About 1 I think that ideally you should train at a low volume to avoid fatigue and thus adapt your ears to work at low volumes

about 2: I think that happens because you might have your ear used to louder sounds and at the moment, it's hard for your ear to differentiate lower sounds, this would be related to how you are used to listen to music, to work when editing/mixing/mastering and all that.

In the end it is better to learn to work with few levels than with many, mainly to avoid ear fatigue.

Hi Paul, I think you are right on both accounts.

About the optimal level, when you go too loud it gets more difficult to hear, same as when it's too quiet.

A trick to better determine decreasing levels is to start listening to the decreased level and dial up the volume of your monitors/headphones roughly to the optimal level. Then A-B to the original level. That way it's much easier to hear the difference because boosts are easier to determine than cuts.

The same method of starting with the decreased level works also with EQ cuts like in Kit Cut and Filter Expert, although you don't need to adjust volume levels.

And of course I agree with Alejandro about the habit of listening to music on a too high volume level.

Can't say much about the first question, I only have 80Ohms headphones I use, no monitors, so I basically sit at 35% System volume all the time to not blow out my ears.
Although, I do found it helpful to increase the volume for the Spacepan champ olympic game, as the sound those aliens make fades in and with higher volume I can spot them a lot earlier.
I don't see how that could translate to DB King, but i doubt it make much of a difference. Since that game doesn't feature fading sounds, but rather abrupt alternation of the gain I feel all you gonna get from increasing the volume will be hearing damage over time.
For the second question I can confirm that +6dB, atleast seemingly feels like a bigger distance than than -6dB.
I thought it would be like an optical(sonic in this case) illusion inherited from how our brains evolved structurally, so that we would notice things more as they increase in volume, which in nature mainly happens when something is approaching us.
You are completely right that the dB is logarithmic, but I thought the scale would invert at point zero of the axis.
Going logarithmic in both ways ? I don't know for certain🤷‍♂️😅

All I can confirm is, that I, too state that even +3dB feels like a bigger step than -3dB.

I always thought that its a weird game. Even though it does help to increase my perception of something being louder or quieter than something else, it won´t ever be possible to tell the exact dB amount. It might be possible to get it in the game if you always play at the same volume, but apart from that it will be really hard to use.
Would make more sense if they used Phon or Sone instead of dB.

@Mike Check
I have the same feeling about the usefulness of using a dB scale because, if I'm not mistaken, +3 dB will not be perceived in the same way if it is from 3dB or 15dB. The logarithmic scale indicates that it will be easier to perceive 3dB+3dB than 15dB+3dB. So even though the site excerpts are normalized, the perception depends mostly on the player's system level. Is that right?

@Paul A That might be right, but even while playing dB King you will notice that the overall gain level of the instruments will not always be the same.
At least to me, sitting at level 19 currently, the general volume of each stage seems to be varying, not to much, but more than enough to jebaite me into thinking -6dB sounded like the -13.5dB from the stage before that as they didn't shared the same initial level.

@Mark Phillip Marphy Horch
If it's true SoundGym shoud a least control if every sound is normalized and a the same level each time is played !

@Paul A Why Do you think that should be the case? DB King is meant to train the ability to differentiate various amounts of gain leveling, whether it is a sound peaking at the -1dB mark down by -8dB or a sound that is only reaching -9dB peaking reduced by only -1.5 dB or boosted by +3dB. If all the levels would be normalized to the same level initially prior to gain changes, you would be very likely to simply remember the loudness of -10dB on your system, which makes no sense for anything practical rather than learning the relation between all the different amounts. Which can really assist one if you can determine that those upper mids need a boost of +2.5dB and not +1dB or +7dB.

@Mark Phillip Marphy Horch you are right, in retrospect, the exercise is constructed as you describe it. But that only adds to the absurdity of the comparison by dB in the absolute. Two answers can be the same (number of dB) for two completely different sound realities which adds some unnecessary difficulty cognitively.
All in all, the exercise does not require to ear for a real distance between two intensities but it's more an assimilation of the logarithmic curve. This doesn't change the fact that the volume of the system on which we practice changes the experience, but it puts the substance of the exercise into perspective.

The DB game is my least favourite of them all 😅 I'm on level 14. Just so much trial and error and tons of luck when it comes down to -10db or -11.5db...

And the least useful to me as well! Lol.

Calibrated monitoring system is the answer to mastering the dB King game. Calibrate your system, so that you know what SPL level you are monitoring with, and use consistent monitoring levels - don't fiddle with the fader. There is a significant perceived difference, when you add 1 dB when listening at 79 dBA, or 85 dBA levels, but if you just monitor loud all the time, your ears will tire much faster.