Audio Engineering Explained

PREFACE

 

 

This chapter begins our journey through the world of audio engineering by explaining some fundamental principles. Our hearing, like our other senses, works in a logarithmic fashion, which allows us to cope with the enormous variation in sound levels that occur in the real world. Explanation starts with the decibel, a unit whose logarithmic basis matches the response of our ears, and makes the plotting of graphs and the doing of calculations much simpler and more intuitive than the alternative of grappling with scientific notation and numbers wreathed in zeros.

From considering the mathematics of decibels (which is really very simple), Pat Brown moves on to consider how they are used to measure absolute rather than just relative sound ...