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Boosted by jwz:
lcamtuf@infosec.exchange ("lcamtuf :verified: :verified: :verified:") wrote:
Engineers are supremely rational and value precision. That's why we use a unit called "decibels".
Well, it's not really a unit. It's a difference in magnitude for some other unit. We typically don't specify that other unit, but you can probably guess. We named decibels after Alexander Bell, but we misspelled that a bit.
Using decibels is just more intuitive than writing ×10 or ×1,000. That's why we define a decibel as an increase of ~1.2589. No, I mean, that's for power! If you're doing voltages, obviously use ~1.1220.
As for "0 dB", it probably refers to the other thing we talked about earlier in the text. But it could be one volt. Or a milliwatt, if you're doing radio stuff. Or maybe a threshold of human hearing. Or a really loud sound... I don't know, who's writing the spec?