6 ms·

This seems exceedingly ignorant of the work decibels do in telecommunications, RF and fibre engineering. The voltage vs power relationship is something that exi

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 your head, and still preserve a big degree of accuracy. Whining about it makes me really doubt that the OP has any practical experience about the things they're talking about.

neepi 1y ago
[flagged]
- fouronnes3 1y ago
  However you must concede that the perspective of an outsider can be refreshingly eye opening sometimes, even to experts. Especially when it reveals the arcane practices that make a field difficult to learn - for example here the point about the base being too implicit is very valid. The article is perhaps ignorant of a few things, but its criticism shouldn't be dismissed outright IMO. Accepting constructive criticism from someone less experienced at something is a good exercise in humility, and can often help you improve. It's far from a "curse in any field".
  - neepi 1y ago
    That would assume that the entire world hasn't already tried this a thousand times over. Measurements are standardised communication tools. If you start changing the definitions, things fall out of the sky and on your head.
    - baxuz 1y ago
      This mindset is why the US is still using barley seeds as a standardized unit of measure.
    - yxhuvud 1y ago
      No, changing definitions was exactly how we ended up with SI units. That was a very good (and necessary) thing and definitely not the sky falling down.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - viraptor 1y ago
      Glad we never changed them and still drink in hogshead, use the original foot reference, and never resolved what base is a megabyte. ;)
- dns_snek 1y ago
  You haven't addressed any points the author has made, we don't need to have "experience" in a field to know that ambiguous units are ridiculous and bad. When I'm buying a piece of string for my garden, I don't need to find an agricultural textbook to know whether "10 meters" in agriculture is the same as "10 meters" in engineering, and whether the definition of "meters" depends on whether the string is made out of cotton or polyester. The same is not true for "decibels". People seem to assume that we're too stupid to understand logarithms, we're not.
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    Well 10 millimetres of rain is different that 10 millimetres thickness for say branch...
    - kqr 1y ago
      At first I was going to contradict you but then I realised 10 mm of rain is actually a measure of volume or mass, corresponding to 10 kg, right? And of course, people use it mainly as a rate, i.e. 10 kg per hour, or per four hours, or six hours, or 24 hours. And it gets worse when we start talking about snow, the density of which can vary a lot!
      - Ekaros 1y ago
        Well depending on area you are counting it on. So yes per square meter it would be 10 kg. Your rain gauge might for example not have 10mm spaced markings...
    - margalabargala 1y ago
      Could you elaborate on this? If 10mm rain falls, and you have an open collection container, then the depth of the water in that container would be more, less, or the same as the thickness of the branch?
      - camtarn 1y ago
        ...as long as the container has straight sides. The area of the opening needs to be the same as the area of the container all the way down, otherwise the two areas don't cancel out.
- foxglacier 1y ago
  It's like telling a chemist that moles are a useless complication. They'll swear up and down how important they but have no reasons except that everyone in the field uses them so they must be important. Sometimes conventions live on past the original need they met and experts are blind to that because they're only experts in using the convention, not evaluating conventions. Moles might have made sense when we didn't even know atoms existed and perhaps dB are similar, though I wouldn't know about that one.
  - tzs 1y ago
    > Moles might have made sense when we didn't even know atoms existed and perhaps dB are similar, though I wouldn't know about that one. Moles make sense because atoms exist.
    - foxglacier 1y ago
      Moles still work without knowing that atoms exist. The quantity being called "amount of substance" not "number of things" reflects that. However, they are still a redundant over-complicated legacy that doesn't need to exist.
      - Ekaros 1y ago
