Headroom? Resolving Audio’s Long-Standing Terminology Ambiguity

Speaker: Merlijn van Veen, Senior Technical Support & Education Specialist @ Meyer Sound

When: Wednesday 4 March 2026, 18:30 pm

Where: Room MS023, The University of Derby Markeaton Campus, Markeaton St, Derby DE22 3AW and Live on Zoom

About the Talk:

For more than half a century, audio engineers have used the term headroom with confidence—but not with consensus. Ask a room full of professionals to define it, and you will likely get two fundamentally different answers. Some describe headroom as a fixed property of equipment: the level range between nominal operation and the onset of non-linear behavior. Others describe it as the remaining safety margin between signal peaks and system limits. Both definitions are widespread. Both seem reasonable. But they cannot both be correct.

 This ambiguity is not merely semantic—it reflects a deeper shift in audio technology. In the analog era, gradual saturation made system limits forgiving and peak levels less critical. In the digital era, hard clipping created absolute ceilings and a new culture of peak awareness. Along the way, the meaning of headroom quietly drifted.

 This keynote traces the historical, technical, and conceptual roots of the term, drawing on standards, literature, and measurement practice to reveal a crucial distinction: one definition describes a property of the system, while the other describes a property of the signal. Conflating the two has left the industry without precise language to describe either clearly.

The solution may be surprisingly simple. By adopting the term peak room to describe a system’s inherent level capability, we can restore clarity and reserve headroom for what engineers increasingly mean in practice: the signal-dependent safety margin to clipping.

This talk challenges a long-standing assumption, explains why the confusion persists, and proposes a practical path toward clearer thinking and clearer communication in modern audio engineering.

 About the Speaker: 

Merlijn van Veen is an audio engineer, educator, and technical specialist whose career spans broadcast, live sound, system optimization, and international standards development. He studied studio recording and jazz piano at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where he established the technical and musical foundation that continues to inform his work.

He began his professional career at the Dutch Broadcast Company (later Dutchview, now NEP), working as a sound engineer for television productions including Big Brother and The Bus. He later spent ten years with Harlekijn Holland, the company of renowned European artist Herman van Veen, where he was responsible for all live concert sound. During this time, he mixed more than 150 performances annually in a wide range of venues across Europe and beyond, developing particular expertise in the natural amplification of the human voice and acoustic instruments.

Over the course of his career, Merlijn developed a deep specialization in sound system measurement and optimization, inspired and mentored by industry pioneers including Bob “6o6” McCarthy and Mauricio “Magu” Ramírez. He created several widely used educational tools, most notably the Subwoofer Array Designer, which was featured in Live Sound International magazine and has been downloaded thousands of times worldwide.

Merlijn served as principal instructor for Sound Reinforcement at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague from 2016 to 2018. Since 2018, he has worked at Meyer Sound as Senior Technical Support and Education Specialist, supporting system design, measurement, and training for professionals around the world.

He is an active member of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), where he co-chairs the AES SC-04-03-A task group responsible for the AES75 standard for measuring loudspeaker maximum linear sound levels using noise, as well as the AES SC-04-03 working group on loudspeaker modeling and measurement. As of 2025, Merlijn serves a two-year term on the AES Board of Governors. He is also moderator of the Test & Measurement forum on ProSoundWeb LAB and a frequent contributor to Live Sound International magazine.

Merlijn continues to focus on advancing clarity, rigor, and education in sound system engineering worldwide.

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