Is there a hidden cost to noise cancelling? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a hidden cost to noise cancelling?

theguardian.com

25 pointsbookofjoe13 comments

As the article mentions, I can tell you that there is a stark divide between people who flew airplanes / helicopters in the civilian world before 1990 and after 1990, when noise cancelling headphones became prevalent.

Old guard can't hear anything, and has weird preferences for what small airplanes are 'good' or 'bad', whereas the younger crowd doesn't.

I personally owned a small airplane a few years ago that never made it as a viable product and wound up bankrupt, but for the remaining fleet still flying around and needing parts support. The company that made them went bankrupt in the late 1990s / early 2000s and one of the biggest knocks against it was how loud it was inside the cabin.

But with noise cancelling headphones all of that disappears and it's really a wonderful, comfortable little bird, and has had a resurgence in popularity as noise cancelling headphones became ubiquitous.

Even when I owned one I had no idea how loud it was inside the cabin until I inadvertently sat on the noise cancelling on/off switch on the cord of my headset one day and suddenly couldn't understand what the air traffic controller was saying, lol.

If a link is established, would it mean that workers who get tinnitus correlated with wearing noise canceling headphones all day to focus in “open office” environments might have standing to claim damages/recompense under OSHA?

"Multiple studies have shown that constant earplug wearing, day and night, over just one week is enough to result in new-onset tinnitus"

just an anecdote, but a few years ago i was wearing earplugs (regular non-noise cancelling) for really long hours every day and i had to stop because it was making my tinnitus really bad. ive been using over ear headphones for a while now and they don't seem to set off my tinnitus in the same way

Same here. I wonder if it’s something with the audio they emit or more related to the physical stimulation of the ear (by having something plugged into it).

Mine were AirPods Pro, incidentally there’s quite a lot of reports of this phenomenon with them (which might be coincidence of course considering their popularity).

> I wonder if it’s something with the audio they emit or more related to the physical stimulation of the ear

I doubt it's the audio they emit, as they don't really emit any audio (when only cancelling noise). The "trick" with ANC is that it cancels out the sound wave that would otherwise be noise.

One of the theories around tinnitus is that some of the auditory nerves become "overexcited", causing them to fire more frequently, which essentially leads to your brain "amplifying" the sound, and the tinnitus is a byproduct of this amplification. Much like speakers will "hiss" if you turn on the amplifier without any music playing. The underlying reason for the amplification happening in the first place is usually mild hearing loss.

That also somewhat explains why (my) tinnitus is usually worse in quiet surroundings (again back to the amplifier analogy).

in any case, that's how my MD described it to me. I have mild tinnitus, probably caused by years of riding a motorbike without earplugs in.

Suggestions exist that the tiny hairs inside our ears are used for sensing the sound, low cysteine levels in normal hair is associated with brittle hair[1] Zinc also binds to cysteine to make structures in the body, like zinc fingers, and binds with histidine for myleoid cells like mast cells and remylination of the nervous system.

so are low zinc, cysteine and histidine levels a factor for tinnitus?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1176799/

The article missed the point that the type of noise we are currently exposed to (traffic, airplanes, construction) is actually harmful to our health. Noise cancelling is a welcome respite from the sensory overstimulation of a modern city and if they prove to be harmful too the alternative would be to work towards a quieter world. Electric vehicles are a welcome step in that direction

> Electric vehicles are a welcome step in that direction

I suppose so, but it's also a clear hazard to pedestrians like me. If a speeding car can sneak up on anyone without making a noise, I say that's more of a bug than a feature.

At higher speeds, most of the noise a car makes comes from its tires, not its engine, so at least in that case, electric cars are also noisy. That doesn't help at low speeds, though.

Electric vehicles must produce sound by law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sound...

The interesting bit of the article is the rise of specific forms of tinnitus as a result of using these devices, and some brain compensatory behaviour due to changes in auditory input.

Since I have acquired tinnitus anyway ("The Who", twice, glasgow 1970s) I can't say it's affected me.

Good noise cancelling phones made a 23 year longhaul flight requiring job much more tenable. Most of the business class carriers now provide very high quality ones, I still sometimes prefer my own (and of course need them in the cheap seats)

I need some kind of noise cancellation. My hearing is going and pretty quickly. Background noises are annoying and people seem louder since lockdown.

I love being in my quiet space with my noise canceling headphones.

So do I wear the bose headphones or not? I wear them all the time while working. I guess there is a chance of tinnitus?

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