I believe there was some enhancement over the past few versions that causes the 0 volume to appear as a thicker line. When a title is inserted automatically into a new recording, it fattens the original 0db line and my OCD won’t have it. I drag the height of the recording a tiny bit down (or up) to resize and to show 0db as a flat line, indicating no noise.
I don’t know about the thickness of the line but you don’t have enough video resolution to show a “small” amount of noise.
If you right-click on the scale to the left of the waveform you can zoom-in. It gets a little screwy because you loose the negative half of the waveform (and +1.0 goes out-of-view) but it might help with what you’re trying to do.
There is also a logarithmic view that “expands” the quiet parts. (Decibels are logarithmic.)
And 0dBFS is the “digital maximum” so digital dB levels are normally negative.
The zero to plus/minus one scale is not decibels. It’s a normalized linear numerical scale that can be treated as 0-100%.
A truly-silent file is a flat-line at zero and is minus infinity dB, with a numerical value of zero. (A totally silent digital file is a file full of zeros.)
Noise usually becomes audible at around -60dB which is 1/1000th of full scale. …Too small to see.
P.S.
Decibels are relative. For acoustic loudness in the air (SPL = Sound Pressure Level) The 0 dB SPL reference is approximately the quietest sound that can be heard and SPL levels are positive. There isn’t a standard calibration between digital and acoustic levels but there is a direct correlation… If you lower the digital level by 3dB (or 3dB more negative) the SPL loudness also goes down by 3dB.
There are other dB references for electrical & radio signals.
All true I’m sure, just wanted that line to be flat when there is zero noise coming through. It’s the auto-title that’s bumping it, which happened in a somewhat recent release. Its just a sizing issue for the default view.
Thanks for the reply. 