HiFi Louder in the wee small hours?

Doesn’t everything sound louder at night. I have an Amazon Echo device in my garage linked to my Ring doorbell which makes an announcement every time someone approaches the camera this can be heard outside fairly clearly in the vicinity of the door sounding like normal conversation. However, at night you can hear it at the bottom of the drive the sound just seems to carry. I put it down to background noise during the day that is not there at night. We live on the edge of a city with nothing but fields beyond us and it is generally a very quiet neighbourhood and no industry around. I can only surmise that there is background noise during the day and we have become so accustomed to it we do not notice it until it dies down then every sound seems to carry.

Richard

If it is consistently louder then yes, I'd say that it is relative to the diminished background noise during the night.

My problem is that I download a lot of stuff as mp3s for the same reason but they all seem to be recorded at different levels. So at one moment I am drifting off to sleep against some cosy crime drama or other and the next (or probably an hour or two later) I am shocked awake by people screaming at each other in an afternoon play.

Nick

IME, it's mainly psychological, particularly if you're trying to sleep or concentrate in other ways.

Also, the ambient noise floor matters, especially in cities. Even here, a couple of miles from the centre of Sheffield, it's pretty much countryside quiet in the middle of the night. Therefore, quiet sounds appear louder. Come commuter time, the ambient noise increases noticeably, affected (I think) most significantly by the wind speed/direction.

Yes. Bluetooth is digital and won't affect sound levels

BTDTGTTS

What I hate most is you tube 'autoplay' when I wake up with terrific nightmares due to the medication I take and find it is some gory crime thriller that has been autoplayed all night...

I am not sure if there is some kind of autolevelling for sound in today's operating systems

Easyeffects purports to work for linux

The bliss of living where the 'rush hour' is three cars in an hour instead of just one...

And the loudest thing is the Stratotankers, Rivet joints and F15s revving up 15 miles away....

We live in a similar situation, busy is when you get the schoolbus come through and has to halt to collect a pupil . Always reminds me of this

I do find when you are fortunate to live in such a situation that one noise that stands out can be quite annoying, here there is a small light aircraft belonging to a flying school that regularly circuits around with a varying engine note that is very irritating though conversely the Spitfires doing experience flights from a nearish airfield don’t irritate because their engines sound nice. As the missis reminds me we are not on a flight path to Heathrow. Not that the countryside is always totally quiet , sometimes when people are doing jobs you get the two stroke orchestra as several chainsaws, strimmers ,concrete mixers blend together accompanied by the. rumble of large diesel tractors , the roar of Army and RAF helicopters doing low flying exercise and a deep rumble in the background from tanks firing on Salisbury plain

GH

You have a school bus?

I get more WWI and earlier aircraft some days than light aircraft. Spitfires & Hurricanes, a Mustang. A Harvcard. Tiger moths...

Abso**ING lutely. It's very rare to see an airliner here. At anything less than 30,000 ft.

I grew up 15 miles from Heathrow and 2 miles from the Vickers 'secret' airfield regularly visited by V bombers and all manner of jets.

Ditto. The noisiest thing is when my neighbour is doing agriculture on the land adjacent. A combine harvester till midnight or later is the norm in August.

And apache helicopters use this are for training sometimes.

Ooh er missus. Did the earth move for you too?

Ooh - I wonder if we used to be neighbours? Until the age of 12 I was growing up in Sunbury on Thames: just a 237 bus ride from Hounslow and then on to Heathrow's Queen's Building with my plane spotters' book and I was just a bike ride away from Brooklands where my next-door neighbour sometimes took me to watch them building the VC10

Nick

Nope. I lived down near Wisley and Eric Clapton's birthplace. Ripley. Add in William of Ockham's birthplace, the Tyrell racing team, Barnes Wallis in the next village, and Tommy Sopwith's old house in ours... Hence the Hawker Horsley, which is where I grew up...

...Father was ex WWII Blenheim pilot and loved his planes and cars...

I grew up to the sound first of traffic, in outer London, and then to te sound of military jets and airliners later on..

Now live in glorious silence.

I initially grew up and then returned frequently to Chiswick* where sitting in Grans garden there was aircraft noise almost constantly the period covered the introduction of the 707 displacing things like Bristol Britannias ending with 747’s and the Concorde with numerous other types on the way. Visits to the Queens building featured quite often. Could not complain as my Uncle worked for BOAC/British airways a connection which was useful as I was taken into hangers to see aircraft like the VC10 under maintenance, can’t see them allowing that nowadays. Where we moved to was a RAF low flying area so you got used to the sudden appearance of a Hunter and sometimes something different, but they and their sound came and went quickly besides which watching them interesting rather than irritation . I’d grown up and moved on again by the time it entered service but on visits back to my parents in North Devon a boom from Concorde could be heard clearly as it had gone Supersonic somewhere off the Coast . That wasn’t loud but was still discernible and enough to set pheasants etc off, a lot of people missed that when it stopped.

As it happens it was my Uncles 90th recently and we had a family reunion in the same l house in Chiswick and I was struck how quiet it was , the modern aircraft do seem much quieter or they are routed differently giving areas a break,perhaps that is it as few years we visited Kew Gardens and did the tree top walkway and the aircraft passing were very noticeable.

• One return was via Exeter to Heathrow on a C47 Dakota by a short lived airline called British Westpoint who operated three , one of them survives having been restored to its WW2 appearance and is part of the Berlin airlift memorial at Frankfurt. Unfortunately I have no idea if that was the one we flew in so it remains as a 1 in 3 chance.

GH