Our Kenmore dishwasher that is 10-11 years old is making a noise like it isn't going to last much longer, so we are replacing it. I've looked at several models, but I'm leaning toward a couple of Bosch dishwashers. One is rated at 52 dB but comes only in black. The other is rated 54 dB, but comes in black/white/stainless steel. Stainless steel would match our refrigerator. Is there much difference between 52 dB and 54 dB in a dishwasher?
Not from my house :)
-- Oren
..through the use of electrical or duct tape, achieve the configuration in the photo..
Both will be very quiet. Most of us would not hear the difference.
Do some research on reliability though. Bosch is highly rated for cleaning, noise level, but I've read a lot of complaints about service. Our local dealer no longer stocks them.
Every 6db is a doubling in the volume, so going from 0db to 6db is twice as loud, going from 6db to 12db is another doubling of the volume making 12db four times as loud as 0db, going from 12db to 18db is another doubling, making 18db eight times as loud as 0db. (assuming 0 db is the volume you call "normal" or your zero calibration point which can be any thing you want to calibrate it to).
So for example if you calibrate the sound of a cricket at 10 feet to
0db, then you increase to 18db the cricket will be 8 times as loud as "normal".So a difference of 52db to 54db would be about 33% louder, most folks would hear that easily.
I went shopping for a furnace the only spec I cared about was db, the salespeople thought I was nuts. I told them I care less how efficient it is, I want the quietest one regardless of energy. Unfortunately the manufacturers could not even tell me their db ratings (Trane, Bryant, Lennox, etc)
Read all about it here:
RichK
Most could hear the difference if asked to compare the two levels side by side. However, 1db or less is generally not discernable. And even if you can tell that one is louder than another, I would doubt it would be enough to make it a deciding factor in a dishwasher. For example, here's a link to some common sounds and their associated db. 50 is a private office or soft music. 60 is conversational speech 65 is a business office or soft classical music. Considering that, I wouldn;t worry about 52 or 54 from different dishwashers.
I have a GE Profile that is very quiet, the water sounds like a gentle water fall. In fact, when I first turned it on, I thought there was a leak. In general, I think Bosch is over priced and I've heard plenty of bad stories about problems and repair costs.
dishwashers.http://home.new.rr.com/trumpetb/audio/dBexamp.html>
And you could always knock down the sound a little more by packing some fiberglass between the cabinets and DW on the install provided your not blocking any kind of fan or anything, also under, over, and behind. If a Kenmore lasted 11 years why change? I have a Kenmore on it's 10th year, no problem other than a cherry pit that blocked the drain once. Never let a cherry pit get in your DW, no fault of Kenmore on that one.
Sounds like it is too small of a difference to worry about, thanks.
I checked out a Kenmore, and it was 58 dB. There is no wall between it and the living area, so I want a quieter one. Thanks for the information.
I've never heard this before. AFAIK, a 10 decibel increase is twice the volume. It was chosen that way to be a round number, 1 bel.
I verified this by looking the URL's you gave in your second post, although maybe they don't say it quite the way I have.
The scale is logarithmic because of the way our ears and brain work together. If we only went by the energy or force or whatever that went into making sound, it would be misleading. A sound that is the result of twice as much energy does not sound twice as loud. The difference seems to be a lot less than that.
Same thing in the opposite direction. When we hear a tiny sound, maybe the sound of a pin hitting the floor, or a leaf, it's thousands of times less strong than normal talking, but it doesn't sound like that to us. The sound is smaller, but not that much. It's still clear.
I've often thought that the reason it works that way is because of the three bones in the ear, and that one of them is moved when the general level of sound is higher or lower, to move the fulcrum and change the mechanical advantage of the ear bones. So that small sounds can sound louder and loud sounds can sound less loud.
OTOH, it might not be the bones at all but the brain.
One guy with the kind of background to know told me that I'm wrong, it's not the bones, but typically I'm not yet convinced. I asked several physics Ph.D's what happened to light after it was no longer light in a sealed room, and didn't it turn in to the same amount of heat that it took to make the light in the first place, and all but one either couldn't say, or thought the answer was no. One thought the answer was yes, and I'm pretty sure he and I are right.
