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Likewise, we have to thank James Watt, Georg Simon Ohm, and Heinrich Hertz for their contributions to the industry.
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The “decibel,” one tenth of a bel and named for Alexander Graham Bell, recognizes his contributions to the understanding of sound. Incidentally, if you’d like a kind of immortality, be terribly clever and work out a system of measurement. Therefore, a 100-watt amplifier will produce sound only slightly louder than a 50-watt amplifier. If a sound gets louder by 3 decibels or “slightly louder,” it takes twice as much electrical power from your receiver or amp to produce that modest increase.
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That relationship is called “logarithmic.” If that word gives you an instant headache (nightmares of high-school math), then here’s a simpler explanation: So why doesn’t that 100-watt amplifier always sound twice as loud? Because the acoustic decibel–the decibel (dB) being the unit of measurement used worldwide to quantify the acoustic loudness of sound–has a peculiar relationship to amplifier power output measured in electrical watts. How loud is that? Hearing tests with large groups of people have revealed that a one-decibel (1 dB) change in loudness is approximately the smallest audible step that the average listener can detect, so an increase of 3 dB most listeners term “slightly louder.” In the above example, the sound from the speakers would not be “twice as loud” it would only be “a little louder,” an increase of 3 decibels. Not so.Īlthough it’s not the easiest thing to comprehend, doubling the amplifier power does not double the loudness. As audio/video hobbyists, most of us grew up thinking that if we have an amplifier with 50 watts of rated output power into 8-ohm speakers, and that combination produces reasonably clean and loud music, then by doubling the amplifier power to 100 watts per channel, the system would then play twice as loud.