This is important. I have noticed that Elements playback volume is much lower than AJ and other competitors (I checked Pond5 and Motionarray). I do not know how long it is like that. Compare the same track on AJ and EE.
There is a phenomenon in psychoacoustics that makes louder music seem better. It is only an impression.
BUT when clients check tracks on different stocks, they will have the impression that “louder” stocks are better. This will happen too if client compare file on the computer with quiter EE site.
This is why radios and tv channels compress sound as much as possible (they literally squeez it). This is why there was a loudness war trend (thankfully stopped by a volume normalization on streaming services).
This is very bad. @KingDog could you please forward this feedback to someone reliable? I suppose it is a bug or it has been made due to a lack of volume slider. But we cannot accept the constant state which makes the impression of lower quality.
Just please compare it by yourself and you should hear the difference.
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I can confirm. My tracks sound different on AJ and EE. It feels like there has to be a volume control on the page, but I didn’t find it.
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I asked before for help but no none listening and answering @BenLeong may be you can tell something for developers?
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Noticed this today as well. Please address, Envato!
Hi @LumenMedia and @bdProductions. Sorry for the long delay - I’ve been following up on this with our Product team, trying to find out more context around the change.
It looks like the Elements audio previews were deliberately set to a lower volume to match the levels that are used for video item previews, as we have a lot of customers who licence content from both categories. This is based on consistent feedback (going back several years!) from our video-editing customers about the old volume being far too loud - before the change, music item preview volumes averaged around 10db higher than the audio for Video Template previews.
Some examples from our feedback list:
Is there any way, within the player or web page, to drop default audio levels for the watermarked music tracks when searching for music? The tracks sound louder than the audio from Premiere or Audition. I end up having to drop my master volume when I sample tracks but then I have to bump the master audio back up when I start to work on my timeline.
I edit with headphones on for the most part and pretty much every time I tab out of my edit to search for music I nearly blow my eardrums out and/or fall out my chair. It’s also not a case of me just having my volume up too high as I’m monitoring audio in Resolve / Premiere with db meters present so I have a pretty good handle on where peak loudness is sitting.
Your music previews are MUCH TOO LOUD! I was extremely scared the first time, it hurt my ears and did not even know how I can turn down.
We may build more features to help with this in future (letting individuals set their own global preview volume controls, perhaps?), but for now the best option was to bring the Audio previews down, to match the sound levels in Video Templates.
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Thanks for answering. Yes, looks like mess. One party (authors) need correct volume level, others - eho make and use video templates - need lower volume.
Thanks @BenLeong !
The only way to solve this without the impression of lower audio quality is to introduce volume slidebar and set the default volume at 100%.
Besides that - such complaints are happening on all other stocks and I do not recognize any other stock with such a low playback volume.
Current playback volume is way too quite. -10db 
It makes the psychoacoustic impression of lower quality. Just compare same track on AJ and EE. Everybody can hear it.
But I do not understand why video previews have lower volume? VideoHive has normal volume level. You can also compare how video previews sound on VH and EE. These video previews should have maximum volume level with the site-global volume slidebar. That’s the only right solution.
That’s VERY important quality issue.
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