I guess the reason I think it is the bones is that we could have gotten by with only 1 or 2 bones, I think, if they were only going to transmit sound from the eardrum to some nerve. The purpose of the third bone is not strength. They are all barely attached to anything else afaik. The purpose seems to me to absolutely be some kind of regulation, automatic volume control, similar to other mechanical controls I've seen but forgotten throughout my life, especially before electronics was so dominant.
The volume control on a Victrola we had for a while was the segmented door, like the lid on a roll-top desk, that could be pulled in front of the wooden horn, in models where the horn was not atop the tone arm but below it in the cabinet. Really only one part involved there, and the phyical volume control was arithmetic, not geometric or logarithmic.
The iris on a camera, modeled right after the iris in our eyes, decreases the area available for light to enter by the square of the diameter. That's it. That's what I compared the bones of the ear too, but I think they might be more powerful if the fulcrum really moves.
Maybe I asked the wrong question to the guy I talked to about the ear. Does the fulcrum move? I should have stuck with objective questions instead of asking about conclusions.
IIRC the steam/speed/power control on a steam locomotive is a little more complicated than what I expected, but I don't remember if it is comparable to a 3 part device like the ear.
I'm pretty sure I've seen other mechanical controls more complicated than an iris or locomotive, maybe involving three parts and but my memory is a blank now.
If the fulcrum in the ear doesn't move sometimes, we do we have 3 bones and not just one (or two, but I'm not sure what the second does or would do)?
Since 2db is one fifth of 10 db, it woudl be the fifth root of 2, to give the ratio; minus 1, to give the fraction louder; and times 100 percent to give the percentage louder. The fifth root of 2 is a little under 1.2, so a little under 20%. Checking with a calculator I think 1.15 to the fifth power is a little over 2, so about 15% louder, though how that converts to the way people would perceive it, I'm still not sure. I guess we've already allowed for the hearing oddity of people by using decibels, but now we're converted it back to loudness -- read that ENERGY -- so I think that removes the advantage of using bels and decibels. It removes the reason they were invented in the first place, to provide a number that would correspond to our hearing, as opposed to the amount of energy used in making the sounds.
So even though I willingly did it at the start of the paragraph, I think it is misleading to convert back to energy. What we should do is learn to understand, to have a good feel for what a decibel represnets. Their purpose is to represent sound, but the problem is that we don't have ongoing feedback of how loud in decibels something is.
After measuring and experience and practice and visualizing, we know an inch when we see one. We can see two inches and know that something is twice as long as an inch. But even if we memorize the charts that you yourself pointed us to in your second post, we don't really appreciate how loud 20 db are, and even less so the ratio of two levels of sound, or, given one sound and a decibel difference, the level of the second sound.
I'd say that in general, we can visualize things much more than we can audiolize things. Maybe that's why there is no word audiolize.
I don't think you're nuts.
I'm glad you just gave me the idea, and I hope by the time I need a furnace, they will rate them by loudness. They probably won't, though.
I have a 3 speed indoor furnace fan, only adjustable by connecting a different wire to the power. It's too loud, but it's set on the slowest speed. I changed it anyhow, on the slim hope the schematic or the color was wrong, but they weren't.
I looked it up, and a 3 dB increase approximately doubles the power.
Yes this got far too complicated; very quickly.
will not be discernible to most ears.
And some of the posted info. was wrong/incomplete!
Several comments reference to Decibels.
1) The decibel is of course one tenth of a Bel. The Bel is defined as "The logarithmic ratio of two powers (volumes)". It is a unit of comparison named after Alexander Graham Bell a Scottish immigrant who invented the telephone in Canada. 2) If you double the power (volume of sound etc.); The logarithm of 2 is 0.3; or 0.3 Bels. Which is of course 3 Decibels! 3) The third thing wrong is that Bels/Decibels etc. are a 'comparison' or ratio of two powers, or in this case, two volumes.It is incorrect to say something is X Decibels.