        Moles are used because they are useful abstraction. When you want to get from reaction equation to actual real word having some fixed weight is useful. It becomes useful to have fixed relatively usable quantity to work with. They are relatively decent size for actually weighing out things. And honestly mapping number of elementary particles directly to grams is not unreasonable. Even if because physics of world are tad weird there is still possibility for some sanity checks.
        foxglacier 1y ago
        They're not necessary, just a complicated way of doing what SI prefixes already do. Chemists don't notice this because they're intertwined with a whole network of conventions that would all have to be discarded at the same time. That's the legacy effect - it's too hard to untangle all at once. Inches are a relatively decent size for measuring lengths too, but people manage without.
atoav 1y ago
As someone who teaches this concept to.. art students I have to say that this complaint sounds a lot like the typical misconceptions and confusions a beginner would have. Yes, dB is a weird and unintuitive concept and it takes a moment to understand it, but it is also extremely useful once you get it. The fact that people don't write out the reference values does not help either, people will bounce out that audio mix at -20dB when in fact they mean -20dBFS which is referenced to the digital maximum (Full Scale) value. Above 0dBFS you clip the waveform. People leaving out the reference part is the mean reason for the confusion IMO.
- im3w1l 1y ago
  So one thing I always wondered about with audio mixing is that clipping should be random? Like if the sine waves somehow all line up the momentary amplitude could be much greater than the typical amplitude. And this would mean that there isn't a fixed volume above which you get clipping and below which you don't get clipping. Playing tricks with phases could prevent/cause clipping. Is -20 db then simply a rule of thumb for preventing occasional clipping?
  - mark-r 1y ago
    You're talking about the difference between Average amplitude and Peak amplitude. Yes, the peaks will be higher than the average, but not by a constant amount unless you're working with a pure constant sine wave. It will depend on the sound you're working with. The phase is part of that sound so generally you can't mess with it. -20 db would just be a starting point, you could adjust up or down from there.
rocqua 1y ago
Decibels in gain, those are fine. Though they use a silly base. dBm makes a decent amount of sense, given the RF background. The fact that decibels work differently for voltage and power is very weird, but understandable in isolation. But audio decibels are horribly underspecified. And any other use of a decibel as a dimensionful unit is horrible. I think the RF people know, and that's why they use dBm. Any system that uses decibels as dimensional units needs to make their baseline clear. I recently saw a fan advertising a low decibel noise "at 3 meters". And it's nice that they advertise (part of) the baseline, but it sweeps a ~10db difference in pressure under the rug, comparee to the standard 1m reference.
- mikewarot 1y ago
  Decibels aren't units... they are ratios. The ratio could be gain, or loss, or compared to the noise floor, or the signal of interest, or a standard unit, such as Watts, milliWatts, or microVolts into 50 ohms. >The fact that decibels work differently for voltage and power is very weird, but understandable in isolation. If you have a given load, increasing the voltage by a ratio of 10:1 (20 dB) is exactly the same as increasing the power by a ratio of 100:1 (20 dB) (because increasing the voltage ALSO increases the current, and the power is the product of the two)
  - IsTom 1y ago
    > Decibels aren't units... they are ratios. Until they are a ratio to a specific arcane reference level as mentioned in the article.
    - grues-dinner 1y ago
      It's not that arcane, it's referenced to a sound pressure level of 1 pascal. Which, yes, is still arbitrary in that it all ends up back at the arbitrary values of things like metres, seconds, kilograms, etc. Volts per pascal might make sense in some contexts (like your input buffer power supply), but log volts per pascal makes sense in others, particularly for audio applications where you stack gains and attenuations onto an already-logarithmic domain.
holowoodman 1y ago
