Measuring amplitude

Our ears and brains help us sense that louder sounds have higher amplitudes and…softer sounds have lower amplitudes;…however, to put that information to better use in a musical application, we need…to be able to measure a sound wave's amplitude more exactly.…Then we can create rules of what to do when a specific amplitude level is…reached, and control the range of a soundwave's amplitudes to our advantage.…This measurement process forms the basis of all dynamics processors.…If we can measure it, we can start controlling it.…

There are many ways to measure amplitude.…Inside our digital audio workstation, we will use dBFS, or Decibels Full Scale.…This scale defines our system's maximum and minimum amplitude values,…otherwise known as dynamic range.…This helps us measure and control the relative amplitude of audio signals within that range.…Sometimes the dBFS can confuse people because it counts up from negative…numbers and ends at 0.…Why does it do this?…In a digital audio system, values above 0 are simply cut off, or clipped,…