Also, pro-parenting tip: ANC earbuds without even playing anything are effectively a "turn down the volume" button on your kids screaming!
Uh-oh...
> ANC earbuds without even playing anything are effectively a "turn down the volume" button on your kids screaming!
That is more of a "non-parenting tip", really. The solution to screaming children is to tell them to tone it down a bit, no to isolate yourself from them. That way they not only learn something but also interact with you instead of considering you to be part of the furniture.
Source: my two daughters who can be quite noisy at times. Sometimes this is fine but they know to tone it down when they're in company of others.
Then I remodeled my kitchen with a friend who had a new pair of AirPod Pros. While we were sawing countless plywood boards, I had foam in my ears, he listened to podcasts; while we were sanding for hours, he listened to music. Etc.
Now I see ANC earbuds less as a comfort thing than a tool: a flexible and pocketable solution to all kinds of things that come up (ambulances, jackhammers, overhead trains). Swiss Army knives for ears.
I’m with the author on this, ANC is too fatiguing to my ears to use. Passive noise reduction is much better.
For a noisy work environment like that, I would strongly recommend you get real hearing protection with built-in headphones. I suggested Etymotic in-ear headphones elsewhere, but there are also ones that are based on over-the-ear hearing protection like is more commonly used on construction sites.
https://ehs.umass.edu/sites/default/files/Noise-Cancelling%2...
The only generally accepted way in which they might protect your hearing is by reducing the urge to crank the volume on your music too high in an effort to drown out environmental noise.
The difference matters. AirPods and similar devices are engineered to reduce the loudness of the sound. But hearing damage is caused by intensity, which is not the same thing. One is about how the sound is perceived, and the other is about the amount of energy being carried by the sound waves. It is possible to reduce a noise's loudness without reducing its intensity.
The principle of ANC is straightforward and the textbook definition doesn't involve any psychoacoustic tricks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control. You haven't given any reason to think AirPods are doing something fundamentally different.
I didn't ask to dig any deeper. I don't need to understand every grotty little detail of the reasoning behind my doctor's advice. I trust her to know what she's talking about when the subject is her core area of expertise.
What I do know is that it seems plausible to me. The perception of loudness is a product of a fairly complex system that involves both neural filters and sensing organs that work a very specific way, and a lot of that happens on the opposite side of the spot where the actual damage occurs in noise-induced hearing loss. I would guess that the problem is that any failure in the ANC to get the phase just right results in a waveform that's been modified such that it reduces the noise's detectability by the cochlea much more than it reduces the actual energy being carried?
That said, I would suggest you're trying to put the burden of proof on the wrong proposition. Given that AirPods are not being sold as hearing protection, and have not been tested by the EPA, one would think that we the default hypothesis should be that they are not adequate hearing protection. Especially since we're talking about people's health here. So perhaps you can come up with a study demonstrating that consumer-grade ANC such as AirPods (we have to assume that the device in the paper you linked above may not function comparably to popular consumer devices, so the study's findings may not be relevant here) can be safely used as protection from occupational noise?
My issue is that most of the loud noises I am trying to block out are non-repeating. ANC is great for rhythmic sounds, but terrible for everything else. A blacksmith friend of mine hates ANC.
My issue now is that the newer Samsung buds all are open, to allow for better ANC. This rules them out for my use case.