Decibels are completely ridiculous. They are only useful if you are a cable monkey just adding and subtracting amplification/dampening factors. As soon as you need to do any kind of non-trivial conversion or computation, dB* is more of a hindrance to understanding and simplicity, because you will always need to look up in some strange table of dB weirdness. Integrate over a spectral power density in dB/Hz? You better convert that to real metric first... Need to solder in a capacitor/resistor/coil as a filter? Better convert to real metric first, because only some pre-made filters are specified in dB (and there are quite a few weird conventions, so you better convert to real metric and check first...).
- lifthrasiir 1y ago
  I do see needs for something like decibels. It is a useful way to communicate an inherently logarithmic quantity. The real and IMHO only mistake is that it was described as a typical unit, while it should have been a unit constructor and specially treated in the SI unlike others. (Not in the SI, but the [milli]meter in mmHg etc. and `p` in pH---really p[H+] [1]---are other popular examples of unit constructor.) [1] To be clear, I'm aware that pH and p[H+] are technically different. But that's orthogonal here.
- MegaDeKay 1y ago
  I'd say the engineers I knew building satellites at companies like SS/L and Boeing deserved a better title than than "cable monkeys".
- mwbajor 1y ago
  They're just ratios....
svara 1y ago
> 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 physical units. That's not normal, something as basic as units is usually very cleanly defined in physics. Someone in this comment section said it's not a problem because there's usually going to be a suffix that is unambiguous. If that were actually the case, you wouldn't see these types of complaints.
- rusk 1y ago
  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 could satisfy your curiosity with a rotary encoder?
  - IsTom 1y ago
    You could have log Watts or something, it doesn't have to be dB to be logarithmic.
    - rusk 1y ago
      That would be dishonest. You don’t adjust input power - you adjust attenuation EDIT if you did let’s say approximate power, or measure and present the consumed power (as some systems do) you would still be in a situation about how to present this data. Do you present your users with a simple 1-10 (logarithmic) or a 10 digit display which sweeps over vast ranges of uninteresting values. If you opted for a more compact scientific notation … well guess what that’s also logarithmic but in two parts LOL
      - deleted 1y ago
jeroenhd 1y ago
The same can be said of any unit. "If you just learn to work with it regardless of its weirdness, it's completely normal" doesn't mean the standard isn't ridiculous. I don't think anyone has stated that a logarithmic scale is bad. The type of logarithmic scale changing depending on the field it's being used in, and the non-standard notation (dBm being used instead of dBmW for instance), is just inconsistent for no reason. For a unit of immense scale, I rarely see it used outside of the -100 to 100 range, though. That puts its daily use square in the middle of SIs giga/nano range. I'm sure the formulae are a bit easier by not having to include exponents, but I don't see a practical reason why dB's normal use can't have been covered by normal prefixes. What sets the dB* aside from other American units is that this one is very close to following standard units. If it weren't for the deci- prefix and the usage of standard units like Watts and Volts ("Bell-horsepowers"), the inconsistencies in practical use would probably have been expected, making learning about the weird intricacies of each field a lot less infuriating.
- em3rgent0rdr 1y ago
  > I don't see a practical reason why dB's normal use can't have been covered by normal prefixes Because instead of numbers going like 1, 10, 100, 1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1G, and so on when using prefixes, we get a much more smoother numbers of 0 dB, 10 dB, 20 dB, 30 dB, 40 dB, 50 dB, 60 dB, 70 dB, 80 dB, 90 dB. You can see the the number for the dB get bigger, while when using prefixes the numbers get bigger two times in a row and then go back to smaller. With dB you usually just see a number from 0 to around +/- 100 or so. You can plot dB nicely as an axis of a chart and then see the slope of a curve in so many dB per decade.
  - tuetuopay 1y ago
