Decibels are interesting unit of measure.

The scale is actually the bel scale named by Bell Telephone after Alexander Graham Bell and invented for measuring telephone signal power. A decibel is 1/10 of a bel.

Afaik no one uses straight bels any more, just decibels.

The bel is a base ten logarithmic scale measure of power. So if you increase a signal by one bel (ten decibels) it gets ten times more powerful.

Because it's a logarithmic scale it can be deceptive if you forget to think about it. And it can be deceptive too because it measures power but our ears don't.

So a ten decibel increase in noise is 10x more powerful.

For sound it's a little more confusing because our sound perception doesn't scale with power (or even necessarily consistently). 10db is usually something like twice as loud.

So it can be easy to get confused.

This thread was inspired because I was comparing two amplifiers, one of them has a max amplification of 56db and one has 60db and I thought "that's not really a significant difference."

Then I did a double take and was like "Oh yeah, the 60db amplifier is 2.5x as powerful as the 56db amplifier."