Decibels

You've probably heard the term decibel used in conjunction with sound levels: having a
muffler louder than 85 dB will get you a ticket, listening to music at 110 dB will
damage your hearing. You've probably also noticed the button marked ATT -20dB on
the function generator, so decibels don't just have to do with sound. So what exactly is a
decibel? It's a logarithmic way of expressing the ratio of two power levels (or sound
pressure levels, or voltage levels, or any other kinds of levels). More precisely,

where and are the two powers being compared, and is the common, or base 10
logarithm. If we have two voltage levels, and across the same load resistance, ,
then

Why logarithmic? The smallest perceivable sound level corresponds to an acoustic

power density of approximately . But the level at which the sensation of
sound begins to give way to the sensation of pain is about . To cope with this
large dynamic range without loosing track of the number of zeros after the decimal
point, a logarithmic scale is useful.

It's important to remember that a decibel measurement expresses a ratio. So it always

makes sense to say that a signal x is so many dB greater (or less) than signal y. But if
we say that a signal is equal to some number of decibels, then there must be a reference
level. For sound, that reference level is usually taken as which corresponds
to a pressure of . If we call this the reference pressure level, , we get the
definition of sound pressure level

(where we use 20 instead of 10 since power is proportional to the square of the

pressure).

In a circuit, the choice of a reference level is not quite so obvious. For voltages, the
typical choice is 1 V, which gives "decibels relative to 1 Volt" or dBV for short. Other
forms you may encounter are dBW (relative to 1 watt) or dBm (relative to 1 mW).

It is sometimes stated that the response of a filter falls off at "20dB per decade" or "6dB
per octave". This is just another way of saying that the response varies as 1/f. In other
words, if is 10 times (i.e. the frequencies are separated by one decade) then
will be 1/10 of . Since then we have a loss of 20dB (or a
gain of -20dB) for each decade increase in frequency. Similarly, for two frequencies
separated by one octave (a factor of two) we would have or
approximately 6dB per octave.