    > You can see the the number for the dB get bigger, while when using prefixes the numbers get bigger two times in a row and then go back to smaller Interesting, I don't have any issues with that, and I see the numbers getting bigger and bigger no problemo. Perhaps it's an issue of metric/imperial, as I grew up in a metric country: I have a mental visual model of decades, while dB feels linear. The opposite is likely true e.g. in the US. > You can plot dB nicely as an axis of a chart Nothing prevents you from putting the decimal scale on a chart. As a matter of fact, many engineering fields do precisely that. One example that comes to mind are components datasheets: a lot is in log scales, but explicitly so, by putting the 1-10-100 numbers with naught-k-M-G. It's explicitly logarithmic.
neuroticnews25 1y ago
I think the "whining" is just a stylistic choice and an excuse to talk about the things he finds worth noting. I didn't perceive the tone of the article as negative.
ajuc 1y ago
You can use logarithmic scale without making it a pseudo-unit that changes the factors depending on the application. Additionally - attacking people you don't know for ignorance because they have different opinions is very narrowminded.
baxuz 1y ago
You haven't addressed any of the points the author made. You only show habituation and status quo bias.
- rusk 1y ago
  [flagged]
iLoveOncall 1y ago
Doesn't OP addres that multiple times in the article? He constantly reminds that the unit means vastly different things based on the domain, and focuses on acoustics after that, which is what every laymen would think about given the mention of decibels.
metalman 1y ago
sound IS funny, db does work, and for people building the things that produce or record sound. Useing db is just another unit used in engineering. Now if someone wants to get into the (very facinating), psychoacoustic side of sound, where another unit has been tried, "phons", prounounced fonz ;) , then it becomes clear that determining sound pressure levels is a tricky thing, as at the low end of perceptable sound the real world power of the actual sound is miniscule when converted into heat or mechanical power, and at the othete end a amp/speaker set up that was 100% efficient would only need 5 or 10 watts of electricity to power a stadium concert. we work with what we have, in a past lifeI got a degree in sound engineering, but barely practiced it, found myself way more into enjoying the products that have been built to be used, but am always greatfull to the people who make it possible, who on occasion are entertained by the sometimes exotic ways that I abuse the equipment, as the good ones take pride in having thought of and planed for such things, but do like confermation from the field. STC ratings anyone?
jvanderbot 1y ago
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.
verzali 1y ago
Yeah that was my thought as well. Decibels make it much easier to do link budgets as you can just add or subtract instead of multiplying or dividing.
- lxgr 1y ago
  That's an excellent application of Decibels (or really any other logarithmic unit). TFA's gripes are with the many not so great ones.
  - verzali 1y ago
    Yeah, I'm not really familiar with sound engineering, so I don't know how valid his points are. But I'm fully on board with the complaints about notation, there must be a better way to do it than the current way.
emilfihlman 1y ago
You are completely missing the point, which is that decibels are opaque and carry hidden field specific meaning that is not possible to know from the "unit". This is not a criticism of how useful they are in calculations.
rcxdude 1y ago
I work in a related field (lots of signal processing, but not necessarily RF-y or audio-y), and it's a constant source of confusion. I actively avoid using them in technical communication because they will be misinterpreted by someone, and when we have customers who use them they usually don't actually know enough context to disambiguate them.
mapt 1y ago
Having a logarithmic scale is a very different feature than having this one symbol to express all logarithmic scales with contextual meanings that sometimes need to be incorporated as two or three separate variations in a conversation. Why wouldn't this work better broken out as half a dozen different units, with objective zero points and mathematical convertibility?
sanderjd 1y ago
"It's weird and blunder prone but useful" is not actually a counterargument to the author, who is not arguing that it is not a useful thing.
viraptor 1y ago
> and is a core memory of beginner blunders in the field Are you into creating artificial issues to make understanding things harder? If not... what's your point? > doubt that the OP has any practical experience One quick search would save you from writing a very silly thing.

