Noise is everywhere–annoying, tiring and sometimes painful. Since the early days of aviation, when a roaring, clattering engine sat on a wooden frame close to the pilot, and the wind whistled through the wire bracing like a banshee chorus, engineers have sought to make the process of manned flight less noisy. And they have succeeded, to a degree.
In the modern business jet cabin, sound expressed in the overall A-weighted filter scale of measurement, or dBA, has been reduced to somewhere in the 60- to 70-dBA range, higher in some parts of the cabin and lower in others, and differing from one aircraft to another. It is far better than in decades past, but cabin noise remains an annoying and often intrusive barrier to human conversation, which is normally conducted in the 55- to 70-dBA range. The study of acoustics is not magic. It’s a science–perhaps not an exact science, but a science nonetheless.
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