| ▲ | HPsquared 2 days ago |
| It's a bit like "percent". A shorthand for dealing with ratios, often with hidden assumptions. |
|
| ▲ | colejohnson66 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Sure, but you never say "the production is at 50%". 50% of what? Peak possible output? Typical output? That's what the author's complaint is: dB, while arguably useful, is annoying because people leave out the part that it's relative to. And then people, when talking about dB, assume the other party has knowledge of what their ratio is relative to. dBm, dbSPL, etc. |
| |
| ▲ | davrosthedalek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | In every communication, the sender assumes that the other party has some knowledge. For example, I assume that you can read my badly worded English text. There is rarely confusion with the people in the fields that use dB a lot. That other people often get confused by dB is not a failure of dB, not even of its common use, the same way I can't blame English for not being Chinese, or for Americans use F instead of C, or K, for temperatures. |
|
|
| ▲ | BlueTemplar a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Insert mandatory complaint about percentages being misused : their point is the approximation : 1.02×1.03~1.05 <=> +2%+3%~+5%, which only holds up to low tens +/-%. |
| |
| ▲ | nayuki a day ago | parent [-] | | There is a solution for you - log points! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_change#Logarithmic_ch... , http://a-loonie-saved.blogspot.com/2008/08/log-points.html An example of deceptive arithmetic: A mutual fund's 5-year history of annual returns is −70%, +30%, +50%, +20%, +40%. Naively, the total return for the 5-year period looks like +70%. But in fact it's −1.72%, because the reciprocal function makes the −70% very “heavyweight” compared to the positive changes. Using log points instead, the 5-year sequence is approximately −120.4, +26.2, +40.5, +18.2, +33.6. The sum of these rounded numbers is −1.9 (nowhere near +60.0), which agrees well with the correct result of about −1.735 log points (i.e. −1.72%). |
|