neepi 1y ago

[flagged]

fouronnes3 1y ago
However you must concede that the perspective of an outsider can be refreshingly eye opening sometimes, even to experts. Especially when it reveals the arcane practices that make a field difficult to learn - for example here the point about the base being too implicit is very valid. The article is perhaps ignorant of a few things, but its criticism shouldn't be dismissed outright IMO. Accepting constructive criticism from someone less experienced at something is a good exercise in humility, and can often help you improve. It's far from a "curse in any field".
- neepi 1y ago
  That would assume that the entire world hasn't already tried this a thousand times over. Measurements are standardised communication tools. If you start changing the definitions, things fall out of the sky and on your head.
  - baxuz 1y ago
    This mindset is why the US is still using barley seeds as a standardized unit of measure.
  - yxhuvud 1y ago
    No, changing definitions was exactly how we ended up with SI units. That was a very good (and necessary) thing and definitely not the sky falling down.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - viraptor 1y ago
    Glad we never changed them and still drink in hogshead, use the original foot reference, and never resolved what base is a megabyte. ;)
dns_snek 1y ago
You haven't addressed any points the author has made, we don't need to have "experience" in a field to know that ambiguous units are ridiculous and bad. When I'm buying a piece of string for my garden, I don't need to find an agricultural textbook to know whether "10 meters" in agriculture is the same as "10 meters" in engineering, and whether the definition of "meters" depends on whether the string is made out of cotton or polyester. The same is not true for "decibels". People seem to assume that we're too stupid to understand logarithms, we're not.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  Well 10 millimetres of rain is different that 10 millimetres thickness for say branch...
  - kqr 1y ago
    At first I was going to contradict you but then I realised 10 mm of rain is actually a measure of volume or mass, corresponding to 10 kg, right? And of course, people use it mainly as a rate, i.e. 10 kg per hour, or per four hours, or six hours, or 24 hours. And it gets worse when we start talking about snow, the density of which can vary a lot!
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      Well depending on area you are counting it on. So yes per square meter it would be 10 kg. Your rain gauge might for example not have 10mm spaced markings...
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    Could you elaborate on this? If 10mm rain falls, and you have an open collection container, then the depth of the water in that container would be more, less, or the same as the thickness of the branch?
    - camtarn 1y ago
      ...as long as the container has straight sides. The area of the opening needs to be the same as the area of the container all the way down, otherwise the two areas don't cancel out.
foxglacier 1y ago
It's like telling a chemist that moles are a useless complication. They'll swear up and down how important they but have no reasons except that everyone in the field uses them so they must be important. Sometimes conventions live on past the original need they met and experts are blind to that because they're only experts in using the convention, not evaluating conventions. Moles might have made sense when we didn't even know atoms existed and perhaps dB are similar, though I wouldn't know about that one.
- tzs 1y ago
  > Moles might have made sense when we didn't even know atoms existed and perhaps dB are similar, though I wouldn't know about that one. Moles make sense because atoms exist.
  - foxglacier 1y ago
    Moles still work without knowing that atoms exist. The quantity being called "amount of substance" not "number of things" reflects that. However, they are still a redundant over-complicated legacy that doesn't need to exist.
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      Moles are used because they are useful abstraction. When you want to get from reaction equation to actual real word having some fixed weight is useful. It becomes useful to have fixed relatively usable quantity to work with. They are relatively decent size for actually weighing out things. And honestly mapping number of elementary particles directly to grams is not unreasonable. Even if because physics of world are tad weird there is still possibility for some sanity checks.
      - foxglacier 1y ago
        They're not necessary, just a complicated way of doing what SI prefixes already do. Chemists don't notice this because they're intertwined with a whole network of conventions that would all have to be discarded at the same time. That's the legacy effect - it's too hard to untangle all at once. Inches are a relatively decent size for measuring lengths too, but people manage without.

atoav 1y ago

As someone who teaches this concept to.. art students I have to say that this complaint sounds a lot like the typical misconceptions and confusions a beginner would have. Yes, dB is a weird and unintuitive concept and it takes a moment to understand it, but it is also extremely useful once you get it. The fact that people don't write out the reference values does not help either, people will bounce out that audio mix at -20dB when in fact they mean -20dBFS which is referenced to the digital maximum (Full Scale) value. Above 0dBFS you clip the waveform. People leaving out the reference part is the mean reason for the confusion IMO.

im3w1l 1y ago
So one thing I always wondered about with audio mixing is that clipping should be random? Like if the sine waves somehow all line up the momentary amplitude could be much greater than the typical amplitude. And this would mean that there isn't a fixed volume above which you get clipping and below which you don't get clipping. Playing tricks with phases could prevent/cause clipping. Is -20 db then simply a rule of thumb for preventing occasional clipping?
- mark-r 1y ago
  You're talking about the difference between Average amplitude and Peak amplitude. Yes, the peaks will be higher than the average, but not by a constant amount unless you're working with a pure constant sine wave. It will depend on the sound you're working with. The phase is part of that sound so generally you can't mess with it. -20 db would just be a starting point, you could adjust up or down from there.

rocqua 1y ago

Decibels in gain, those are fine. Though they use a silly base. dBm makes a decent amount of sense, given the RF background. The fact that decibels work differently for voltage and power is very weird, but understandable in isolation. But audio decibels are horribly underspecified. And any other use of a decibel as a dimensionful unit is horrible. I think the RF people know, and that's why they use dBm. Any system that uses decibels as dimensional units needs to make their baseline clear. I recently saw a fan advertising a low decibel noise "at 3 meters". And it's nice that they advertise (part of) the baseline, but it sweeps a ~10db difference in pressure under the rug, comparee to the standard 1m reference.

