Float and Decibel Conversions

Today I would like to take a little time and talk about a subject that is very important to understand when working in the digital audio domain, and that is how to convert between floating-point and decibel.  Know how to convert between these two will be very useful when you are working with dynamics such as compressors and limiters, or even just simple volume controls.  It is good to have a way to perceive the data that is familiar to us.

What Is a Decibel?

Decibel or dB is a measure of volume that is in the range of -96 to 0.  It has a logarithmic relationship to the floating-point range that we normally work with.  Decibel is used since our ears hear sounds in a logarithmic nature.

Decibel – To – Float

The equation for converting from dB to floating-point is as follows.

where dB is a number in the range of -96 to 0.  This equation is extremely useful for when you have volume controls that are in dB. You can just convert to the floating point number which can be used as a scalar multiplier in your audio processing.

Float – To – Decibel

The equation for floating-point to dB conversion is just an inverse of the previous equation.

Domain and Range

It is very important to consider the domain and range of these equations.  Decibel-to-Float has a domain of {-96, 0}, and a range of {0.0000158, 1}.  The domain of the function can be lower than -96 but we want to cut it off here since that is the range commonly used.  Also when converting from Float-To-Decibel, we want to start the domain at 0.0000158 since that will give us the output of -96.  If we try to plug in 0 in this equation we will get an error.

Conclusion

I strongly recommend for you to get familiar with these equations since they are extremely useful when working in digital audio.

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