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Comment by snakeyjake | Hacker News Reader

>The only headphone tech that I was aware of or that I'd ever really considered

I guess I'm old now because this style of headphone was present on every model of passenger aircraft in the sky when I was a young adult.

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When I was a kid, I once brought a stethoscope with me on the airplane so that I could watch the movie for free. (Or rather listen to it.) I pulled off the heart-listening cup part of the stethoscope and inserted beverage straws into the rubber tubing. Then I put one straw into each of the two little holes in the armrest.

It worked perfectly! Until a stewardess caught me and made me stop.

Sounds ingenious but I don’t quite follow the story. Why would a stewardess make you stop? Was there some system where you had to pay for headphones separately to hear a movie? I’m pretty sure all I remember are headrests having standard 1/8” audio jacks.

Yes, they would charge for headphones to watch the movie. The movie (there was only one, or maybe two on a long international flight) was played on CRT monitors mounted on the ceiling of each cabin section.

That was 20+ years ago, before flat panel screens in every headrest that could tune into one of a couple dozen looping channels, and long, long before you could watch anything at any time from a huge library.

You skipped too far into the future with the "huge library" bit. Fixed:

"long, long before you could watch [Season 2, Episodes 4 - 6 of Comedy Central Roast]."

Before that, they actually ran film projectors in some planes, using a variety of half-baked schemes.[0] Wild times!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-flight_entertainment#Histor...

No, they had holes that sounds came out of and the headphones were just long tubes plugged into the hole to convey the sound to your ear. Like the article. They'd rent the headphones to you.

I used to just pull the armrest up next to my ear and listen directly out of the hole.

I would've moved you up to First Class for being so inventive.

Thus sparking the engineer’s natural distrust of authority figures.

I've never heard this before! When I started flying it was just the 2 mono jacks that you still see on planes that haven't been updated (always wondered why it wasn't just a stereo jack)

Pretty surprising to hear there's air/sound tubes rigged on to every seat on a plane.

Seems like the sound tubes ended in the 70's: https://apex.aero/articles/sound-tube-surprising-history-air...

the inventing company is still around

https://avidproducts.com/2023/12/08/celebrating-70-years-of-...

apparently the speaker was in the armrest.

I flew some overseas trips on Delta 767s in the late 1990s that still had the tube headphones. I was pretty intrigued by the concept, you could hold your hand up to the tube holes in the arm rest and hear the music echo off your hand.

Either on the headphones themselves or in the little overwrap bag there was a note to leave them on the aircraft when you deplane, because they (obviously) wouldn’t work elsewhere.

> Seems like the sound tubes ended in the 70's

I was still encountering them in the early '90s, although by that time they had become uncommon.

I guess the article is written from the perspective of AVID: once electronic headphones became cheap enough, they didn't sell any more pneumatic systems for airlines - but the last planes equipped with pneumatic systems in the late 70s/early 80s still flew (unrefurbished) until the 90s.

> (always wondered why it wasn't just a stereo jack)

Either because they didn’t want you to take their headphones from the plane, or so they could charge for use because you couldn’t just plug in your Walkman headphones.

Or both.

> Seems like the sound tubes ended in the 70

I'm 40-ish, and I remember them as a child, so they were definitely still kicking around in the mid to late 80s, most likely on KLM and Pan Am, that were the airlines of my childhood.

They definitely were still a thing into the 90s

In my "maybe I'll need it some day" pile, I still have the two-mono-plugs to one stereo jack adapter I bought at Radio Shack so I could stick it to The Man. I think I only used it half a dozen times.

I bought a BLE wireless headset last year that came with one :-) No idea when I would ever need it!

The only passenger aircraft I've ever encountered this on in 39 years of flying regularly were domestic US flights up until ~2000 or so. To the point where it's still a story I tell about the ridiculous levels of penny-pinching of US airlines (United wanted $5 to rent a plastic tube to let you listen to the inflight entertainment, with no way to plug in your own).

It was united that I most recently encountered this too. It was 2005ish and they flew a 747 with pull down theatre screens and pneumatic headphones on an australia-us flight.

Not sure if that was the backup plane or they were just desperately holding out to upgrade the fleet.

Having said that anyone that flew just over 30 years ago would have likely used pneumatic headphones and watched on a shared pulled down theatre screen. It was the norm not that long ago.

