Playing your instrument or amplifier 10 dB louder feels twice as loud, but is actually ten times as much sound power.It takes a twentyfold increase in sound power (twenty more dB) for you to experience a quadrupling of subjective loudness. As a rule of thumb, it takes a tenfold increase in sound power (ten more decibels) for you to experience a doubling of subjective loudness. To make things more complicated, your subjective experience of loudness is on a completely different scale from the actual power level of the sound. ![]() 20 dB quieter = one one-hundredth as much sound power.10 dB quieter = a tenth as much sound power.6 dB quieter = about a quarter as much sound power.3 dB quieter = about half as much sound power.1 dB quieter = about four fifths as much sound power.1 dB louder = about one and a quarter times as much sound power.3 dB louder = about twice as much sound power.6 dB louder = about four times more sound power.10 dB louder = ten times more sound power.20 dB louder = a hundred times more sound power.Playing your instrument one decibel quieter means that you are putting out about four fifths as much sound power as you were before. Playing your instrument one decibel louder means that you are putting out one and a quarter times as much sound power as you were before. The next thing to understand about decibels is that adding them means multiplying the actual sound power levels. All other decibel levels are multiples of this reference intensity. Instead, it refers to the quietest sound that humans can hear, which is roughly equivalent to the sound of a mosquito from ten feet away. The first thing to understand is that zero decibels does not mean silence. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately, decibels are logarithmic, which makes it hard to develop an intuition for the actual sound pressure levels that they represent. A change of one decibel is a just noticeable difference: if you make something one decibel louder, that is just enough for the listener to notice that it’s louder. The decibel scale is meant to reflect the subjective experience of your hearing. For one thing, there are so many different kinds of decibels! You only care about two of them: the decibels you see on a noise meter, and the decibels you see on a mixer. Unfortunately, decibels are extremely confusing. If you are a musician or audio engineer, it is very important to know what decibels are.
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