Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: decibels, noise, canceling | Themes: Audio/Video Players
15. Melting Brains? Hardly.
Realistically, there is no health risk posed by today’s PCs. The FCC guidelines exist to guard against electromagnetic interference, but this interference doesn’t mess with your brain or your cells. It messes with other electronics devices. About the worst you could expect to happen is some noise in the FM reception of a nearby radio. In extreme cases, EMI could mess up the data stream in a weakly shielded electronics device. But that’s it. From a health perspective, this is absolutely a false myth.
What about laptops blanketing your nether regions with radiation for hours on end? True enough, we did not test for this, but the same emission guidelines apply to laptops as desktops. The one and only potential health risk I was able to discover through research on the subject applied to men, specifically their sperm. It’s well-documented that prolonged elevated temperatures can damage sperm counts and motility. So prolonged usage of a laptop actually on a man’s lap could feasibly do harm to his little swimmers. But then we hit the logical question of whether a guy spending that much time on his laptop actually needs those sperm, if you take my meaning. I’ll leave this research for somebody else.
I totally expect there are a few ultra-paranoid health freaks out there who may want to convince the world that boogly rays are being emitted by computers. Boogly rays can not only melt your hippocampus, they will also drain your bank account, melt the polar caps, and (once a critical mass of boogly radiation blankets the Earth) act as a homing beacon for hostile alien invaders. The only reason the rest of us aren’t aware of the terrifying boogly ray threat is because we haven’t started measuring for it. Well, them’s the breaks. Show me some solid studies to the contrary and I’ll be happy to listen.
Until next time, dear readers, beware the booglies...and be like forums poster Honis, who suggested the awesome idea to check out magnetic emission dangers of windowed cases. Email or post your suggestions for future myths—we really do listen!
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One word: Google.
Gosh, we're not the general public... we're nerds
correction, physical pain doesn't set in at 130db, feeling sets in at about 130 db, so that bass that you feel thumping is above 130db, but since volume is a function of decibels and frequency it is very quiet. but children wailing is very high pitched so them at 80 db is significantly louder than the bass in your car. if you want to learn more than just do some more googling around. try searching "volume"
A clarification on ANC theory. There is no "anti-noise" generated. Ambient sounds strike the speaker cone moving it. Essentially the ANC signal applied to the diaphragm resists this motion of the cone, holding it still. Without movement the sound energy is dissipated as heat on the back surface of the cone. It is not canceled out in the classic sense, the compression and rarefaction of sound waves are mechanically destroyed.
One more really simple thing to add here. Put some really high-quality foam earplugs in your ear canal AND use your ANC headphones. This is what I do when I fly (Bose QC2's and custom-fit plugs). You've got to have enough sound without distortion in your headphones to overcome the attenuation of the plugs but for the most part their response curve is flat (if not a bit high on the low end). So your tinny-sounding earphones are actually going to have a bit more bass overall.
I've also been known to wear my Shure earbuds under my QC2's but they stick out far enough that I have to be careful not to touch them against the inside of the headphones. The nice bit is that even sitting in the back of an MD-80 I've only got to put my iPod at about 25% volume to hear every detail.
Shures with QC2 sounds like Heaven...assuming Heaven is a very quiet place. :-)
Regarding joeman42's comment, first, I'm going to say that I am definitely not a sound engineer nor any kind of other acoustic specialist, so the depth of my understanding may need improvement. However, the description I gave of ANC fits every description of the technology I've been exposed to over the years. For example, check this paper: http://doctord.dyndns.org:8000/Pubs/POTENT.htm, which describes the ANC process like so: "the noise is modeled to produce an anti-noise waveform at the output speaker." Given this guy's title as Vice President of R&D for Noise Cancellation Technologies, Inc. and the fact that this paper appeared in an IEEE publication, I'm pretty confident of the source.
Another very entertaining article from you.
“(Once again, you can tell something about the quality of a site’s content by the frequency of typos and errors in its text.)”
You might want to change that line before someone of bestofmedia knocks on your door and gives you a kick in the nuts when you open.
Another very entertaining article from you.“(Once again, you can tell something about the quality of a site’s content by the frequency of typos and errors in its text.)”You might want to change that line before someone of bestofmedia knocks on your door and gives you a kick in the nuts when you open.
Yeah, I can add that to the list of reasons I've given them. ;-) But really, you can tell the difference between a rushed schedule and borderline illiteracy or outright disregard for quality. If I've got to take one in the giggleberries for saying that Web sites in general need better quality control, so be it, but I think Bestof has a good crew that does good work. I'd rather have a few typos and solid reporting from people who care about the readers' best interests than a lot of the over-polished, under-thought dreck common in the field.
Thanks for the kind words.
Interesting article
I have hearing loss. I was born since birth, and therefore, I can't use headphones or go to rock concerts, lest I risk damage to my ears. I have never used an i Pod for more than a few minutes, and I'm glad.
I'm 15 years old, and I estimate that by the time I'm 40, my generation will have worse hearing than me. I'll be laughing "I HAD hearing loss BEFORE it was POPULAR!"
I should hope so.