
What is the difference between the concepts of “volume”, “level” and “loudness”? Part 2
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And we will also find an interesting phenomenon. In high school physics, you can learn that the sound of a shrimp chewing food 100 meters from the microphone of a nuclear submarine is -80 decibels, and the sound of a normal conversation is 40 ~ 60 decibels, the sound of the engine of a airplane is 120 decibels, etc. (just an example), and if you open a DAW (digital audio workstation) or audio editor, you’ll see all negative decibels. Why?
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Scaling in Adobe Audition, overall audio volume is below 0dB
This brings us back to the previous sentence: dB itself isn’t even a unit. It is just a counting method and must be followed by other content to form the unit. For example, dBSPL (sound pressure level), dBFS (decibels relative to full scale), etc. Different units have different definitions. For example, dBSPL is the softest sound humans can hear as 0dBSPL, and then increases or decreases depending on the size of the sound (for example, the sound picked up by a -80dBSPL underwater microphone is inaudible to human ears, so which is a negative value), and dBFS is a way of expressing loudness on a computer. Since the operation of the computer is binary, it is necessary to sample and quantize the recorded analog audio in a binary way to calculate. And the quantization needs to specify the bit depth, which is the range of the audio from smallest to largest. Therefore, it has a full value, so the full value (maximum value) is specified as 0. Volumes less than 0dBFS are represented as negative values.
In addition to dBFS and dBSPL, there are quite a few dB that represent loudness. For example, dBV, dBu, dBm, etc. in electroacoustics they measure loudness by voltage, power, etc., which also roughly equate to “level (Level)” I won’t go into too much detail here. This also proves the diversification of the word “volume”. For professionals, it is not a word that can be used for communication and does not cause misunderstanding. You need to add some good context when using it, like: “Item A’s volume at 10s in my DAW is 3dB louder than that.” of item B”, This refers to dBFS.
4. Explain from a profit perspective:
The volume that we see the most is actually here, such as the volume adjustment of various music players, the volume adjustment of computer systems, etc. If the above English definition and actual point of view is more similar to an absolute value, from the profit perspective, the word “volume” here fully refers to a relative value, a ratio. By adjusting the volume, you can make the audio volume change as you like. It can be made from huge to silent. Loudness here refers to how much it has changed from the original, which is the explanation that best reflects the definition of the dB volume unit.
Second, the level (Level)
In the last paragraph of the 3 above, volume units such as dBV and dBu are mentioned, in fact the true master of these units is the “level”. It is an electrical engineering term that has been applied to audio with the development of electroacoustics and has become “loudness” in today’s digital audio era. In today’s world of audio processing, “level” and “volume” can be directly mixed together, and the only term that still uses the word “level” is probably the “level meter” that exists in DAWs and effects plugins.




