Nulumina Corporation
Light and Sound Have Similarities in Human Perception
LIGHT ENHANCEMENT IS ANALOGOUS TO QUALITY AUDIO: Vision and hearing both have a "midrange" of highest sensitivity often described as brightness (lumens) or loudness (decibels SPL). The Cyradiance vision-boost concept is analogous to how quality hearing aids or audio equalizers increase the sound intensity at high and/or low frequencies where your hearing is less sensitive to improve your ability to hear more detail.
You can think of red light being analogous to bass, yellow-green as midrange, and blue or violet as treble. If you put the most energy into the midrange of either sound or vision, many important details are lost. Louder or Brighter, but much poorer quality.
Just adding more brightness does not improve visual quality,
similar to how just adding loudness does not improve audio quality.
You want to know the frequency range of your audio components, and you likely boost your bass and treble to hear more detail in music in frequency ranges where our hearing is weaker. You should want to do the same with your illuminating light spectra for most situations if maximizing detail perception is your goal.
Being able to illuminate using ALL color wavelengths where your eyes are most sensitive in darkness, means that you can better see the details of natural surfaces including dirt, mud, roots, bark, fungus, algae, insects, slime, scat, wetness, ice, oil films, and many types vegetation, and many rocks & minerals.
Stop being fooled: Many people think that more lumens of brightness means more light, but with LEDs it is easy to be fooled. 10X the brightness can actually mean less radiant light & poorer quality light, AND it frequently does. Yellow photons count for over-10X the "brightness" of even mid-blue or mid-red photons, so the cheap way to get more "lumens" on a spec sheet is to output more yellow light. Unfortunately, this excessively oversaturates yellows and further obscures the already weak or missing violets indigos, cyans, and the red spectral ranges. What's worse, the actual dark surfaces you need to see reflect mostly the weak & missing spectral ranges of light from other headlamps and flashlights.
We are working to greatly expand our explanation of this issue and how such a general misunderstanding of these terms came about in this website. Our Light Sciences section introduction is now available and may be helpful in the meantime if you seek to know more.
You want full-spectrum illumination to not only to make your nighttime excursions more enjoyable and also safer!