Relationship between sound power level and sound pressure level outside of laboratories
Theodore John Schultz · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1977
This brief paper does not try to settle the current dispute over the question whether the sound output of mechanical devices is better expressed in terms of sound power level or sound pressure level. Instead, it considers the relationship between these quantities in spaces which have not been specifically designed to be reverberation rooms, and concludes that, once we have measured the noise of a piece of equipment, no matter whether in terms of the sound power level or the sound pressure level, we had better be cautious in how we use the measured data.