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I'm in the painful process of figuring out a nice eq and then discovering that it makes things too loud causing overdrive, so I need to convert my old +xdb to 0db and my old 0db to -ydb. This is not a straightforward conversion at all however due to the nature of decibels. So it begs the question:
Why does digital sound EQ use decibels instead of an amplitude multiplier?
You'd think a single floating point multiplier is way computationally cheaper to implement as well as easier to reason about.
Audio engineering uses decibels, because they are closer to how the human hearing perceives loudness: a double energy level is not twice as loud. A linear scale would require either a very large fader or be fiddly to tune towards the lower end.
If you're tuning your EQ by the numbers, you're doing it wrong. Use your ears! ;-)
If a small change in EQ is causing clipping, then the mix is way too hot. Reduce the overall gain by 6dB (at least) then apply your EQ changes.
