Legal Decibel Emissions for a Car Exhaust
A deep sense of satisfaction slips through your vibrating bones when your exhaust system lets rip , but that happy grin rapidly drops away when you enter a residential district. Clearly, your car exhaust is generating too much noise. It’s breaking some local ordinance and upsetting your neighbours. Let’s pacify that street full of howling dogs and angry residents by making sure your exhaust noise level is street legal. Gain Some Noise Perspective The decibel scale measures sound intensity. The loudness of the sound is calibrated across a logarithmic scale, but we don’t really need to know the mathematics behind the science. Suffice to say, we have a measurement system for sound intensity, and we also have several reference points that illustrate key points on that chart. If you’re listening to a regular conversation, you’re experiencing 60-dB (decibels) of loudness. A crowded party ramps that figure up to 70-dB. It’s at this point that you really recognize the sound as an irrit...