Timeline for What is the reason for using decibels to measure sound?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 7 at 20:25 | comment | added | Kevin Brant | "Why is it necessary to calculate such a thing and give the ratio of it" I think can be answered more obviously - all units are ratios of things. When you measure something in meters it's actually the ratio of the measured length to the length of 1 meter ie. 1km is 1000 times larger than 1 meter. Similarly, 30dB is 1000 times larger than 0dB, and 0dB is our base unit of value just like how 1 meter is our base unit of value for linear units. So what is 0dB? For power we use dBW which defines 0 dBW = 1 * 1 Watt, and for audio we might use dBA which defines 0 dBA = 1 * (some super quiet sound). | |
| Jul 6 at 3:07 | comment | added | jaskij | To add to that answer, a lot of human perception is actually logarithmic. So it makes even more sense to use dB SPL, even if the base of the logarithm is different. | |
| Jul 5 at 14:08 | vote | accept | kaan | ||
| Jul 18 at 21:22 | |||||
| Jul 5 at 13:29 | comment | added | Theodore | @BrtH Visual resolution is measured in terms of solid angles, not distance. | |
| Jul 5 at 13:12 | comment | added | Andy aka | @BrtH you are not comparing apples with apples. Sound level is an intensity whereas distance is distance; the equivalent in eyes would be light intensity and, we readily measure optical power in decibels. | |
| Jul 5 at 12:33 | comment | added | BrtH | "that's a scale of 1,000,000:1, it's more meaningful to rescale it". That doesn't seem obvious to me at all. The human eye can detect features of about 10um to a few km, a scale of 1.000.000.000:1, yet we have no problem using normal linear distance units instead of a logarithmic ratio. | |
| Jul 4 at 14:27 | history | edited | Andy aka | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 401 characters in body
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| Jul 4 at 14:23 | history | answered | Andy aka | CC BY-SA 4.0 |