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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& #39;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& #39;t.
So a ten decibel increase in noise is 10x more powerful.
For sound it& #39;s a little more confusing because our sound perception doesn& #39;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& #39;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."
