My stupid noise journey (2023) | Hacker News Reader

My stupid noise journey (2023)

dynomight.net

164 pointsustad190 comments

I have gone through a similar journey. In my case I believed the main problem was the neighbour next door. I got an extra layer of gypsum on the wall but turned out the noise comes from all sides. You can't win in such situation. Apartment buildings not built with noise isolation in mind should be illegal. Had to move out and went to live on a house that was absolutely silent. Well, as long as no one outside was mowing the lawn or something. Then, after 10 years, forgot the problem existed and decided to buy a new house near a busy road. What an idiot I am. Now going through all possibilities: already ordered an extra thick glass layer on my windows (it already has 3 layers), bought sound sound dampening panels (they do not do anything other than help a tiny amount with echo), sound dampening curtains (no effect, but at least stop the daylight well) and may even build a new fence and build glass walls around my balcony. But yeah, you can get used to traffic noise, I hear, and sound cancelling headphones solve the issue as long as I wear them (nearly all day anyway while I work)... it's getting better already after a couple of months. But stumping neighbours upstairs, your only defence really is headphones.

Can you plant bushes or shrubs between you and the road? Also if you add a water feature between you and the road it would add more constant background noise which would raise the baseline that noises would have to exceed before you could hear them.

My house is on the top of a hill. There is already some trees in front of it but it would be impossible to put several lines of them which would be needed to have any effect. I believe a good glass fence in front of the house will help a lot (together with the extra glass on the windows) by reflecting away most of the direct noise (but no idea if that will really work). I've already gone through lots of discussions about it, and you're right, a water feature is suggested often, I need to have a look at that.

> Can you plant bushes or shrubs between you and the road?

A thin strip of foliage does (basically) nothing to reduce noise propagation. Dense foliage (meaning you can’t see anything through it or move through it) gets you about 1 dB reduction for every 10 feet of thickness.

one decibel reduction at what reference pressure, and for which frequencies? I think you don't really know, or you would have specified.

as with most things relating to acoustics, the truth appears to be extremely complicated[0] and foliage has different effects at different frequencies including reflection (which may perceived as amplification in some scenarios)

0 https://sarantinosgeorge.com/2019/05/25/the-sound-absorption...

one decibel reduction at what reference pressure

The implication is that we're talking about sound pressure level in air, therefore the reference pressure would be 20 µPa.

and for which frequencies?

Again, the implication is annoyance and in that context I'm looking at overall SPL in A-weighted decibels (A-weighted decibels, while not perfect, is reliably correlated with annoyance)

I think you don't really know

For the record I'm an expert [0] in acoustics and noise control. It's how I've made my living for the past 30 years. So yes, I really know.

or you would have specified

I wasn't trying to get into a detailed discussion here, but I'm happy to oblige for anyone that wants to learn.

as with most things relating to acoustics, the truth appears to be extremely complicated

Absolutely. That said, if you look at the link, the author mentions 8-9 dB of excess attenuation with 50 meters of intervening foliage. That correlates to about 1 dB of attenuation per 18 feet of foliage. Again, that demonstrates that a strip of foliage would do almost nothing to reduce sound levels. And for what it's worth, the phonemea the author is describing is not "absorption" - it's a combination of partial cancellation of the reflected/direct wave interaction in porous soil (same reason why snow covered ground makes things quieter) and refraction from leaves/trunks (which is why the foliage needs to be _dense_, otherwise soon waves travel through the gaps and provide no reduction).

[0] By "expert" I mean a) studied the subject as an undergrad at MIT b) worked for 30 years in the field, producing or contributing to several hundred Environmental Impact Statements in the USA, authoring/co-authoring a couple dozen papers and presentations including one peer-reviewed study, c) authored or contributed to acoustics guidance manuals for the U.S. Federal Transit Administration, Federal Aviation Administration and National Academies, d) have been admitted as an expert witness in acoustics/noise control in criminal and civil trials in seven states, e) have certification demonstrating noise control expertise [1], f) been recognized by my peers as having contributed to the field, g) have had research referenced by international researchers

[1] https://www.inceusa.org/board-certification/about/ (sample test questions available at https://www.inceusa.org/pub/?id=6FBAEF10-B2FE-1D7D-AFCA-55D5... if you want to see the type of acoustics knowledge that is tested.

username checks out

There's really not much you can do short of building a room in a room. Your curtains and sound panels treat mid to high frequency but does nothing for the low frequencies of traffic that are penetrating your walls. You need a combination of mass and isolation to treat that.

as sibling comment says, low frequencies are problematic. See what they put around highways, usually a 2cm thick glass and/or stone wall. Maybe put a good fence as far as possible from house?

But then there are even lower frequencies. They go through everything - they are shaking it.. thunder/rumble. A huge mass works, but i don't know if it's only way.

For example, find a hill/ridge that has the city on one side, and nothing/wilderness on other side, go on top of it. You will hear whole city - mostly low freqs. Go a bit further in the "nothingness" direction. Then a bit more. And listen.. the feeling is like your ears are being unplugged - it's that sound disappears - and you are so get used to it..

is noise from commercial aircraft low frequency? I live in DFW about 20min from a major airport and I remember going outside after 9/11 when all air traffic was grounded. It was eerily quiet even though I was still in the middle of a large metropolitan area.

