What do we gain from the most common unit of sound (Db) being non linear?
In: Technology
The loudest sound possible in earths atmosphere is 194dB.
This is about 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as loud as 1dB.
Pretty quickly you just see “large number of zeros”. And humans don’t perceive power that way. If you double the actual volume, humans won’t hear something twice as loud. You have to make it more like 10x as loud for humans to think it’s doubled in volume.
While a logarithmic scale is harder to work with, it’s actually more intuitive. You can know that motorcycles and lawnmowers are at around 100, while vacuum cleaners are more like 80. But motorcycles and lawnmowers being 10,000,000,000 while vacuum cleaners are only 100,000,000 is a lot less clear.
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