mikewarot 1y ago
Decibels aren't units... they are ratios. The ratio could be gain, or loss, or compared to the noise floor, or the signal of interest, or a standard unit, such as Watts, milliWatts, or microVolts into 50 ohms. >The fact that decibels work differently for voltage and power is very weird, but understandable in isolation. If you have a given load, increasing the voltage by a ratio of 10:1 (20 dB) is exactly the same as increasing the power by a ratio of 100:1 (20 dB) (because increasing the voltage ALSO increases the current, and the power is the product of the two)
- IsTom 1y ago
  > Decibels aren't units... they are ratios. Until they are a ratio to a specific arcane reference level as mentioned in the article.
  - grues-dinner 1y ago
    It's not that arcane, it's referenced to a sound pressure level of 1 pascal. Which, yes, is still arbitrary in that it all ends up back at the arbitrary values of things like metres, seconds, kilograms, etc. Volts per pascal might make sense in some contexts (like your input buffer power supply), but log volts per pascal makes sense in others, particularly for audio applications where you stack gains and attenuations onto an already-logarithmic domain.

holowoodman 1y ago

Decibels are completely ridiculous. They are only useful if you are a cable monkey just adding and subtracting amplification/dampening factors. As soon as you need to do any kind of non-trivial conversion or computation, dB* is more of a hindrance to understanding and simplicity, because you will always need to look up in some strange table of dB weirdness. Integrate over a spectral power density in dB/Hz? You better convert that to real metric first... Need to solder in a capacitor/resistor/coil as a filter? Better convert to real metric first, because only some pre-made filters are specified in dB (and there are quite a few weird conventions, so you better convert to real metric and check first...).

lifthrasiir 1y ago
I do see needs for something like decibels. It is a useful way to communicate an inherently logarithmic quantity. The real and IMHO only mistake is that it was described as a typical unit, while it should have been a unit constructor and specially treated in the SI unlike others. (Not in the SI, but the [milli]meter in mmHg etc. and `p` in pH---really p[H+] [1]---are other popular examples of unit constructor.) [1] To be clear, I'm aware that pH and p[H+] are technically different. But that's orthogonal here.
MegaDeKay 1y ago
I'd say the engineers I knew building satellites at companies like SS/L and Boeing deserved a better title than than "cable monkeys".
mwbajor 1y ago
They're just ratios....

svara 1y ago

> 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 physical units. That's not normal, something as basic as units is usually very cleanly defined in physics. Someone in this comment section said it's not a problem because there's usually going to be a suffix that is unambiguous. If that were actually the case, you wouldn't see these types of complaints.

rusk 1y ago
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 could satisfy your curiosity with a rotary encoder?
- IsTom 1y ago
  You could have log Watts or something, it doesn't have to be dB to be logarithmic.
  - rusk 1y ago
    That would be dishonest. You don’t adjust input power - you adjust attenuation EDIT if you did let’s say approximate power, or measure and present the consumed power (as some systems do) you would still be in a situation about how to present this data. Do you present your users with a simple 1-10 (logarithmic) or a 10 digit display which sweeps over vast ranges of uninteresting values. If you opted for a more compact scientific notation … well guess what that’s also logarithmic but in two parts LOL
    - deleted 1y ago

jeroenhd 1y ago

The same can be said of any unit. "If you just learn to work with it regardless of its weirdness, it's completely normal" doesn't mean the standard isn't ridiculous. I don't think anyone has stated that a logarithmic scale is bad. The type of logarithmic scale changing depending on the field it's being used in, and the non-standard notation (dBm being used instead of dBmW for instance), is just inconsistent for no reason. For a unit of immense scale, I rarely see it used outside of the -100 to 100 range, though. That puts its daily use square in the middle of SIs giga/nano range. I'm sure the formulae are a bit easier by not having to include exponents, but I don't see a practical reason why dB's normal use can't have been covered by normal prefixes. What sets the dB* aside from other American units is that this one is very close to following standard units. If it weren't for the deci- prefix and the usage of standard units like Watts and Volts ("Bell-horsepowers"), the inconsistencies in practical use would probably have been expected, making learning about the weird intricacies of each field a lot less infuriating.

