The Sound pressure level reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Sound pressure level

Sound pressure level (SPL) or sound level L_p is calculated in decibels compared to a reference sound pressure.

The reference sound pressure is

= 20 µPa (micropascal), (Pa = pascal = N / m²; N = newton)

It can be useful to express sound pressure in this way when dealing with hearing, as the perceived loudness of a sound correlates roughly logarithmically to its sound pressure. Even the microphones work this way and our eardrums. They cannot convert the sound intensity.

See also

• Acoustics
• Sone
• Weber-Fechner Law

External link

• Conversion of sound pressure level to sound pressure

This is the "Sound pressure level" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.