Well it includes those low frequencies. I'm sure if you've flown you've experienced the strange ear-plugging feeling of flight. The fuselage is highly sound damped from the engines but you still get the low frequencies. Also could be that pretty much everyone tried to not go outside during 9/11, probably a lot more than just planes stopped

the air being pushed out/around from aircraft engines probably.

most running engines produce some low freqs, and also slow-rotational things.. like cars' wheels thumping on streets and roughnesses there.. esp. thousands of those. And then combinations of almost same freqs produce very low differentials - something on 50hz and another on 53hz will yield some 3hz. Which cannot be heard, it's to be felt.

Another similar silence happens if one is in a street/ suburb/ block-of-flats full of airconditioners-on-walls when the power goes off.

At high and medium frequencies, sound is like water. That means that a small gap can spoil the insulation. That's why recording studios are built as ‘boxes within boxes’.

Low frequencies require mass-spring systems in which the walls are decoupled.

Sound absorption panels don't do anything about insulation. They just condition the sound inside the room or make it less "echoy".

DIY Sound isolation is very, very difficult. If you want to do it, call an acoustic company that knows what they are doing. Not a generic construction company.

Light is like water too. Go figure.

I think most traffic noise is medium frequency enough that a properly sealed 4 pane window might make a noticeable difference vs. a 3 pane window.

I don't think it's possible to build apartments or other connected houses in a way that isolates each unit from another, not without losing the efficiency / cost benefits of connected housing. Case in point, I live in a row of houses, but they just use long slabs of concrete for the flooring, creating a hard connection between the houses.

Mind you, it's fine (for me) most of the time, it's only really an issue if someone starts drilling / does anything in direct contact with the floors / walls.

Noise pollution (or sound pollution) is a modern day era problem, and if I dare say disease. It’s getting more and more difficult to isolate ourselves, especially in urban environments.

It never ceases to amaze me that blocking noise/sound (one of the weakest forces) is very difficult, whereas blocking light (being fastest and more “powerful”) is very easy.

It might sound futuristic, but I expect noise canceling force fields to become an everyday household thing in a few years ;-)

> It never ceases to amaze me that blocking noise/sound (one of the weakest forces) is very difficult, whereas blocking light (being fastest and more “powerful”) is very easy.

How is sound weaker than light? Light is stopped by some thin cardboard, whereas sound will just breeze through walls.

Both have huge dynamic ranges, but consider:

1. We evolved to spend 50% of the time in the presence of a 1 kW/m^2 light source.

2. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_intensity, sound intensity is 10log₁₀(I/I₀) dB, where I₀ = 1 picowatt/m^2, which means 1 kW/m^2 is ~150 dB, which is about what you get from standing 1 meter away from a jet engine (Wikipedia cited a book for that claim, and doesn't itself say which jet engine).

In terms of energy, sure, light is much more energetic, but the problem with sound is that it can reach your ears with orders of magnitude less energy than light can.

The other side of this is that light (EMR) attenuates exceedingly rapidly in matter. Much (though not all) of it will pass through a few tens or hundreds of kilometers of atmosphere, but a distressingly thin piece of solid matter (or many liquids) will block or scatter it beyond all detection save residual thermal noise. (The fact that we can transmit light through hundreds or thousands of kilometers of solid glass is worth marvelling over.)

Sound, being a vibration of matter itself rather than an electromagnetic field, actually often travels better through matter, particularly those low frequencies which are transmitted through structures or the ground itself.

But yes, the far more energetically intense electromagnetic radiation is generally far more easily addressed than far weaker sound eminations.

Exactly my point, we can easily block the light from the sun (roughly 1400W/m2) but we can't easily block the TV/radio (50dB) from the neighbor living above :-)

In my mind I've got this "silly" analogy that noise is like the strong electromagnetic force, very powerful but only in relatively short distances ;-)

The tiniest amount of vacuum stops sound as abruptly as non transparent matter stops light. furthermore, there was no amount of sound which can overcome the vacuum, whereas enough photons at enough energy will destroy the matter in its path.

edit: yes, an explosion will expel matter through a vacuum, so in some sense enough noise will travel through a vacuum, but you are probably not going to be complaining about the "noise" if you are showered with enough matter to hear it from a massive explosion as your sudden disassembly will (briefly) capture your full attention. Whereas light trivially crosses the universe, as well as through some matter.

Light doesn’t even have mass! It’s completely puny!

I suspect you don't appreciate how much quieter modern devices are growing to be. The hum of electric lights is mostly a thing of the past. As we move to larger electric motors, the roar of gas motors will become a thing of the past.

Obviously, some things are just loud. My kids hate how loud the frogs are next to our house. And blowers will remain loud. As are fast cars.

But, I really believe the future will sound vastly different in most cities. Would be neat to hear the differences through the years. Moving from horses to pully based carriages to gas cars. Now to electric cars. We have moved really fast.

With EVs you still have the issues of road noise from the tires.

Right, is why I said fast cars are still loud. Or, thought I said that. Surface streets are still much quieter. Moreso if ebikes are used.

We have people who deliberately modify their cars, trucks, and motorcycles to make them even louder. If EVs really caught on to the point most people had them, I would not put it past them to mod theirs to play loud vroom-vroom noises over speakers to match the volume level of ICE cars.

Taser exhaust instead of a pops and bangs tune. Gotta patent that real quick.

electric blowers are way quieter than gasoline ones, maybe we'll have neat tech like https://hackaday.com/2024/05/18/students-leaf-blower-suppres...

or a revamp on aesthetics with gardens full of fruit trees and other cute flowers than a bunch o grass dating the time where lawns were a symbol of status [0]

[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/lawn-order/

Quieter, but still really loud.

