Winning was everything. The first step is to develop a basic understanding of the nature of sound and how the human ear works. The Nature of Sound Sound can be described as any variation in air pressure that can be detected by the human ear. In a music-reproduction system, these variations are created by the excursion of speakers as they vibrate. Amplitude is the size of the fluctuations in air pressure.
Healthy ears can tolerate sound pressure that is more than a million times higher.
The hearing range of the healthy human ear is depicted in Figure 1. Note that speech occupies only a very small portion of the entire audible range. Even music, with its wide frequency response and dynamic range, does not cover the entire auditory spectrum. To complicate things further, this variance in hearing sensitivity is most pronounced at low sound-pressure levels. In simplest terms, these networks are electronic circuits whose sensitivity varies with frequency, reflecting the way the human ear works.