IEC Publication 61672-1 related to Outdoor Microphones for City Noise Monitoring

摘要

The growing market for city noise monitoring has resulted in the introduction of a number of new outdoor microphones with reference directions optimized for city noise measurement. They are all claimed to conform to the acoustical part of the requirements in the sound level meter standard, IEC Publication 61672-1. A thorough investigation of publicly available product data and additional measurements show problems related to the conformance of some of these microphones. This may be because the requirements in the sound level meter standard are difficult to understand, or it may be technically difficult to construct an outdoor microphone that conforms to the standard. IEC 61672-1, published four years ago, is now under revision. The tolerances of the standard are discussed in the view of these observations.