And blowers remain hard to beat in clearing leaves. Not just from grass, but also drive ways and sidewalks.

This is mostly an engineering problem I think. The new Dewalt DCBL777Y1 leaf blowers are so quiet that even on loud I can use it in my garage without feeling like it’s loud or my watch triggering a sound alert. With my gas leaf blower, even outside it’s deafening and my watch immediately triggers. And the electric one is 2x more powerful than the gas one (in CFM, no bs about a smaller nozzle and “high mph”, the thing BLOWS). It also works upside down and doesn’t dump exhaust so I can use it inside as well as upside down when drying my car. No shill, I paid full price for mine and have no affiliation with Dewalt, just surprised and happy. I expected to return it because I didn’t believe it would be better than my gas blower. That gas blower has been on a shelf for the last 3 months. I’ll probably just sell it, there’s no use case where it’s better than the Dewalt except for long runtimes, which I don’t need.

Totally possible. I have the Ego blower and it is much much quieter than any gas blower I ever had. Even better, I'm not worried about the fumes I'm breathing in from it. I'd still hesitate to say they are quiet, though.

To your point, with gas blowers, I know when one is in use in the street. With the electric, I tend to know if in the yard. So, huge improvement. I'd expect if you really hate the sound and are in an apartment complex, you will still hear them some.

I find that with blowers the worst is the amount of dust the throw back in the air. If someone happens to have an air quality device check it the next time there a blower working near

Way quieter, but still noisy because of the whine of the engine and air. But also, for anything but small backyard jobs, they don't last enough or you have to end up with a backpack battery model. I'm sure that'll improve over time but for professional use, the energy density of petrol won't be beat.

Devices with constant hum getting quieter can actually make noise annoyance worse! The brain is good at filtering out constant noises, so they are usually less bothersome. But their sounds can actually help masking out more annoying sounds (variable/unpredictable in loudness and/or pitch). This can be used as (part of) a mitigation strategy for noise annoyance.

My point with the hum was that even lights have lost the sounds they used to make. My gut is our future is far quieter than the current world.

Again, there will still be loud things. But a lot of the noise of the modern world will go away. It is kind of startling how much of the modern world is gas motors running.

Agreed for consumer products. We are generally much better at noise in product engineering than before, solutions are lower cost, the know-how more widespread. Electric motors with electronic control can be very quiet. Engineering plastics with complex geometry accommodates advanced acoustical designs at very low cost. And many consumer products are in rather late stages of refinement, where manufacturers are looking for added qualities to try to keep prices up.

Past ~20mph-30mph, tire noise matches engine noise.

In the US, at least, this means that the vast majority of streets will not see much benefit from EV transition, at least with regard to road noise. The quality of the noise will change, but not the total volume.

As an anecdotal reference point on road noise, I live within a couple miles of an interstate, and the noise I tend to hear does not have discernible engine noise. This is, of course, from vehicles moving at a very different speed than any within a neighborhood.

Right, I see I didn't say it in my first post, but yeah. Loud things are loud. Surface streets, though, should see a lot of improvement.

Fun fact: there's such a thing as low noise asphalt. Obviously it doesn't remove road noise altogether, but it does help a lot.

This is true in a scientific, not practical sense, in any American city.

Engine noise always dominates, because 1% of cars are simply purposefully obnoxiously loud, and you need to be powerful and well connected to get enforcement of existing laws about vehicle noise in your neighborhood.

We're well into subjective areas.

For me, while I find the 1% of purposefully obnoxious engines to be annoying, the thing that grates on my nerves is anything more constant. So for me, road noise dominates in what gets under my skin, not engine noise.

I cannot speak for you or anyone else, except to say that you have no right to speak for anyone else, either, who has not granted such right to you.

Yeah I don't mind the traffic noise outside of our house - it's mostly road surface noise which is dampened to white noise, and most petrol engines aren't that loud at those speeds. But it's the occasional sports car or moped that is the most annoying. Those are getting replaced by electric models too, but I wish they did something about the noise decades ago.

Noise pollution (or sound pollution) is a modern day era problem, and if I dare say disease. It’s getting more and more difficult to isolate ourselves, especially in urban environments.

This feels true to me, but I suspect it’s not. Victorian industry was _loud_, and cars now are quieter than ever.

> and cars now are quieter than ever

But no one drives cars any more. They drive trucks. And motorcycles. And anything with engines designed to tell everyone how powerful they are.

I appreciate my friends/neighbors with electric cars. They do not offset the neighbors with F150s, Silverados, Tundras and other behemoths with v6/v8 gasoline engines.

Big and loud cars are antisocial and should be forbidden to drive as a private person. CHANGE MY MIND

1. it's the closest a private can get of driving a personal spaceship

2. IT'S AMERICA!!!

1. consensus on what is "big" and what is "loud" is politically impossible. 2. In the US at least, all is allowed except for what is explicitly forbidden. 3. So you're going to have to define what is too big and what is too loud to make it forbidden. go back to #1

As long as something is measurable, you can define it, even politically.

"Loud" can be defined as dB, perhaps a distance from the source of the sound or from a neighborhood/business etc. Ex. Any sound you produce much have adequate dampening or distance such that school zones and residential zones do not recieve greater than 75dB from any singular source, nor 90dB from the combination of all sources. Then legally concerts must use different venues, planes must take a more difficult path to avoid the nearby airport neighborhoods, etc. Maybe walls erected next to speedways.

