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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I just live on the planet, but I don’t have this problem with dB and to me, it sounds like you’re the alien. Maybe you could elaborate, or give a motivating example?

I just don’t remember encountering the problem you’re describing, and it’s unfamiliar to me. There’s something about your experience that I don’t understand, but I don’t know what it is.

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Moving from EE to audio to radio is enough to go through a few iterations of "people just write dB but mean completely different things". I got used to it, but that doesn't stop me from saying it's a bad idea and we should improve things for the next person.

Audio, the only gotcha I’ve seen is that -10 is -10 dBu and +4 is +4 dBV. That one is sloppy.

But this comment doesn’t illustrate your point, and I still don’t really understand where you’re seeing this.

Yeah exactly. Lots of people here can't seem to distinguish between "thing that I'm used to" and "thing that is good practice".

But these are totally different. I'm used to and thus comfortable with lots of things that are nonetheless terrible!

I often see pop sci articles saying something like '400 dB would represent a sound strong enough to tear the world apart', or 'military sonar is X dB -- strong enough to liquefy your organs at Y distance'. It's rarely clear to me which of these usages of 'dB' are directly comparable. I think the dB measurement for sonar is a different scale/unit than the one for hearing damage thresholds in air, but I couldn't figure out how to convert between the two last time I spent a few minutes trying to look it up, so in my opinion it can be fairly confusing.

The explanation and motivating examples are in the article.

The article only had bad examples in it, I was hoping for perspective from someone that made sense.

The voltage / power example doesn’t make sense. It’s always power or voltage squared, which are equivalent when the load is resistive.

The articles examples were fine. You (and lots of others here) are being obtuse.

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