Disagree. The people who get confused by decibels, are exposed to other people treating it like it's a unit in its own right. I agree that what the parent described, should be done. If it was what was done, this article wouldn't exist.
As I've said in the other comment, I believe this should be ultimately addressed by the SI.
I would agree.
Right now what we've got is basically "millis", and you just have to know whether the speaker is talking about length or mass. I like your proposal.
dB for sound in particular aligns with human experience. The (10 -) 1-10 on a volume knob typically aligns with a logarithmic scale because we hear differences in loudness at an order of magnitude. A linear volume knob would be frustratingly useless as you would have to crank it many many many times the higher up you want to go. Presumably hundreds of times. A traditional pot couldn’t do that of course but maybe you…
Ever have a cheap set of external speakers that got super loud in the first quarter turn of the volume knob but were pretty much the same loudness after that? Yeah, linear pot for the volume knob. No need for an encoder and software, though, logarithmic pots are readily available for precisely this reason. :)
This doesn't make any sense to me. Isn't this completely backwards? Wouldn't this behavior be expected from a logarithmic knob, and not a linear knob? I know what a logarithmic curve looks like, it rises quickly and then it tapers off, exactly the behavior you describe. But then you attribute that to a lineae knob! The parent comment confuses the hell out of me too, I am just really not putting 2 and 2 together here.
> makes me really doubt that the OP has any practical experience about the things they're talking about. Maybe not, but you can get used to many odd things given enough experience. I totally share the authors view. I don't usually have trouble grasping the definition of a unit, but dBs are just hilariously overloaded. The same symbol can literally mean one of two dimensionless numbers, or one of who knows how many ph…
dB for sound in particular aligns with human experience. The (10 -) 1-10 on a volume knob typically aligns with a logarithmic scale because we hear differences in loudness at an order of magnitude. A linear volume knob would be frustratingly useless as you would have to crank it many many many times the higher up you want to go. Presumably hundreds of times. A traditional pot couldn’t do that of course but maybe you…
Does that also work for showers, with mixing hot and cold water. I feel that a 1% change in the knob/balance goes from too cold to too hot.
Ever have a cheap set of external speakers that got super loud in the first quarter turn of the volume knob but were pretty much the same loudness after that? Yeah, linear pot for the volume knob. No need for an encoder and software, though, logarithmic pots are readily available for precisely this reason. :)
This doesn't make any sense to me. Isn't this completely backwards? Wouldn't this behavior be expected from a logarithmic knob, and not a linear knob? I know what a logarithmic curve looks like, it rises quickly and then it tapers off, exactly the behavior you describe. But then you attribute that to a lineae knob! The parent comment confuses the hell out of me too, I am just really not putting 2 and 2 together here.
"logarithmic" here refers to the number on the scale being logarithmic in the sound pressure level. Restated, power is exponential in the knob value, which roughly matches human perception of a linear increase. An actual linear function is far too slow.
Tangential question: Are there any sound meters that can actually measure down to 0 dB? The best I’ve seen specify 20 dB, which to me is still very audible.
(Note that, as the article mentions, 0 dB doesn’t mean “zero sound pressure”, but just “threshold of hearing”.)
You could have log Watts or something, it doesn't have to be dB to be logarithmic.
We have a unit for that. It's dBm and very easy to grasp. 0 dBm is 1 mW, every 10 dBm is an order of magnitude more (10 dBm = 10 mW). dB is only confusing if people omit which quantities they are relating. If it's clear like in the case of dBm which relate to 1 mW, it's an awesome tool.
This seems exceedingly ignorant of the work decibels do in telecommunications, RF and fibre engineering. The voltage vs power relationship is something that exists and is a core memory of beginner blunders in the field, but it boils down to a simple 10 vs 20 division operation. Besides that, the decibel simplifies a lot of multiplying very small and very big numbers to summing of two-digit numbers that you can do in…
The fact that the numbers on the scale align with intuition at a few points does not mean that the scale is a good one. dBs are jargon encoded with false rigor. No other "unit" has flexible meaning based on the background of the speaker, but jargon does.
> makes me really doubt that the OP has any practical experience about the things they're talking about. Maybe not, but you can get used to many odd things given enough experience. I totally share the authors view. I don't usually have trouble grasping the definition of a unit, but dBs are just hilariously overloaded. The same symbol can literally mean one of two dimensionless numbers, or one of who knows how many ph…
This like arguing that aspect ratios are stupid and wrong because sometimes they apply to a screen which is really big and sometimes it's really small and sometimes they apply to a physical print or a photo or a billboard or a vintage TV and sometimes it's a jpg or a PNG. Aspect ratio is a ratio. It can be a ratio between pixel counts, or between print dimensions, or physical display dimensions. All of which are usef…
> Aspect ratio is a ratio.
Right, but in this case they only give you one of the two numbers. Imagine being told that your TV had an aspect ration of ":16", and you just have to magically know what the other number means in the context. And sometimes ":16" actually means ":4", because quadratic mumble mumble, and sometimes the number is scaled according to some other "how big it seems to humans" factor; all of which you also just have to know in context.