Newcomers to the field of acoustics are often overwhelmed by the number of different level metrics used to characterize environmental and community noise. To make matters worse, almost all of these metrics are abbreviated with capital Ls and reported in units of decibels. The purpose of this article is to help distinguish between three of these Ls: L_peak, L_max, and L_min. Of the three, L_peak is the easiest to understand, so we’ll start there.

L_peak

L_peak stands for peak level. The peak ...