DIN 45500

DIN 45500 was a 1966 German DIN standard for the minimum quality requirements in household audio equipment. It aimed to define the terms High Fidelity and Hi-Fi according to this standard. It was replaced by the EN 61305 standard in 1996, which restricted itself to the measurement methods and performance characteristics, omitting the outdated minimum requirements.

Overview

The standard covered the typical components of audio systems at the time: FM tuners, record players, tape equipment (both cassette and reel-to-reel), microphones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers.

Frequency Response

The human ear can hear tones from roughly 16 Hz up to 20 kHz, however, each person's hearing range is slightly different – an adult has a typical hearing bandwidth of 20 Hz to 16 kHz. The highest sensitivity to perceived pitch changes occurs in the range between 2 kHz and 5 kHz. Along these lines, the DIN 45500 specified a linear frequency response between 250 Hz and 6300 Hz, with a 5 dB tolerance, for household audio equipment. For studio equipment, the stricter DIN 45511 specified a linear response between 80 Hz and 8000 Hz with a 3dB tolerance.

Power

The RMS Power figure cannot be used to determine the achievable loudness. For example, it is possible to achieve 105 dB using a horn loudspeaker with a 1 Watt signal, whereas many HiFi loudspeakers would need 200 Watts to achieve that volume. There is no standardization in loudspeaker performance ratings.

References

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