YO-S-I! YO-S-I!

[tamakun]

Okay, here's a little puzzler for you. Say you have two machines that make 15dB and 20dB of sound, respectively. If you turn both of them on, will the resulting sound level be a straight addition of the two machines (35dB), or will one of them be drowned-out by the other (20dB), or will there be an equalization and there is a calculation in determining the sound level (perhaps 1/2 of both = 17.5dB)?

Long question made short: If I run water to clean dishes and run the stand mixer at the same time, will I wake Christine up? ;p

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Go download a copy of Reaper, and try both combinations, and look at the waveform ;) (Though, maybe wait until she's already up first. :D)

Also.. wouldn't their average be 27.g dB?

(Plus I don't even want to get into the way that the human ear perceives increases in loudness as increasing logarithmically...)

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

oh, wait, I just realised I read the wrong numbers, never mind my comment about their average. XD;

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I think I found something that calculates the answer - lower on this page (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/adding-decibel-d_63.html) there's a graph mentioning if there's, say a 5dB difference, you add 1 to the higher sound power, so the answer would be 21dB.

Of course, I can't make heads or tails of whether the stand mixer actually makes 5dB more than running water or any of that XD

[scruloose.livejournal.com]

21.19 dB

Here comes the science.

...also, according to this page, it takes a 10 dB difference to sound twice as loud to human hearing.

All in all, it sounds like running the two together makes really surprisingly little difference compared to running the louder one alone.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a lot of science to wake up to o.o

But that's good to know - so technically as long as there's not too many sources, then the sound level won't be increased too much. Thanks! :D