Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: decibels, noise, canceling | Themes: Audio/Video Players
9. We Can Rebuild It
Now it’s time for the ol’ snip-snip. Pick a spot at least two or three inches from the speaker and cut the wire. Carefully strip the insulation to reveal the two wire strands. There are many methods for splicing audio wires, and the one I’m showing you here ranks among the worst. Wire nuts are better but ungainly in a thin headphone wire. Soldering then taping is also better, but if you had a soldering gun, you wouldn’t have cut the wire in the first place. I went with the strip-twist-and tape approach. Again, it’s ugly, and I wasn’t going for style points in my taping job, but it worked.
At this point, plug in the speakers and give them a listen to confirm they still work properly. If so, place them at the back of each of your protection ear cups and place the foam padding back into the cups. You may need to use a spot of glue to keep the speakers from shifting around. Before you do this, you may also want to experiment with adding a layer of padding behind each speaker. The foam in your ear protection is roughly an inch thick, and that’s a lot of separation between the speaker and your outer ear compared to the original headphone design. The object is to get the speaker as close to your ear as possible without making the fit uncomfortable or impairing the noise canceling properties of the earmuffs. Also consider gluing part of the cable to the inside of the earcup to better secure the speaker and guard against damage in case of an accidental wire tug.
Keep in mind, the extra separation from ear to speaker will impact fidelity. My set clearly sounded thinner and higher as I lost a lot of bass across the extra distance. That said, the results were better than I expected. My $15 earmuffs cut out way more background noise than my Bose QuietComforts, and while the results may be a lot less stylish and may not sound as nice, I’d much rather use them in loud and/or rugged environments, especially for audiobooks.
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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.