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Comment by rapfaria | Hacker News Reader

What do folks do to prevent these? Set a hard-limit, say 20% of maximum volume? Are there software that help on this?

Set a reasonable limit, which will vary wildly based on the hardware and software involved.

I'm sure there's companies out there selling high-tech solutions, but you already come equipped with a pair of incredibly sensitive instruments attached to your head. A comfortable listening volume is a comfortable speaking volume, so pop an earbud out and talk to yourself! If you feel you'd need to raise your voice to be heard over your game/music, it's too loud for extended listening.

Take breaks, and if it hurts at any point, take a long break. Video games have lots of small, quick and sharp sounds (gunshots and such), and in a competitive environment, you probably want to have the volume high enough to hear footsteps from far away, but that'll also make all the "bad" sounds very loud.

That brings to mind automatic gain control. It seems like there could be a market for headphones that have their own AGC to prevent a computer or music player from overriding such things. Perhaps a button to switch to AGC Normal, AGC Safe, AGC disabled? Maybe even default to AGC Safe, so one could crank up a game to where they can easily hear footsteps but then a 50 BMG next to the head would be the same volume. AGC Disabled to bring back the dynamic range of music that has a known loudness. Or perhaps it's a silly idea.

[Edit] Per liminalsunset I should be referring to this as Dynamic Range Compression or DRC

This isn't a bad idea at all! Typically, this technique is actually known as dynamic range compression (DRC), which is a form of AGC and a technique for reducing the difference between quiet and loud sounds [by reducing the volume of sudden loud sounds]. Many computer monitors already do a version of this for vision (Black Equalizer, etc). Many audio drivers and audio accessibility features include some form of this, including iOS/(macOS?)[1] and plugins are available for other platforms. On iOS there is also a feature specifically that automatically turns down only audio that exceeds a user chosen safe decibel limit. AirPods are capable of measuring their dB output live, which can be monitored in Apple Health. [2]

[1]https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT211218

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/ipad/ipade8c21895/ipad...

This technique is called Dynamic Range Compression and has been used (abused?) by the music industry for the last century. You're right though, weird that I don't tend to think of it on the device side. One issue I've run into is that it's surprisingly hard to hijack your computers outgoing audio stream for processing. OS level audio routings honestly sucks.

The better place to implement this (in my opinion) is in the games themselves. I've seen a few games (wish I remembered which) recently that offered a few choices in their audio settings so that you can request reduced range for more consistency in noisy listening conditions or full dynamics for people with nicer setups.

On Windows, Equalizer APO can be used for this — it has the capability to apply any VST across the computer's outgoing audio stream, including compressors.

How do various anti-cheat technologies work with that? One could imagine that developers would see that as tampering with the "native experience", if some people use limiters/compressors/filters and similar.

The ideal method would be a compressor. You want quiet sounds relatively louder, and loud sounds relatively more quiet.

As far as software goes, that's where it gets tricky.

These exist for the military and hunters. The ones I saw long ago were probably hard/firmware based. SW must be possible but you’ll get artifacts.

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