I'm reminded of my old boss's words when I worked as an EE at MIT Lincoln Lab. Whenever someone (self included) distinguished between the meaning of decibel on

I'm reminded of my old boss's words when I worked as an EE at MIT Lincoln Lab. Whenever someone (self included) distinguished between the meaning of decibel on a signal's amplitude or power, he'd deadpan : "A decibel is a decibel is a decibel". Eg, a filter that attenuates a certain frequency by 24 dB is well defined. Regardless of whether you're interested in the resulting voltage or power of the output signal. Of course for absolute terms a reference like dBm is used.