4 Biology
4.2 Sound pressure
The human hearing is a piece of art from Mother Nature. Seriously, you don't know how lucky you are. It is capable of processing frequencies that are a factor 500 to 1,000 apart, and sound pressure levels that are a factor 10,000,000 (that's ten million) apart! There's no audio technology on this earth that can beat the human ear. So you better be careful with them!
Tech talk now. Because our ears can determine vast changes in volume, sound pressure is measured in decibels, a logarithmic scale 
. If you double power (twice the watts) the sound becomes 3 dB louder. However, an increase of as much as 10 dB is perceived as a doubling of volume. This equals ten times the power. So in order for you to play twice as loud, you need your amplifier setup to increase its acoustic output tenfold.
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© Joris van den Heuvel 2001-2009