Remix clone Hacker News

> volume sliders start at 0 dB and then go down to negative $MUCHO, until complete silence at -Infinity. And then this same unit is also used to measure how loud my coffee machine is.

They're not the same unit, at all.

The audio software is a skeuomorphism from an analogue mixing console that is applying a change to a signal. 0 is unity gain and deviation from this describes an amplitude variation. This is important, as it means you are either discarding information by lowering the level and reducing dynamic range, or interpolating new information (/ decreasing SNR) by applying gain. This is less important today with floating point, but has strong historical reasons for existence across both analogue and digital domains.

If you look at an audio power amp, you will likely have some form of positive number as this is applying gain. Depending on the context this may have some specific meaning or it may be a screen print of a Spinal Tap logo and the numbers 1..11. These are all just UI decisions and part of doing that well is presenting coherent information for the target user group.

When you're talking about an acoustic noise source this is dB SPL which is a quantifier against a physical reference. That reference level quantifier is omitted a lot, which leads us to a lot of the angst in this post and the comments here. These are precise measurements, with very specific meaning. Their expression is often sloppy, but the units aren't to blame.

(excuse me while I got "full HN" here - I appreciate the irony in this response noting your first few sentences)

The reason people respond strongly to comments like this (or those about Git, or Rust) is because details matter. When you immerse in a domain, you learn the reason for those details. That does not mean things can't be improved, but this also does not imply those details can be removed or are wrong. A lot of the world, particularly when working outside of the bounds of a computer, depends on necessary complexity.

▲

lxgr 2 days ago | parent [-]

> They're not the same unit, at all.

Exactly, so why label two different things using the exact same letters in a potentially ambiguous context.

▲

jwagenet a day ago | parent | next [-]

How about using kg for both mass and weight? At least as an American we learn lb is actually lb_f and lb_m or slug is used for mass. The weirdness is consistent with the rest of the system. In metric Newton exists as a separate and sane measure of force…

▲

_kb 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Because it’s not ambiguous.

If I pay for something in Australia and the bill comes to $50 this has meaning within that context.

I receive a bill in Zimbabwe for $50 this also has meaning within that context.

These values are not equivalent.

Ditto if I were to say it’s 30 degrees out. You may interpret that as either a good day for the beach, nice weather for ice skating, or we need to bear north-northeast depending on what context we share.

Language is messy.

	▲	skrebbel a day ago \| parent [-]
		This is unnecessary complexity. My rant is against that exactly. You're defending confusing shit that doesn't get any better from being confusing. If all countries had a different currency, things would be clearer too. Ask any Australian shopping for digital products on international sites. Half of the sites write $ but forget to specify whether it's "we geolocated you and guessed AUD" or "haha it's USD but we just wrote $ because we forgot that there's a world outside the US". If Switzerland would rename the CHF to Euro but not change its value to match the existing Euro, everybody would agree that that's a terrible idea. There wouldn't be edgy HN commenters explaining that well, actually, there's precedent so it's fine! No, it'd just be bad. The dB ambiguity is a mess for the same reason. The situation has no benefit and in the world of units, where most other things (eg the most of the SI) are actually relatively usable and non-ambiguous, it's a fuckup. And the power vs voltage aspect of it makes it even worse than the $ situation. Your argument that it isn't so bad in practice doesn't change the fact that it has no benefits whatsoever. It's just ambiguity for the sake of it, because way back when people started measuring sound stuff, nobody bothered to go "but wait is this actually handy?" and then we got stuck with whatever the first guy came up with. It's just like the whole kilobyte/kibibyte crap and the whole Wh vs mAh vs kilojoule soup. It's all downside.