is. It’s ability to go loud without distortion yet clearly hearing every single detail without it being masked out.
Hence the conclusion that the higher the room noise floor, the worse it becomes when cranking the volume. It should be the opposite.
Why I can go -5mv today in the living room on certain movie sound tracks, without any fatigue. I found out the reasons , because the total energy going into the room is controlled , they decay off very fast. They don’t stay and bounce around in the room…so far from the demo, all of them(around my age) love it at -5. After the session I reveal at what MV it was playing back. They all stared at me and go . Of course I always asks first how loud can you go, don’t wanna make the demo uncomfortable
That is why, I always come back to TIMING, be it stereo tuning or HT tuning… TIMING is the key to everything
There is a lot of things u can observe and learn during demo sessions, I always take in the feedbacks , positive or negative… then I work on improving that