"Big" would probably need greater specification. One that already exists is lane width, so you can base things off that. Ex. Single-axle vehicles may not have a height greater than its width, where width is measured as the distance between lugnuts in the tightened position of the left and right wheels, the greater distance if the front and back wheels are at different distances.

Most states have some form of car exhaust noise laws - a few even do state dB!

https://www.semasan.com/resources/exhaust-noise-laws-state

Excluding the freedom, definition, etc aspect:

Cars are a very big carrot for hard work. They are the modern status symbol and toy which is available for entry to all budgets. Generally, big cars are luxorious, loud cars are fast. No one is gonna work their ass off to move from a 2003 Prius to a 2025 Prius. Plenty of people work their ass off to get a sexy car and to keep it on the road.

So, hypothetically of course, those people would be less stressed out if those cars were not available, as it would be one less attainable status symbol? No downside there I think.

The carrot isn't necessarily stress because you do it because you want to, not because you have to. Without shortish term goals work is often just a chore you do to survive and so your parents don't nag you. Maybe so you can own a house by the time your entire life has elapsed one more time in the wage cage.

Edit: Missed the status symbol itself being stressful. I don't think so. There's a lot of pride in just your status moving up. You get a 90s 7 series, you're happy as hell because it's yours. Moved from daddy's money to self sufficient. Your first car. Then you get a nice 00s 5 series, we moving up in the world. Then you get an old Jag as a weekend thing, oh shit, we getting fancy. It just gives you a pleasant feedback loop every year to couple years.

For me it's leaf blowers. Maybe mowers or string trimmers though they seem to be done faster. Leaf blowers for HOURS from ... March through December!

7am leaf blowers are the worst. They made me miserable in college durring my 4am Wow phase hah

For the purpose of the conversation, I would say Victorian era classifies as "modern". It's a vague word with different possible meanings, but in many contexts "modern era" is taken to mean "since the industrial revolution" (give or take).

It's not a continual rise in noise levels – there are ups and downs – and for some things volume levels may decrease while for other things noise may increase. But by and large, there seems to have been an upward trend for quite a few decades now.

I love your long perspective!

> Victorian industry was _loud_

Possibly. But no cars, no AC, industry built away from housing. Of course there were horses, trains, loud people. One place that can be quite eye-opening in this regard is Venice. It's really quiet, even when you hear people talking, there are no cars at all and in the evening it's very peaceful, more than any other city I have visited.

"Victorian industry" noise was only a problem at the locations themselves though, before cars and outside of cities it would have been a lot quieter than it is now.

Mind you, most suburbs are quiet.

I tried a couple of noise-cancelling headphones, but they all produce very audible (to me) noise, not anywhere near what I would consider “silence”.

Room acoustics is so complex that I doubt that a noise-cancelling force field is physically possible. ;)

Perhaps consider passive earmuffs? I've used 3M peltor x5, they work wonders on airplanes, a bit more challenging if you wear glasses though.

Silence is unnatural anyway. If you move to a rural area with no neighbors or traffic in sight, you'll still hear plenty of noises inside your house. Rather than rage about distracting noises, just turn on the radio or something to drown it out.

Complete silence may be unnatural but so is Fall Out Boy played so loud the lyrics can be heard a block or more away, for 24 hours a day.

Some sounds are loud enough to be impossible to block out. If police aren't interested in enforcing noise ordinances and your landlord isn't interested either because they're too busy trying not to repair the $12K a month water leak in the basement of the restaurant you live on top of, your only option is to move.

It's all relative, that is, your hearing and brain will adjust to how much ambient noise there is. Up to a point anyway, people go a bit mad if there's too much ambient noise (hence the article).

Likewise when ambient noise goes away though. There's a challenge in a sound studio somewhere that blocks out pretty much all sound, challenge being how long you can last in complete silence. Supposedly you can hear your own blood flowing in there.

It's also why people experience noise cancelling headphones as applying a 'pressure' when they first put them on; there is no pressure as such, but just the sudden absence of ambient noise their ears/brains are used to.

I too hate noise. That said, if you've ever spent some time far from human cities, you will notice there's plenty of noise out there, especially at night. There's probably some sort of evolutionary explanation about white noise vs startling noise etc. etc. but the main point is that it's noisy out there! In a very different way than city noise.

I used to go out to the mountains to stargaze, so pretty out there but people still lived there. Frequently there would be something like a dog barking for hours. I realized you really can't escape human bs noise.

> It never ceases to amaze me that blocking noise/sound (one of the weakest forces) is very difficult

Maybe a result of human evolution? If our ears weren't as sensitive to sound as they are, we might not all be here discussing this.

If you take that into consideration, loads of animals have even more sensitive hearing. Noise pollution is known (suggested?) to have a huge impact on nature as well, although iirc that's more about sudden noises, fireworks and the like.

When the author mentioned they didn’t understand how our ears and brains process sound and then said they went back to first principles, I thought for sure they were going to end up working on their reaction to sounds and doing something like cognitive behavioral therapy.

This was my thought too. Seems far easier to figure out a way to be okay with the noise than to go to great lengths to block it out

I wonder if that's possible. I think to a degree it is, but at the same time, noise and whatnot goes deeper into the lizard brain.

Yeah the psycho(logical) part of psychoacoustics is actually more important one wrt to noise annoyance.

