A decibel is a ratio, not a quantity — which is why a number on its own tells you nothing and the letters after it tell you everything. Where the unit came from, why it is logarithmic, and why gain stages add.
The decibel confuses more people than anything else in audio, and the reason is a single misunderstanding at the start: it looks like a unit and it is not one. A metre is a unit. A kilogram is a unit. A decibel is a ratio — it describes how much bigger or smaller one thing is than another, and on its own it carries no information whatsoever.
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