Talk:Gain (electronics)

message: [ EDIT -- The previous paragraph doesn't make sense. In any context where it isn't clear whether it is voltage or power
gain that is being referred to, the statement "Gain = 20 dB"
is ambiguous. It could mean either "V2/V1 = 10 ,
P2/P1 = 100" or
"V2/V1 = 100 ,
P2/P1 = 10000".
If what was meant was "unless stated otherwise, it's assumed
that gain refers to power rather than voltage", then that's
what should have been said. 
Edit to Edit - The original statement is correct because a 10x voltage increase is equivalent to a 100x power increase, and both a 10x voltage increase and a 100x power increase correspond to a gain of 20 dB. Therefore, it is uneccessary to specify if the gain refers to a power increase or a voltage increase as the two are related.  ]
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.165.235.73 (talk • contribs) 05:46, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ambiguity 

message: This article sucks. It has no preamble to describe what gain is. Maybe you electricians understand it, but it's useless to others. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.97.234.72 (talk) 19:44, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. It's apparently the result of editors trying to out-math each other. I went here from a link regarding high gain as a distinctive part of the band Dinosaur Jr.'s sound; I still have no idea what high gain sounds like, and I don't want to crunch equations to make sense of the article. Can someone with practical knowledge improve this article a bit? Vbdrummer0 02:40, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

text: It was deleted by a vandal. — Omegatron 22:07, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Huah? 

message: The example is very strange.
I think the answer is 20(dB)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.87.130.18 (talk • contribs) 06:35, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ahem. I was wondering when you would notice that. Sorry, my mistake. --Heron 18:32, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The example of GAIN 

message: I sometimes see references to gain being measured in units of resistance.  I admit to not understanding this, or whether there are only certain circumstances when this might be appropriate (e.g., transimpedance gain, which appears not to have its own article or mention in this one). My best guess is that it refers to a voltage gain per some input current current gain per some input voltage, per Ohm's law. Can any experts explain why gain might be measured in units of resistance, and under what condiitons it ought to be? Robert K S (talk) 15:00, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: A transimpedance amplifier is one that converts a current input to a voltage output.  The units of its gain, volts per ampere, is ohms. Dicklyon (talk) 17:48, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

text: After your strikeout and rewrite: the current out per voltage in is what you get from a transconductance amplifier.  Its gain is reciprocal ohms, mhos, or siemens. Dicklyon (talk) 17:55, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gain measured in ohms 

message: Gain is a mathematical concept, and this is an article about its APPLICATION.  can you move this to gain (electronics) or something, and leave the maths/signals here?  I'm trying to link in from runaway climate change and it doesn't make sense.Andrewjlockley (talk) 01:56, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know of it as a mathematical term, and there is no math page on the disambig. Are you talking about finance, compounding interest, something? And even accepting that there is something in mathematics called gain, I think you're wrong stating this as an application of it, because I don't think there's a specialized term for the log of a ratio. Awickert (talk) 02:10, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Please make less specific

message: There is plenty of usage of the seemingly contradictory term "input gain," presumably (?) as the OUTPUT of a preamp or whatever.  If gain is the increase in amplitude from input to output, how, without "cheating" like this, can there be an ill-named "input gain."  By failing to address this usage, even if it's gibberish, the article falls down on the job.  The same goes for the redundant term "output gain."  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.93.212.105 (talk) 14:30, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: In my work in live audio I see many people and manufacturers use the term "input gain" to refer to a passive attenuator—usually a potentiometer—that controls the amount of input signal sent to the preamp. In that case, input gain is not gain at all, it is attenuation prior to gain. Binksternet (talk) 16:24, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Search for oxymoronic "input gain" came up empty 

message: The article defines gain as "the mean ratio of the signal output of a system to the signal input of the same system". Therefore when talking about voltage gain, you would expect this to be G=Vout/Vin. The line "The term gain alone is ambiguous, and can refer to the ratio of output to input voltage, (voltage gain), ..." reinforces this idea. Below, under the voltage gain section, voltage gain is defined as G=(Vout/Vin)^2, which seems to contradict the definition of gain above. Therefore this seems to still be power gain even though it's in terms of voltage. I know this is the standard way of doing it, but maybe someone with more knowledge and experience could attempt to distinguish between the two using better names.
Edit: From the article here (http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_3/chpt_1/5.html), it states "Because the bel is fundamentally a unit of power gain or loss in a system, voltage or current gains and losses don't convert to bels or dB in quite the same way". It seems as if the concept of gain is different when expressing it as a dB number compared to just a ratio. In anycase, I think it should be reworded to make this all clearer.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.5.49.58 (talk) 06:06, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  More Ambiguity 

message: "...logarithms to the decibel base db=10^{1/10}=1.258925\ldots..." Is this really a thing? I'm not seeing any actual uses in reliable sources. SpinningSpark 13:33, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Decibel base logarithms 

message: Korn, your making a lot of unjustified claims in your edit summaries.  Guitar players are no more "regular people" than engineers.  There are tens of millions of both and the majority of the population can't do the work of either of them.  Your addition to the article is more about adding distortion than about gain per se.  It all it has to say on that subject directly is that preamplifier have gain controls.  Well so what.  In any case, you have provided no source indicating that this is a significant aspect of the topic of gain.  Unsourced material that has been removed should never be reinstated without a source.  I'd also draw your attention to the preamplifier article which currently says nothing about guitar preamps and does not (currently) recognise that non-linearity could ever be desirable. SpinningSpark 18:52, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you'll find that just about everyone can turn the knobs of an amp up and down. And since almost everyone listens to music, almost everyone is at least familiar with a guitar, its distortion, and thus the effects of gain in the amplifier. And the knob is labeled 'Gain'. There is no other example where a technical lay person is ever exposed to that concept. It thus provides a very plastic example of where gain is used and this is necessary in order to make this this overly technical article more comprehensible. And this is the reason it should be added here; not because it is important for the topic of gain from the viewpoint of an electrical engineer, but because it is important for an encyclopedic article addressed to the general public that this article make the topic as plastic and comprehensible as possible. This isn't a technical textbook. Furthermore, someone interested in knowing what "gain" does on a guitar amp would open this article, expecting to find an explanation. Thus the explanation belongs here; and it would even do so if it wasn't relevant to the article, even if only in the form of an explanation why it doesn't belong here, followed by a link to the correct place. But while a section about the gain switch on guitar amps would be belong here even if off topic for the article, it is not off topic either, as it is an example of the application of gain in amplifiers. In summary: The information belongs here and its removal decreases the quality of the article as an encyclopedic entry (as opposed to a technical piece), and thus it must be restored. I don't understand the rest of your post, did you remove that stuff because you don't actually believe that amps have a gain switch or that gain increases volume and distortion or are you just demanding sources for the sake of it? Korn (talk) 07:30, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Guitar amp gain