What exactly does "decibels" mean

[saturated]

Ok when I was little I remember reading stuff about Who concerts and SSTs taking off and how many decibels it was

So yeah that's cool translation is oh yeah my chainsaw must be putting out a few decibels

So now I plug and chug through a few books 📚 and finding out that decibels are the result of logarithms and stuff       

So I look on Wikipedia and stuff and see that ok it's deci - Bell ok that makes sense

Then they used it to measure signal loss in miles of cable and stuff

But it seems to me there is much more to this as in ok decibels it not simply how loud something is 

And what about minus decibels 

Anyhow I'm off to try to learn more about this

[saturated]

Ok it looks like a negative decibel is less than one volt 

[Jazz P Bass]

A real good read here: https://www.hollyland.com/blog/tips/what-is-db

[joecool85]

Good info here in the forum as well: https://www.ssguitar.com/index.php?topic=1968.0

[saturated]

Thanks Mr Joe yes that (like other older threads) is a gold 🪙 mine 

Nice to hear from you 

[g1]

A real good read here: https://www.hollyland.com/blog/tips/what-is-db

It's good but there is a bit of confusion in the wording under 'calculating db'. 
Maybe nitpicking a bit, but where the examples talk about the speaker 'producing' power, I think it should say 'receiving' power. 
Any power that is actually produced by the speaker is acoustical power and can only be measured as db with an SPL meter.  So you already know the db and don't need to calculate it.
The power the speaker receives is the amplifier power, and the examples are correct for that (3db for doubling of amp power, 10db for 10 times more powerful amp).
These numbers and more examples probably come up again in the link joecool85 linked above, but I haven't finished re-reading it yet.