This illustrates the difference between a scientific and an engineering approach to things. A scientist is going to review literature and try to develop a mathematical or mental model for the situation, then proceed to articulate different things to test from first principles. The engineer is going to spend a little time identifying a few pre-existing solutions to the problem and then order them by likelihood of working and by cost, then pick the solution that's most cost effective within the bounds of likelihood. Sometimes nothing you try works, and that's when you dip into research, but usually it's in the form of empirical characterization of the problem and the situation. And you're always trying to timebox the work because you have to solve a real problem in a reasonable amount of time and with minimal risk. You don't have time to go to the college library every time you have a question. So doing the stupidest thing that could possibly work is often the answer. If the answer is to go to the college library then you email a professor instead and offer them some money in exchange for a shortcut because they're going to be better at navigating the research than you ever could hope to be.

>Never satisfied, I tried some other models. But, no—the model that everyone says are the best were indeed the best. So let’s review: I had a problem. The ultimate solution to my problem was to do the most obvious possible thing. But I convinced myself that wouldn’t work and spent two years trying everything else.

"Try a non-creative approach." -Albert Einstein

I hate having to wear headphones in order to block obnoxious sounds. Obnoxiously loud people should simply stop being obnoxiously loud. Houses needed better sound proofing. Vehicles need to be quieter. Planes shouldn't fly over densely populated areas.

So much noise is utterly pointless. A symptom of wasted energy.

Soundproofing homes during renovations is stupidly hard to do. E.g. I can't soundproof a party wall without tearing down and replacing a staircase. I installed new windows which block a lot of sound (double glazing, where each pane is of a different thickness), but noise makes it way in through vents and cracks all the same.

Every night I can hear ubers reversing up the road with their obnoxiously loud lorry-style reversing warning beep. If I'm not already asleep, it keeps me up (and for some reason it takes them forever to park or whatever they're doing).

Obviously it's marginally more safe than not having a beep! So, you know, ancillary impacts be damned...

It's also a solved problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwJ5NCf1Vw

Tesco delivery trucks have them here in Ireland; it's pretty good stuff. Still quite loud/noticeable when you're up close, while at the same time not being completely obnoxious to everyone in a kilometre radius.

Looking at their website it mentions several patents, so perhaps that's one reason it's not more widely used.

Good lord, I've gone a long time without knowing what that was all about. First time I heard it I assumed the lorry had a broken reversing beep speaker or something!

Car alarms are similar. Maybe (but doubtfully) they'll prevent your car from being stolen/trashed/emptied. But at the cost of waking up an entire neighbourhood every time a bird shits on it a little too forcefully (or whatever it is that randomly sets off car alarms in the middle of the night). That's not a tradeoff that works for me.

Your house is on fire? Fine, wake up the whole neighbourhood. You're in physical danger? Sure, emergency services can be as noisy as they need to be. Some of your stuff is in danger of being stolen? Meh, I don't want to get out of bed for that.

We have obnoxiously loud little people around and sometimes no matter what I say they forget or outright refuse simply stopping being obnoxiously loud.

noise cancelling headphones are a godsend, making the noise level bearable so we react reasonably and kindly despite obnoxiously loud little people.

Yea, if we could solve the "Obnoxious People" problem, it would solve a huge number of other problems. It's wild how much unpleasantness in the world boils down to a few anti-social, obnoxious, belligerent jerks ruining it for everyone.

From the "obnoxious person" perspective a few anti-social karens and kents should get with the times and stop ruining things for everyone. /s

It's all subjective. To me the idea of living in a city and hearing your pulse sounds like living in the rubber room of an asylum. Going to great lengths to do so is weird to me. I do however find the sound of engines and cars/planes pleasant so I'm probably lucky.

Yeah regular cars aren't a problem, but the kind of cars that are made to be intentionally loud, driven by people who take pleasure in driving them intentionally loudly is. Also blaaaasting some fucking song from your motorcycle at max volume just sitting at a stoplight outside my house is insane. Police sirens are also loud but the loud is a biproduct of the helping people so i can understand it. But holy shit I'm moving somewhere far away from intersections as soon as my lease is up.

Loud cars aren't /inherently/ the issue, it's that most of the people who want their car to be loud also have no concept of sound quality for their exhaust tone. Your typical 4-banger ecobox driven by a 19 year old stoner with an Aliexpress exhaust is not what people mean when they say that they like the sound of cars.

I like the sounds of cars, and cars can absolutely have their sound tuned to be pleasant. Famously, Lexus for the LFA had Yamaha (yes the piano people) tune the sound of the engine and exhaust, which sounds absolutely lovely. Even far more mundane vehicles (not supercars) can sound quite nice. For instance, while I generally don't think positively about Ford, this last generation of Mustang GT had a wonderful exhaust note from the factory with the cutouts open, it was throaty and loud without being full of drone.

Nobody wants to hear an Aliexpress exhaust or the kid with the beater BMW leaking oil that they put a popcorn tune on.

Motorcycles are a different story, but motorcycle riders are also a different sort of asshole.

For me it's certainly not about hearing my pulse or anything, it's about being able to function at all (sleep, even think).

And sure, cars and planes are the best case scenario! Oh how I wish cars and planes would crash in great numbers into every asshole blasting vaguely music-adjacent crap at 1 AM in my area. That would make for a beautiful soundscape.

