On 23 Nov 2006, Linus Nielsen Feltzing told this:
> mat holton wrote:
>> You see, this is the problem when you let audiophiles or programmers
>> design User Interfaces.
>
> Actually, the dB scale solves a very old issue on the Archos, namely
> the question what volume to set to avoid clipping (0dB). The MAS chip
> can set the volume above 0dB, you see.
>
> In the old Rockbox version, the answer was 92% (if I recall
> correctly). I think "0dB" conveys that information much better than
> "92%".

Personally, being a mere programmer and not any sort of audio geek, I
don't understand why 0dB doesn't mean `dead silence'. I mean, that's
what decibels are, right, a unit of sound intensity? So how can you have
a negative sound intensity? -10dB reads to me like -10K on an absolute
temperature scale would (and, yes, I know that -10K really does have a
meaning, but it's a rather obscure one that doesn't relate to
*thermodynamic* temperature, i.e. to what most people understand as
`temperature').

I'm an extreme geek compared to pretty much everyone else I know
off-net. I don't think I know *anyone* who wouldn't be confused by a
negative volume. (It confused me enough that I hunted through the source
to fix the bug, saw that it was intentional, and left it alone, shaking
my head over the apparent bizarreness of this scale.)

-- 
`The main high-level difference between Emacs and (say) UNIX, Windows,
 or BeOS... is that Emacs boots quicker.' --- PdS