Rand Stats

The uploading author of cpan:ALLSOPP does not match the META author of github:allsopp.

Operator::dB

cpan:ALLSOPP

Operator::dB

Operator to support decibel (dB) arithmetic.

use Operator::dB;

put 100 + 3dB;
# 199.52623149688796

put 100 - 3dB;
# 50.11872336272723

put 10dB + 20dB;
# 20.413927dB

Description

The interface tries to be intuitive while avoiding ambiguity. For example, the following makes sense (adding 3dB is approximately equivalent to doubling).

10 + 3dB
# 19.952623149688794

But the following doesn't make sense. It could represent either 13dB or 10.8dB (i.e. 3dB + 10dB).

3dB + 10 # DOESN'T WORK!

All supported operations are discussed in the following subsections.

Addition and subtraction on numbers

Adding or subtracting decibel values to and from numbers (of Numeric type) scales the number by the corresponding decibel gain:

put 100 + 3dB;
# 199.52623149688796

put 100 - 3dB;
# 50.11872336272723

Addition and subtraction on decibels

Decibels can be added to, or subtracted from, each other.

This type of operation returns an Operator::dB::Decibel wrapper object:

my $foo = 3dB + 2dB - 1dB;
# Operator::dB::Decibel.new(x => 10, y => 0.365...)

You can get the decibel value itself with .dB:

$foo.dB;
# 3.6571819272302735

Or by stringification:

"The gain is: $foo";
# The gain is: 3.657182dB

Or by defining your own format with .fmt:

$foo.fmt("%.1f dB(A)");
# 3.7 dB(A)

Caveats

This package exports overloads to built-in operators, which is potentially reckless. But the operator signatures all contain at least one Operator::dB::Decibel object (which is not built-in), so it should be fine!

The Num method is not implemented on the wrapper class, so many built-in numerical operations don't work, e.g. 1dB * 1. This is a necessary limitation because decibel arithmetic is only semantically valid for addition and subtraction AFAIK.

See also