Seriously though, it's just very individual. Unfortunate people who are sensitive to noises can't ever prove to a person who isn't that it's a huge problem causing actual suffering.

oops, errrm, I was referring to kids in the household. just claryfyin'

Just to be clear: I wasn't referring to children in my rant. Children can be loud (and obnoxious), but that's usually fine. Having an adult around who can channel their energy away from the neighbours is all that's needed there.

thanks for clarifying. yes such people exist and they are a nuisance to deal with.

> Planes shouldn't fly over densely populated areas.

Usually the planes were there first, though. Airports were built far away from population centers, but then the surrounding towns or cities expanded.

See https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-is-it-so-hard-to-...

That's not really how I read in that article. It's the introduction of the jet engine that caused the bulk of the problems. It does mention O’Hare in Chicago as an example of an airport built far from the city only to have the city eventually expand around it, but that was in the 40s, 50s, and 60s and wasn't a big problem until jet engines came along. It also mentions that airports have become much much larger (both in terms if surface area and traffic) – it's not just cities that have expanded. There is a big difference between "an airplane once a day" and "an airplane every five minutes", whether it's during daytime or early mornings/evenings/nights.

My hometown is also an example of an airport built far form the city (in the 30s) only to have the city expand around it, but traffic has expanded massively since the early 00s (after the city expansions happened) with RyanAir traffic. Before that it was mostly a military airport with some limited regional passenger traffic.

As an additional point, the most noise isn't necessarily near the airport but sometimes dozens of kilometres from the airport. Sometimes this is because the airport changed flying routes due to noise complaints and/or expansions.

Maybe that's true where you live. My town is just under 2000 years old.

I get that it makes sense from a logistics point to keep airports close to people. But's incredibly disruptive to all the people who are impacted by frequent loud bursts of noise during landing & takeoff.

Imrryr, the Dreaming City? I thought it was older than that.

Maybe where you live. Our local airport was built about a millennium after the city.

Great story. It reminded me of this quote:

"A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library." -- Frank Westheimer

Similar sentiment used these days: "Weeks of work can save us hours of planning".

But what he's talking about is an hour in the laboratory saving him months in the library, so to speak. As usual, wisdom is knowing which situation you're in.

Except that they spent two years in the library and laboratory even though there was an obvious solution that they refused to try first. It's like replacing parts in a computer before checking if it's plugged in.

Right, to be clear, an hour in the lab would have saved him years of research, if he had done it. All I'm saying is that the lab time vs research time question can go both ways.

I have been thinking and learning about sound and noise control/isolation for a long time. I am quite sure that active noise cancellation in real domestic environments is impossible. Simple physical isolation will always be cheaper and more effective. The idea of portability is founded on an overly simplified and ancient demonstration of sign waves cancelling each other, and fataly leave out how human hearing actualy operates, and there are now indications that the very best active noise cancelling headphones, are working, but with side effects that are disorienting, and likely very bad for your health and brain.Do the deap, deap dive into just how sophisticated human hearing is at discerning usefull information in an increadably complecated environment, and the fact that there is NO OFF SWITCH, this isn't just an osiliscope excersise, your brain is fighting furiously to figure out what that wierd sound is, please be nice to your brain and dont feed it an endless unatural, impossible in nature, signal. 3 years of sound engineering in a past life, and still loving sound/music/audio and searching for implimentable solutions to NOISE

I completely understand the sentiments of the author. It's easy to fall into the trap of "it's too easy to be true; let me try out a 'clever' way", and fall into the cycle of figuring out things that have 100 different parameters and thus hard to model realistically.

On the other hand though, which are the best noise-cancelling earphones or headphones? I've gone down this route, and haven't been satisfied with what was suggested. Airpods Pro 2 seems great at canceling noise, but sounds flat. Soundcore products have a phenomenal sound quality, but can't cancel noise as effectively.

Sony Head- and earphones have in my experience been the best at both. The WH-1000XM series are the best noise cancelling headphones I’ve tried so far and the WF-1000XM series are the best earphones I’ve had. My personal favorite tip is the Sony Linkbuds S, which aren’t as good as the WFs at either sound or noise canceling, however they’re the best price to performance you can get on the market IMO

Edit: I should also say that the tuning on the WH headphones is pretty bass-heavy (somewhat obnoxiously so), so make sure to use an equalizer to remove some of that.

I've never tried wireless earphones, only headphones. Do the WF-1000XM work for removing the noise of construction work and such? I'm thinking concrete drilling and circular saws and such

Yes, it does a quite decent job in both high and low frequencies. The place I live in actually used to have a quite large construction area right next to it, so having something like this during the day was a godsend. You can still hear it of course, but it’s a lot more quiet. With earbuds specifically it helps that they also act as earplugs even when off, though enabling noise cancelling does get rid of even more noise.

I used to think background noise was my enemy.. until a week in a stifling motel with a clunky window unit proved me wrong. It started with me having tantrums that i'd never sleep and ended with me having some of the best sleep ever. I've slept with a noise machine ever since

This article resonates with me. I have neighbours that have been renovating for the past 6 months (free-standing house) and the noise is unbearable, it causes physiological responses in my body and great anxiety.

Another neighbour has a gardener that spends half the day blowing leaves in his backyard every Saturday and it's making me hate living here. I like this house and neighbourhood, but the noise ruins it. I'm sick of people telling me I'm being facetious when I get upset about the noise.

I tried my shooting earmuffs, which do help a bit, but the annoying sounds come through. I finally resorted to noise-cancelling headphones, albeit cheap-ish ones from Sony and the past couple of days have been great. My focus has improved and I feel less exhausted. The headphones are the only thing I changed about my lifestyle.

