DECIBEL SCALE GRAPH PRO

(Remember the rules of thumb!) If you look at a decibel chart for common sounds (like the one in the last section), you realize that two 80 dB vacuums could not possibly create a sound level of 160 dB- the combined sound would have an SIL greater than a jet at takeoff (130 dB)! Two 80 dB vacuums create a sound level of just 83 dB! Going from one vacuum to two does double the sound intensity, but doubling the intensity only increases the sound level by 3 dB. However, when sources combine, the sound levels do not add together. For example, if there are two loud vacuum cleaners in a room, and each produces a sound intensity of 100μW/m 2, the total sound intensity in the room is twice that amount, or 200μW/m 2. When you have multiple sources of sound in a room, the intensities add together.

Notice that multiplication/division for intensity “turns into” addition/subtraction for SIL (and vice versa). According to the second rule, if the intensity is multiplied by ten, the SIL goes up by 10 dB. These rules allow you to move back and forth between intensity and sound intensity level without a calculator: Change in intensityĪccording to the first rule, if the sound intensity doubles, the SIL goes up by 3 dB. The key is the two simple rules of thumb shown below.

He even rewired their bass boat for fun one weekend as a young teenager.Loudness perception 43 Decibels (the math) Avoiding the calculatorĮven though decibels are based on logarithms, you can do many calculations with decibels without a calculator. From his dad, he was able to learn irrigation, landscaping, car maintenance, basic electrical, and more. In fact, Kenny still uses several pieces that his grandfather made more than 30 years ago.Īt home, Kenny’s dad made the family budget stretch further by doing many DIY repairs around the house. Building everything from bookshelves to lazy Susans, he became extremely accomplished while his young grandson observed, fascinated at the way raw wood could turn into something both beautiful and functional. His grandfather was an airplane mechanic in WW2 and took up woodworking as a hobby after retiring from the power industry.

Kenny’s life around power tools started early.

DECIBEL SCALE GRAPH PRO

While that might not sound like a direct line into the power tool industry, his analytical and scientific mindset help him design repeatable testing methods for Pro Tool Reviews’ head-to-head testing and offer highly objective comparisons in his reviews. There are tons of decibel equivalent examples out there to give you a general idea of how loud something sounds at a certain decibel level like the one we’ve included. There are two major points to keep in mind when it comes to the dB scale: the actual sound pressure level and how loud something sounds. Sound Pressure Level and the Decibel Scale The reason sound pressure levels and decibels are so important is that it gives us a numerical scale to work with to help prevent hearing loss. Sound pressure is the difference between the pressure from a sound wave and the ambient pressure of what the sound is traveling through (usually air for our purposes). Simply put, decibels are a measure of the sound pressure level. We convert that into the more popular decibel scale or dB scale. Sound pressure level, or SPL, is a measurement of sound pressure that uses Pascals (Pa) as its unit of measurement. Since we’re going for a functional level of understanding and not preparing you for a final exam, I’m going to skip some of the fine details and focus on the general concepts.

Decibel scale graph