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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

I've had the idea of making clones of the most popular baby toys, but make the volume on them much, much lower. Exact same toy, much less volume. There you go, billion dollar idea. Run with it.

I don't get why all the children's toys need to be so loud. These things are held inches away by a child with presumably good hearing, yet they can be heard rooms away.

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Because when you can hear the toy going when you are several rooms away, you know the kid is still there and still playing with it. So you can be in the kitchen doing housework or whatever and hear it over clattering dishes etc.

When the noise stops, you know they're up to something they shouldn't :) Nothing more worrying as a parent of young kids than silence!

This is an interesting problem. I'm not an audiologist, but am sure that any noise above 75dB is harmful to an _adult's_ hearing. If the case can be made that infants and toddlers hearing is more sensitive and should be accounted for, then by leaving the toys so loud we're choosing function over the potential well-being of the toddler's hearing.

Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame has a video on how to quiet those toys. As it turns out, putting a resistor in line with the speaker is all you need.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VvJUWKu6khc

That's definitely the better solution, but I've found it much less work to just pop it apart and shove some kleenex or paper towel in there.

Or just let the battery run down.

As a parent of young kids, so much this. Many of these toys have a 3-way switch, Off, On-Volume Low, On-Volume High. The high setting is way too loud, and the low setting should be the high setting. And then there'd be a new low setting, lower than the original low.

My wife gifted her niece a Fisher Price folding wagon --- a couple of years later, when we had our first child, my brother-in-law reciprocated, buying _his_ niece/our daughter the same toy, and it quickly become a favourite of hers --- when they first had occasion to visit, we explained that it was her uncle who had gifted her the toy, so she gladly ran to her room to wheel it in and present it.

When she did so, my brother-in-law exclaimed, "Hey! That's not loud like the one we have!"

It seemed that it was so loud, that it was the subject of complaints, and a modification, so at least for some toys, noise reduction does happen.

A piece of clear sticky tape over the speaker grille usually works wonders.

I do this for piezo buzzers in a ported plastic housing. Tape silences them then you poke a hole with a tapered needle to control the volume to the desired level.

If someone misplaced their kid, the could simply start playing with their favourite toy and the kid would invariably come out.

It serves as a baby-retrieval device (BRD in the lingo).

It’s the other way round.

If you hear toy noises from the other room, you know where the baby is and what the baby is doing (and if the toy goes silent you go investigate).

Then again, grown up music is not immune to loudness wars - it shouldn’t be surprising to see the same attention grabbing mechanism in kids toys.

Noise-making toys are what you get for parents you hate. Can confirm nearly every one is way too loud.

Unfortunately electronics are so cheap that it can be a challenge to find the one similar toy out of ten on the shelf that isn’t a torture device.

Multiple kids, you give them lightsabers.

If you need to create a rift in the family, a drum set.

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