I hope I can move out of the city in the future, the noise is really draining.

This is a nice follow-up: https://dynomight.net/car-trouble/

Yeah this seems to be a pattern with this guy. Maybe he just really enjoys thinking about stuff, though.

I saw the first recommended article being another one posted on HN earlier about a tea extract or whatever. Body / life hacker of sorts.

I wear earmuffs for work pretty regularly for extended periods of time. If you get ones with the metal connector between the ear covers, you can spring it so they aren't so tight over your head.

The usual failure mode on earmuffs is the cushion bit that seals around your ear drying out and getting brittle. Or the foam in the ear cushions getting hard or breaking down. When either of those things happens, it's time for new earmuffs (or ear cushions if you can find the parts).

These are the ones I use:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-Pro-Grade-Earmuff-90565-4DC-P...

What earphones did the author end up using?

It is strange that after relating all the dead ends in some detail and found his solution, he does not share it.

I guess Bose QuietComfort (hinted at by the bold font). These are ON ear headphones. Not ideal for me personally. These will hurt after an hour or so depending on your ears I guess. I prefer the Sleepbuds II (see below also)

These are the headphones I bought last week. From my experience, I can wear them hours on end and feel fine.

That's right. I was digging through the comments on the substack version of the post and he confirmed it: https://dynomight.substack.com/p/noise/comment/17817515

my noise journey:

1) try noise cancelling headphones

NO: they have undefinable effects on your psyche. Maybe "pressure" or some sort of non-silent silence that your body still reacts to?

2) white noise, pink noise, music, classical music, new age music, atmospheric sounds, etc

NO: actually, these are similar to noise-cancelling headphones. Your brain is still reacting to the sound in a non-passive way.

3) giant earmuffs

NO: heavy, physical head pressure, etc

solution) 3M ear classic NRR 33 earplugs. when I need to concentrate. while sleeping. Keep a pair around for "that guy" playing videos on his phone in public. The BEST. I buy 200 at a time.

After reading this article, I wonder if noise-cancelling headphones + 3m earplugs might work together?

This is me.

I trim the length to ~half to avoid sticking out, which causes them to catch and loosen. I also find that washing them first with an organic soap (Dr B) can reduce skin irritation during long-duration wear. When earplugs get wet they inflate almost comically, but after drying they shrink back down to regular size.

I use the rounded 3M EarSoft rather than the square-edge Ear Classic.[1] And actually, I just get the clone down at Harbor Fright...

Presumably this changes the attenuation somewhat (and voids the cert), but any difference isn't noticeable and it helps a lot for long-duration comfort and overall wearability.

(and yes, obviously I don't stick them in too far :D )

[1] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/c/ppe/hearing-protection/earpl...

> noise-cancelling headphones + 3m earplugs might work together

Sure, any closed back headphones work and cancel out noise very nicely — I tried Sony WH-1000XM4, and they weren't much more effective than a pair of much cheaper closed backs without ANC.

I've been living in this combo for many years (using ear plugs 24/7 and changing them as needed, headphones on top when not sleeping), and it's been really helpful in keeping me relatively sane.

If you don't care about the sound quality, just set the volume to the max so it can yell through the ear plugs, and you don't have to take them out even when listening to something.

>> NO: they have undefinable effects on your psyche. Maybe "pressure" or some sort of non-silent silence that your body still reacts to?

I understand the pressure comment. It does not bother me that much and it's wayyy worth getting used to. I have tried the Apple Airpods Max and QC45. I think QC45 is a little less on the pressure than the Apple noise cancelling. Just my 2c.

How long did you try the ones that you say have an impact on your brain? I've never tried white/pink/brown noise for long but I can imagine that you get used to it. Can relate to the noise canceling headphones too, but only during the first experience.

Mind you, I really like listening to music so I never really have them on with nothing or white noise or whatever.

> (Earbuds inside the earmuffs don’t work because they get knocked out of position and then can’t be adjusted.)

Interesting. I've used earbuds inside earmuffs quite a few times and not had this problem, except when the cord gets tugged.

I definitely agree with the principle that if the experiment is fast and cheap, just do it.

I've done this a lot - mostly with big machinery where the ANC on the earbuds, or the (not aviation quality) ear muffs alone don't suffice to bring the noise down to an acceptable level.

It works well - but have them in long enough, particularly when physically working and the earbuds will loosen and shift. The seal on the earbuds with your ear canal is important, especially with ANC buds. Removing face shields and ear muffs to re-adjust earbuds is frustrating.

I almost always wear noise-cancelling headphones with brown noise playing while I'm at home. It's easier than dealing with an upstairs neighbor who always seems to be moving and only knows how to heel-stomp. And it's the only way I've found to block out impact noises.

It's frustrating that there's no solution to such a widespread problem. The only economical solution I can think of is building another layer of floor in the upstairs unit, but that's a solution that's unavailable to the person trying to solve the problem. And landlords have no incentive for that kind of work because most tenants endure the noise without complaint.

My previous neighbors were very cooperative when I talked to them and they got some rugs and indoor slippers. But the best solution is to just walk lightly. It's second-nature to me to not walk heavily when I'm in small indoor spaces, but a lot of people don't have any awareness of how they walk. I'm also very tall and I think bigger people have a better sense of their physical impact. I'll have small parties here and I'm always interested in who moves gently versus who stomps around my apartment (with apologies to my downstairs neighbor) and it's never the largest people stomping.

