Usually an increase by 3db is doubling the spl , so raising by 10 db is kinda triple the spl and Watts is what you feed the speaker depending on sensitivity of the speaker. But you all know this by now 😁
Perception and Watts: Doubling of power
There's a curious rule of thumb, which to my ears seems mostly true:
- To double the perceived volume, you must output 10x more power.
10x power = 10 dB by the way. We've read this as we were buying amps and trying to decide between 100w/channel and 150w/channel. We are told, repeatedly that 50 W difference isn't really that much.
On more than one occasion I've tested this and found it's pretty much spot on. Here's my question:
How can any of us really tell what half as loud, or twice as loud is?
I mean, think about this for a bit. I cannot tell half as bright, or twice as bright, but it seems I actually CAN tell what half as loud is. How does this even begin to work in the ear/brain mechanism?? 😁
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Hi Erik, twice the volume, i.e. twice as much sound pressure level, is 6dB(spl). And this requires 4x the power in watts. It seems that 10dB is what most of us perceive as double sound intensity, i.e. from a psychoacoustic point of view. And even then, our perception is affected by the frequency. The lower the frequency, the lower our sensitivity, so +10dB may not be enough in the bass, for example... Interesting stuff! |
@iseland I think you mean an increase by 3db requires double the power (or watts) Certainly this is not a tripling of average SPL |
Back in the day we found that more speakers (specicially: tweeters) got killed by too SMALL amp that were clipping like crazy when playing louder, and the clipping sent huge amounts of watts to the tweeter. Most tweeters blow at 10W (just throwing a number at it), so a 20watt amp is capable of killing a tweeter (if sending a lot of high frequency clipping noise to the tweeter). |
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