The decibel has always confused me. Sometimes people use decibels as an absolute value where "0" is silence and anything over "120" is very loud. Journalists do this when describing how loud a band is1. Sound engineers do it too, when boasting about the power of their speaker-setup. "It's louder than a jet engine at 50 paces, man". But when I look at the volume meter on a mixing desk, things are different. The desk shows the loudest value as zero, all the way down to silence at "-96" (or some...
