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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.

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im3w1l 2 days ago | parent [-]

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 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.