Effects of signal processing on the measurement of maximum sound pressure levels

Maximum sound pressure levels are commonly used for environmental noise and building acoustics measurements. This paper investigates the signal processing errors due to Fast or Slow time-weighting detectors when combined with octave band filters, one-third octave band filters or an A-weighting filter. For 6th order Butterworth CPB filters the inherent time delay caused by the phase response of filters is quantified using three different approaches to establish the following rules-of-thumb: (1) time-to-gradient/amplitude matching occurs when Bt ≈ 1, (2) time-to-peak matching occurs when Bt ≈ 2 and (3) time-to-settle matching occurs when Bt ≈ 4 for octave band filters, and when Bt ≈ 3 for one-third octave band filters. Four different commercially-available sound level meters are used to quantify the variation in measured maximum levels using tone bursts, half-sine pulses, ramped noise and recorded transients. Tone bursts indicate that Slow time-weighting is inappropriate for maximum level measurements due to the large bias error. The results also show that there is more variation between sound level meters when considering Fast time-weighted maximum levels in octave bands or one-third octave bands than with A-weighted levels. To reduce the variation between measurements with different sound level meters, it is proposed that limits could be prescribed on the phase response for CPB filters and A-weighting filters.