To fix the situation, engineers needed a method of quantifying this loss in the first place. Engineers immediately saw that early phone calls lost signal strength over distance: signals grew fainter the further they had to travel. The decibel’s history is found in communications-particularly, the cables that carried phone calls. The Telegraph? Both the British Royal Navy and the Emperor of Russia were involved in the earliest, practicable designs.

The radio? Same deal: it transmitted messages to soldiers without the need of telegraph lines. The compressor? Originally, it was used to ensure no radio orders to troops would be inaudible. So let’s dive into the decibel, starting with its history: The history of the decibelįun fact: you can generally assume that your favorite piece of audio technology was invented for the purposes of the military, communications, or communications for the military. In this article, we’ll cover the history of the decibel, what it is, and how it applies to audio engineers and producers. “Bring up that vocal a dB or so.” If we notch out a frequency, we talk about that cut in terms of decibels: a 2 dB cut at 650 Hz, for example.īut have you ever stopped to think about where the decibel came from, why the decibel is used, and what a decibel even is?įamiliarizing yourself with the decibel is useful, as it’s omnipresent in our business. So much of what we do is quantified in decibels-e.g.

Decibel scale