Standards News: A New ANSI Loudness Standard

Loudness depends on both the acoustic properties of the sound that impinges on the listener and on the listener. In 2005 a new standard for calculating the loudness of steady sounds as perceived by listeners with normal hearing was approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The new standard replaces and supersedes the computational procedure used in the old ANSI S3.4‐1980 standard. To gain some insight into the new ANSI standard, several important distinctions between the old and new loudness standards are described below.