I had noticed a decibel meter showing up on the Pigscreen during the game but wasn’t sure if that was actually registering sound. I guess it was. UA says the crowd got up to 110.5 decibels when Wise and Ledbetter got the fourth quarter sack. That’s louder than a car horn from 3 feet away, or a steel mill, or screaming in someone’s ear. Not quite up to Seattle/KC levels of loud, but we don’t have the north end enclosed yet. Anyway, check it out:
I would be really curious to know how loud it got when Mallett threw to Ronnie Wingo on the second play of the 2010 Bama game. That one literally hurt my ears. I am guessing that pushed 130 decibels, maybe more. The loudest recorded college crowd was at UWash, which also has a canopy over the sideline seats holding in the noise (also why the Seattle NFL stadium is so loud) of about 135 dB. Maybe we should look at a canopy…
One note about the science of measuring sound: Decibels are logarithmic. A jump from 100 to 110 decibels isn’t a 10% increase, it’s a 100% increase. So that sound at a UWash game was like six times louder than what we got Saturday.
I was at KC when they topped Seattle a few years back. It was loud enough that I had trouble hearing for a few days. Even when the offense had the ball, you couldn’t hear the people next to you when they were trying to say something.