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jfengeltoday at 2:14 AM3 repliesview on HN

I still don't understand why audio dB are negative. That's relative to what? What happens at 0dB?


Replies

erutoday at 3:10 AM

Well, the brightness of celestial objects is also sometimes negative:

> The apparent magnitude of known objects can range from −26.832 for our Sun to about +31.5 for objects in deep space imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.[3]

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude

deepspacetoday at 2:38 AM

0db is usually defined as the loudest sound that the audio system can produce. Hence, everything else must be negative.

show 2 replies
kevin_thibedeautoday at 2:36 AM

That is dB full scale where 0 is an absolute ceiling and you can deduct from there.