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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it's the noise cancellation causing problems. I definitely hear a high-pitched noise from the noise cancellation feature and rarely use it at all specifically because of that, except very infrequently like on planes. Maybe the high frequency noise is damaging the ear drums at high frequencies?

But I can definitely say I do not have tinnitus despite wearing AirPod Maxes quite often.

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Ummmm. ANC attenuates certain frequencies and fails to attenuate other frequencies. Which you would end up hearing anyway if you weren’t wearing the headphones. So effectively the sound power reaching your ears didn’t change for those frequencies.

I have worked on ANC systems in automotive applications.

theoretically. it's never going to match the input exactly though and therefore it will generate noise of its own. it's conceivable that there would be less variation in this noise, due to quantized nature of the system that synthesizes the cancellation, and that a fixed synthesized signal for long durations could exhaust parts of the cochlea that are used to the high variability of natural sounds and/or trigger an adaptation in auditory cortex.

or the software is bad or the anc mic fails, and it generates a high pitched whine that causes short term tinnitus.

just spitballing because it's fun. would be interesting to analyze the frequency responses to benchtop and realistic scenarios for anc in modern earbuds.

also would be interesting to understand the psychophysical response to those behaviors!

Thank you. I would love for someone go down this rabbit hole and see what they find. Maybe it turns out the answer is "none of the above" but these feel like productive lines of inquiry.

> Ummmm

Serious question, because I see it so often: what are these fillers meant to achieve?

They are a attempt to replicate, in written form, the rhythm of conversation that is typically encountered when two or more people speak in person, face to face.

The "Ummmm" we see in the present example, expresses doubt in what was just said (written, really), and foreshadows that the statement to follow (from speaker #2) may be disagreeable to the other person (speaker #1).'

Similarly, it is not uncommon to find the word "Hmmm" as a preface to some statement. This expresses a notion of "I will need to think about this." But in some contexts, "Hmmm" can convey skepticism. In real-life conversation, people frequently exploit this ambiguity, as a clever way to signal that they are skeptical but will not state so out loud.

Replication of speech habits into text.

In this case, it signifies skepticism.

Shortcut to passive aggressiveness

It wasn’t meant to come across as passive aggressive. When I make a statement that contradicts the original post, I try to be mindful and human. Instead of saying ‘you’re blatantly wrong’ I am hoping to not come across as a rude guy on internet. I’ll probably explore other ways.

:) I would, because it came across as very sarcastic to me

Your ears are a complex system. Just like when your eyes think it's darker, your pupils dilate, your ears have a similar method of controlling how much sound gets to the sensitive bits.

It's possible that ANC convinces your ear to open up a bit more, leading to damage in the frequencies that it doesn't attenuate.

I wonder if the ANC is actually bringing out latent tinnitus that was already there, but we don't often experience sudden transitions to and from silence where tinnitus becomes most notable.

There's evidence that in urban environments street noise is loud enough to cause hearing loss over time. Millennials or younger have basically worn headphones their whole lives as well, and only recently have devices started alerting for dangerous exposure. If you've listened to music or a podcast on a plane or the bus with earbuds then the volume would have been at dangerous levels.

I don't want to imply ANC may not cause tinnitus (this should be explored), but I suspect the reason people feel it wares off also has to do with the brain acclimating to background noise again.

I'm convinced that this is it. The DSPs and speakers aren't fast enough to instantly create a counterwave, so I guess sometimes it will amplify the external sound, even in some kind of distorted manner since even the amplification-component won't be identical to the incoming external sound.

Why would this be specific to AirPods? I've never heard of Bose-induced tinnitus, and if it were a thing you'd think it would be well known by now.

I was looking for this comment - I have a different ANC headphone, and I definitely noticed that it puts a new kind of pressure on my ears. Not often, but only when the ANC is activated, and when I have been using it for an extended time. No tinnitus here either, just something I noticed.

I also don't have tinnitus, and like you don't use noise cancellation much at all (planes being just about the only time). I find the Maxes sound very good in normal mode and block out a lot of noise on their own. But these noise cancellation modes could be a cause for concern.

Yes. There's been suggestions from multiple papers that exactly this is the case. Granted, "you get what you search for" on the internet, but I think you'll agree that search results for this are more than that.

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