Such an effective trick when you experience it in person.
I remember visiting Goonhilly Earth Station as a boy (a collection of huge satellite dishes at the very tip of Cornwall, UK) and they had two small (~2 or 3m diameter) dishes facing each other on either side of the visitor centre. Completely blew my mind to hear someone whispering from all the way across the room!
Any building with a domed ceiling is ripe for interesting reflections as well. There's a story of US congress/senator during a negotiation offering to step to the other side of the room to allow his "colleagues" to confer in private knowingly as he could hear their conversations due to the reflections off the dome.
That's a great point. The piece was written from a very web-centric point of view. Even though I used analogue mixing desks as my jumping off point, I only really looked at decibels in a digital context.
In fact, all the digital VU meters I've looked at do account for positive values, so I definitely shouldn't have breezed over that aspect so quickly.
This varies from product to product; for example, meters in Pro Tools are labeled directly in DBFS[1]. So are Yamaha digital mixers (at least the LS9 and M7 - not sure about the newer ones).
On the other hand, the Allen & Heath GLD has its meters labeled differently, and I'm not quite sure what they're referenced to (they go up to +12). This can be a bit frustrating, since I never know how close I am to digital clipping, but in practice I aim to get everything around 0 dB on the meters and I have at least 12 dB of headroom.
Wikipedia has a neat list[2] of different analog reference levels for 0 dBFS.
I remember visiting Goonhilly Earth Station as a boy (a collection of huge satellite dishes at the very tip of Cornwall, UK) and they had two small (~2 or 3m diameter) dishes facing each other on either side of the visitor centre. Completely blew my mind to hear someone whispering from all the way across the room!