The title says it all. I’ve just begun studying CCNA and everything I thought I knew about decibels (the prior musician side of me obviously correlated it with sound) was thrown out the window when I learned that it was also used to measure electrical signals. I’ve been trying to read wikis but none of them really hit on how it can measure both sound and voltage, which are two completely different things…
In: Technology
It’s because the decibel is a logarithmic scale “comparison” unit. You want to say “x is 10 times as powerful” in a mathematical way, you use (deci)bels.
It’s used in sound and in (AC) electricity because both deal with waves, and loudness = power = amplitude of the wave. So attenuation and amplification were the first things we did with electronics, and decibels can be used very nicely to indicate just how much you’re amplifying sound (by amplifying the electrical signal wave).
The decibel is a “comparison” unit, like “percentage”.
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