(outer ears) and ear canals are severely affected by proximity to the headphone cavity. With speakers, the opposite is true. A flat low-frequency response is hard to obtain—except in free space high above ground, or in a very large and anechoic chamber that is free from reflections down to 20 Hz. Until recently, it was not possible to achieve high levels at frequencies down to 20 Hz without high levels of harmonic distortion. Even today, the best speakers are likely to generate around 1 to 3% of total harmonic distortion, corresponding to 30 to 40 dB below fundamental. This is not good enough, given the steep rise in loudness (rising to as much as 24 dB per octave) with frequency revealed by the equal-loudness curves below about 100 Hz. A good experimenter must ensure that trial subjects really hear the fundamental and not harmonics—especially the third harmonic, which is especially strong as a speaker cone's travel becomes limited as its suspension reaches the limit of compliance. A possible way around the problem is to use acoustic filtering, such as by resonant cavity, in the speaker setup. A flat free-field high-frequency response up to 20 kHz, on the other hand, is comparatively easy to achieve with modern speakers on-axis. These effects must be considered when comparing results of various attempts to measure equal-loudness contours. Relevance to sound level and noise measurements The A-weighting curve—in widespread use for noise measurement—is said to have been based on the 40-phon Fletcher–Munson curve. However, research in the 1960s demonstrated that determinations of equal-loudness made using pure tones are not directly relevant to our perception of noise. This is because the cochlea in our inner ear analyzes sounds in terms of spectral content, each "hair-cell" responding to a narrow band of frequencies known as a critical band. The high-frequency bands are wider in absolute terms than the low-frequency bands, and therefore "collect" proportionately more power from a noise source. However, when more than one critical band is stimulated, the signals to the brain add the various bands to produce the impressions of loudness. For these reasons Equal-loudness curves derived using noise bands show an upwards tilt above 1 kHz and a downward tilt below 1 kHz when compared to the curves derived using pure tones. Various weighting curves were derived in the 1960s, in particular as part of the DIN 4550 standard for audio quality measurement,