The question is immediately 'In relation to what'. So the dish washer is 50 something decibels louder than, what??????? Dead silence? A mouse squeak???? A teenager's ghetto blaster at full volume?? A loud motorbike next door????? A radio plying very quietly as you drop off to sleep????
Decibels have to be referenced to something. Anyone reading car magazines such as Car and Driver may have noticed that they will say that the sound level inside the cabin of a certain vehicle is say 75Dba. While another vehicle which is twice as loud, say, has a sound level of say 78Dba. That tells us that the measurement (comparison) is Decibels and that it is in reference to some agreed standard of "Zero Dba".
There are number of different references used by different industries/ types of technology.
The reason for Decibels is; a) Convenience; think back to adding and subtracting logarithms in school and then anti-logging the result! Right; remember that? We 'did logarithms' around about age 14 IIRC. About grade 8 or 9? b) Logarithmic response is the way the human ear works.
So if two people are hammering on a wall rather than one person hammering on a wall it will be TWICE as loud and therefore 3 Decibels Louder. And humans will be able to perceive the difference in noise level. OK?
Actually its more correct to say that a doubling of distance from the source gives you a 6db drop. So increasing 6db gives you a perceived doubling of the volume, as though you came twice as close to the source. This is, of course, for a point source sperical wave emination, (line sources or cylindrical waves have a less than 6db loss for each doubling up to a certain point).
I work with audio.
I stand by my statement that it you will hear the difference between
52 and 54, all other things being equal like the frequency and pattern of the noise, etc.At my mixing panel here when I go from -6db to 0db the difference is quite a lot.
Agree completely. A 6 Db increase is four times the power and is clearly discernible by most human ears!
It wouldn't matter if you were changing from one milliwatt to four milliwatts. Or from one watt to four watts. The change is +6Db.
If I double the power/volume the logarithm of 2 = 0.3 Bel. (i.e. 3 Decibels) If I double volume again again the logarithm of 2 = 0.3 Bel (another 3 Decibels) The total increase in volume is four times (doubled it twice) and is therefore 3 + 3 = 6 Decibels.
When it comes to distance from the source of a noise that is something different. But you could think of the volume of air between you and the noise source being twice as wide, twice as high and twice the distance away. So the sound/volume would probably decrease at at least a square root rate? Let's not get into that?
Yes in a sphere the power will roll off much faster, than say a cylinder, I've always heard 6db per doubling for sperical point sources.
Also lets not get into the frequency of the noise coming from the dishwasher, 1000Hz is perceived much noisier than 100Hz at the same db. At least this thread dismisses those who would say "its only 2db difference you wont hear it" db is logrithmic due to the sperical nature of the emination. Sort of like the difference between a 10 inch pizza and a 12 inch pizza, vs a 16 inch pizza and an 18 inch pizza, both sets are 2 inches bigger in diameter but 16 to 18 gives you more extra pizza than the whole 12 inch. If that makes any sense.
I think I would phrase it that doubling the power results in a 3db increase.
But more important is that power and volume are not the same thing. So there is no contradiction between what I said and what you just said.
Because of the way our ears and brains work, it takes a lot more than twice the power to result in twice the loudness. That's a reason, maybe the whole reason, that Bels and decibels were defined.
If we heard sound in a linear way, we could have measured it using ergs, or dynes, or watts, I'm not sure what, but one of the already existing or newly created measures for power.
My friend suggested Consumers Reports, but she was guessing. She didn't actually know if they rated for quietness.
on 8/10/2007 4:07 PM mm said the following:
They do.
I'm using the August issue as a guide. It happened to come out at the right time.
on 8/10/2007 4:15 PM Jud McCranie said the following:
You can subscribe to the complete Consumer Reports testing results at their website. $26.00 for one year, or $5.95 per month. If you are a subscriber to the magazine the annual cost is $19.00. It is more comprehensive than the magazine in that you can search for previous testing and results.
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