Microsoft made a -23 decibel room, but how does that work exactly? Once something hits 0 decibels how exactly can we measure it getting more quiet than that?
In: 24
Decibels is a log scale, and it doesn’t start at *zero energy*.
The first part of that means that it’s not that going from 10dB to 20dB is 2x more energy, it’s actually 10 times more energy! And 30dB is therefore 100 times more than 10dB.
The scale starts at the lowest possible energy for the average person to be able to hear. That doesn’t mean there’s no sound – no energy – it just means that it’s too low for most people to hear most of the time. -1dB is, therefore, 10x less energy and is even more quiet. You already probably couldn’t hear anything, but now you *really* aren’t likely to hear anything.
It’s a bit like how you can have negative temperatures when using Celcius and Fahrenheit – the scale doesn’t start at absolute zero, it starts at a “zero” that is meaningful to us.
Latest Answers