He is exactly correct, I have a Bachelor of audio engineering.
For those who like using calculators
it is correct and decibel (SPL) is logarithmic.
Sound pressure level (SPL) or acoustic pressure level is a logarithmic measure of the effective pressure of a sound relative to a reference value.
Sound pressure level, denoted Lp and measured in dB, is defined by[4] (wikipedia, 21016) retrieved from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_(logarithmic_quantity)
In simpler terms, think of it as a ratio. So 40db is not half as loud as 80db but a ratio of. so to get 80db spl from 40db spl, you would need more than 100% more power according to the ratio. This is because if pascals was used as a reference for sound pressure being that it is the unit of measure for pressure and sound is pressure, the numbers would be ridiculously small. 1 pascal is equal to 94 db spl So, to simplify the measurement, we use db spl. All it is is another form of expressing numbers and values.
The Decibel
A logarithm function is the inverse of the exponent function. Examples of exponents are:
102 = 100
103 = 1000
10-1 = 0.1
The inverse of this, the logarithm function (log10), is as follows:
log10(100) = 2
log10(1000) = 3
log10(0.1) = -1
The last equation can be spoken as, “the log base 10 of 0.1 equals -1.” The decibel unit (symbol dB) is a logarithmic unit expressing the ratio between two values. The decibel was named in honor of the famous scientist Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). When measuring sound, we use the following logarithmic formula to determine the sound pressure level (SPL) in decibels.
(Thermax jackets, 2015). Retrieved from
How To Calculate Sound Pressure & Sound Pressure Level
