3 ms·
There's a volume threshold above which the pressure wave in the air reaches the amplitude where the lows fall below the vacuum, right? But what happens if you g
by praptak 8y ago
There's a volume threshold above which the pressure wave in the air reaches the amplitude where the lows fall below the vacuum, right? But what happens if you give the air particles energy level above that threshold?
- TylerE 8y agoYou can continue to get louder, as only the negative part of the waveform is clipped.
- mikeash 8y agoIncidentally, this is why rocket launches sound crackly. It’s not overdriving the microphone, but rather the air itself.
- bjoli 8y agoSounds above 194db are usually just called shockwaves.
- aasasd 8y agoThis is addressed in the article to which the posted one links: http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-earth-four-times http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-... > But there’s a limit to how loud a sound can get. At some point, the fluctuations in air pressure are so large that the low pressure regions hit zero pressure—a vacuum—and you can’t get any lower than that. This limit happens to be about 194 decibels for a sound in Earth’s atmosphere. Any louder, and the sound is no longer just passing through the air, it’s actually pushing the air along with it, creating a pressurized burst of moving air known as a shock wave.