Shared screens was the norm in Europe too, but pneumatic headphones is something I've never seen on a European carrier at all - not at all ruling out some might use them, after all, there are many of them and I've by no means flown them all. I wonder, though if it's another case of tech that may have been skipped by airlines that e.g. didn't add inflight entertainment as early as others and so got to "skip ahead" a generation. Most of the European airlines I'd have flown with while younger would have predominantly flown short-haul flight where inflight entertainment might have not been a priority until fairly recently.

I haven't seen a inflight entertainment console in a few years of flying. There's a trend for some carriers in the US to remove them since most passengers would rather use their own tablet, phone, or laptop with much higher quality; and the carrier can sell them wifi.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2019/10/13...

I've recently been on a plane which had some kind of small phone/tablet mount on the back of the headrests so that you could actually pull it down and put your phone/tablet on it to watch a movie. Great UX, because everybody is on their own devices all the time anyway.

I've also don't remember seeing them in Europe when flying as a child during the 1990s. Yes, there were shared CRTs every 10-15 rows or so, but the earphones were your run-of-the-mill electric earphones, usually with a two prong connector.

I have to add these were all international flights (this was mostly pre-Schengen, and in any case I don't believe I've taken a flight between Schengen Area countries until 2023), so I'm not sure if shorter distance flights would have been different. The mid-distance flights (> 2.5 hours) I've taken would generally have in-flight entertainment if it wasn't a budget option. Some of the cheaper flights had no screens (or maybe they had ones, but didn't want to pay for the movie) and still had earphones slots connect to a set of inflight radio stations (that were also available when there was a movie being played, as an alternative).

So yes, it was an arguably "superior" experience with selectable audio, volume buttons and rather crappy drivers directly inside the earphones.

Same experience here, never seen a "tube" type headphone on any European airline, but several carriers used weird headphone plugs so they could still sell you headphones.

I guess the airlines went with whatever was cheaper? For a while, pneumatic headphones (in a system with 100+ headphones) probably were cheaper overall than electronic ones, but with the constant decrease of electronics prices, by the 1990s they probably were only still there for legacy reasons...

I remember putting my ear up to the little holes and faintly hearing the audio even without anything plugged in.

Twelve channels of the weirdest and/or lamest music you'd ever heard in your life, all in a faint, tinny form that makes AM radio sound audiophile quality.

And, if you're lucky on a longer flight, the audio to a film selected to be inoffensive to everyone on the aircraft.

Sometimes in sync!

Yeah, on one armrest you had the sound-tube headphone "jack" and the other armrest had an ash tray. Wild times.

Does anyone know why old aeroplanes used the plastic tube style of headphones, instead of copper wired? From the blog post, it makes very good sense why the MRI headphones are necessary in that setting.

Edit:

From this URL: https://avidproducts.com/2023/12/08/celebrating-70-years-of-...

This type of headphones are called pneumatic headphones.

Spitballing:

Cost: one speaker and tubes was probably cheaper than 200.

Weight: old headphones were chunky, see above.

Comfort: not wearing giant chunky headphones you weren't accustomed to might have been preferable

Breakability: pneumatic headphones were harder to break, cheaper to replace

Stealability: passengers would have no reason to steal the headphones, and if they did it was cheap to replace.

All of these go away as proper headphones get increasingly small and cheap.

> Cost: one speaker and tubes was probably cheaper than 200.

I'm pretty sure there were 2 speakers in each arm rest. I think it's more about them being harder to break and cheaper to replace. When I flew on an airline that used them, they came clean in a sealed bag. They may have been brand new, or at least cleaned and sterilised. Electronic headphones are unlikely to be as cleanable.

Also possibly sanitation: You can probably throw the pneumatic tube headphones into boiling water without worrying about breaking any electronics.

I'm thinking I'm old too because I grew up with telephones that had crystal earphones connected with non-magnetic copper wire.

Yes— there was a time where the free headphones were this style and you could bring your own electrically conductive headphones (with the right adapter, since it had separate RTS jacks for left and right channels) to enjoy a slightly better and louder sound quality

This is certainly one of those things that has changed. I remember them too. A different era in flying.

I recall those being the standard for publci headphones everywhere, on planes, busses and hospitals

Hmm I can't recall my earliest flights (late 80s) but rapidly we had normal audio jacks

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