em3rgent0rdr 1y ago
> I don't see a practical reason why dB's normal use can't have been covered by normal prefixes Because instead of numbers going like 1, 10, 100, 1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M, 100M, 1G, and so on when using prefixes, we get a much more smoother numbers of 0 dB, 10 dB, 20 dB, 30 dB, 40 dB, 50 dB, 60 dB, 70 dB, 80 dB, 90 dB. You can see the the number for the dB get bigger, while when using prefixes the numbers get bigger two times in a row and then go back to smaller. With dB you usually just see a number from 0 to around +/- 100 or so. You can plot dB nicely as an axis of a chart and then see the slope of a curve in so many dB per decade.
- tuetuopay 1y ago
  > You can see the the number for the dB get bigger, while when using prefixes the numbers get bigger two times in a row and then go back to smaller Interesting, I don't have any issues with that, and I see the numbers getting bigger and bigger no problemo. Perhaps it's an issue of metric/imperial, as I grew up in a metric country: I have a mental visual model of decades, while dB feels linear. The opposite is likely true e.g. in the US. > You can plot dB nicely as an axis of a chart Nothing prevents you from putting the decimal scale on a chart. As a matter of fact, many engineering fields do precisely that. One example that comes to mind are components datasheets: a lot is in log scales, but explicitly so, by putting the 1-10-100 numbers with naught-k-M-G. It's explicitly logarithmic.

neuroticnews25 1y ago

I think the "whining" is just a stylistic choice and an excuse to talk about the things he finds worth noting. I didn't perceive the tone of the article as negative.

ajuc 1y ago

You can use logarithmic scale without making it a pseudo-unit that changes the factors depending on the application. Additionally - attacking people you don't know for ignorance because they have different opinions is very narrowminded.

baxuz 1y ago

You haven't addressed any of the points the author made. You only show habituation and status quo bias.

rusk 1y ago
[flagged]

iLoveOncall 1y ago

Doesn't OP addres that multiple times in the article? He constantly reminds that the unit means vastly different things based on the domain, and focuses on acoustics after that, which is what every laymen would think about given the mention of decibels.

metalman 1y ago

sound IS funny, db does work, and for people building the things that produce or record sound. Useing db is just another unit used in engineering. Now if someone wants to get into the (very facinating), psychoacoustic side of sound, where another unit has been tried, "phons", prounounced fonz ;) , then it becomes clear that determining sound pressure levels is a tricky thing, as at the low end of perceptable sound the real world power of the actual sound is miniscule when converted into heat or mechanical power, and at the othete end a amp/speaker set up that was 100% efficient would only need 5 or 10 watts of electricity to power a stadium concert. we work with what we have, in a past lifeI got a degree in sound engineering, but barely practiced it, found myself way more into enjoying the products that have been built to be used, but am always greatfull to the people who make it possible, who on occasion are entertained by the sometimes exotic ways that I abuse the equipment, as the good ones take pride in having thought of and planed for such things, but do like confermation from the field. STC ratings anyone?

jvanderbot 1y ago

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.

verzali 1y ago

Yeah that was my thought as well. Decibels make it much easier to do link budgets as you can just add or subtract instead of multiplying or dividing.

lxgr 1y ago
That's an excellent application of Decibels (or really any other logarithmic unit). TFA's gripes are with the many not so great ones.
- verzali 1y ago
  Yeah, I'm not really familiar with sound engineering, so I don't know how valid his points are. But I'm fully on board with the complaints about notation, there must be a better way to do it than the current way.

emilfihlman 1y ago

You are completely missing the point, which is that decibels are opaque and carry hidden field specific meaning that is not possible to know from the "unit". This is not a criticism of how useful they are in calculations.

rcxdude 1y ago

I work in a related field (lots of signal processing, but not necessarily RF-y or audio-y), and it's a constant source of confusion. I actively avoid using them in technical communication because they will be misinterpreted by someone, and when we have customers who use them they usually don't actually know enough context to disambiguate them.

mapt 1y ago

Having a logarithmic scale is a very different feature than having this one symbol to express all logarithmic scales with contextual meanings that sometimes need to be incorporated as two or three separate variations in a conversation. Why wouldn't this work better broken out as half a dozen different units, with objective zero points and mathematical convertibility?

sanderjd 1y ago

"It's weird and blunder prone but useful" is not actually a counterargument to the author, who is not arguing that it is not a useful thing.

viraptor 1y ago

> and is a core memory of beginner blunders in the field Are you into creating artificial issues to make understanding things harder? If not... what's your point? > doubt that the OP has any practical experience One quick search would save you from writing a very silly thing.