Not trying to be smug or blithe, but this is one of the main things I love about living in the suburbs or the country: neighbors can only bother me outside (and they rarely do).

He's talking about the QC45's or QC35's and yeah, they are that good. I could wear them 10 hours a day without issue, and they do lower the sound floor tremendously. They are not a perfect solution, but the cost to performance ratio is unbeatable.

What I do to deal with general noise but specifically disruptive low frequency noise from my surroundings is to mask it, in particular with longform (often an hour long) dub techno tracks. CV313 is good for this. It's the only good way to counteract the subsonic energy coming through my walls and ceiling.

We experience sub frequencies with our whole body, certainly I seem to have a high sensitivity to the 5-30Hz stuff. So no amount of ear plugging will be really that effective.

Man these were some well educated mr Bean level hijinks.

I had to stifle a laugh multiple times reading it.

One of the highlights was definitely:

“I tried kits for making custom-molded earplugs. One hardly blocked any noise. Another had a small piece immediately break off deep inside my ear, resulting in legendary good times trying to remove it with a screw”

like, why a screw? not tweezers, not anything of that sort?

also the part about trying to have a conversation with the earmuffs on, lol.

I feel for you OOP but still, pretty funny.

Why do you feel for object-oriented programming? :)

I hope everyone reads to the end for the real takeaway — believing you can re-engineer a complex solution from first principles is generally a fool’s errand.

It's a really good takeaway too. Analysis is a tool, not a way of life.

My achilles heel, which is similar, but not the same, is attempting to over-optimise, to the detriment of myself and people around me. I have learnt that sometimes it is ok/best to act with little consideration. Usually it's worth quickly assessing what the worst case scenario is - if it's missing a flight, maybe it's good to apply some detailed analysis. If it's being 15 minutes late too the pub - maybe just get on with life and see what happens. It's a really difficult and pervasive behaviour though, which I find some people cannot understand. I can't go upstairs or downstairs at home without briefly wondering if there is some item that should be elsewhere (washing, scattered toys etc) that I could carry with me. I can't switch a light off without doing a quick evaluation of how long it will be until needs to be back on, and therefore whether or not it is in fact worth turning it off. Gah!

think of it as habits. It's a good habit to turn off lights when you leave a room but it's not a rule you have to do or else

His upstairs neighbors have their own channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IRB0sxw-YU

I had a similiar thing with my eye sight: I couldn't believe or accept that my eye sight got really bad in a short period of time (i was 15).

But i did compensate for 5 diopter relativly good.

I did learn plenty of that research, made me more aware of eye sight and because i was very young, hard to say that it was obvious to just accept it at that time.

In hindsight my school grades were definitly worste than they had to be...

And regarding noise: We have a wonderful big lake here in germany and small mountains around it, you can hear the autobahn (going around it) everywhere and we really do a shitty job with handling car noise. Even on the small mountain or in the nature area you hear cars.

I definitly will move out of the city in the next few years and in an area which does not have a autobahn close by. I'm happy driving 30-60 minutes to the autobahn.

Noise cancelling headphones have quite literally been one of the best things I've ever spent money on. I started using them three years ago (about a year out of college) and I was immediately filled with immense regret that I didn't invest in a pair earlier.

Noise cancellers have made it so much easier for me to focus, they've lowered my stress levels, made me a more effective programmer and even made me a nicer person.

I also recently just shelled out $600CAD for a new pair of Bose noise cancellers and they were worth every single loonie!

I'm sensitive to noise, have been using noise-canceling headphones for many years, but just recently developed chronic tinnitus. I can still use the headphones, but I _have_ to be playing music in order to block out the ringing. Which then makes the original problem worse over time as my ears start to hurt from so much constant sound.

Anyway, I've been in a real pickle for a few months now. Wondering if anyone else has the same problem?

One recent discussion of many: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43082700#43083496

I read this as far less about noise and its cancellation than about problem-solving, and in particular DYOR: do your own research.

There is a reason we rely on experts, a large part of which is that good experimental design, execution, sampling of test subjects, and interpretation is hard. That's not to say it's impossible, and it's not that conventional wisdom / received understanding isn't often wrong (and there's nothing quite so profound an impediment to discovery of truth than solidly-embedded wrong understandings, especially at the cultural level). But at a starting point at least checking to see if what "everyone" believes, claims, and/or recommends is of value is a reasonable possibility to verify or refute early in a search.

There's also the realisation that reasoning through a problem is almost always far less useful than actually trying the damned thing, which is to say experiment and empirical testing. This isn't completely contradictory to what I'd written above, as all the impediments to good experimentation apply many-fold to good Gedankenexperimenten, or thought experiments. A key difference between the two is that an actual experiment will tend to reveal your sloppy reasoning, rationale, and/or method in fairly short order, whilst thought experiments can lead you down the garden path. Kant critiqued pure reason for ... reasons.

And for all that ... the author did learn something, and did realise their mistakes, and probably learned a bit more in the process than if they'd simply followed the initial consensus advice. But a different and perhaps more methodological approach could have arrived there sooner.

Something that has helped me a lot when dealing with noise or other distractions is present time meditation. Just sit there and focus on actively hearing and feeling everything, I would just do 5 min sessions but quite often. After practicing this for while I became less distracted and more comfortable wherever I was.

Did you follow some guide or just "made it up" this particular method? Interesting!

Moving is the only real solution. Nothing can stop the infrasonic sound.

Noise level risk is the #1 criteria I look at when purchasing real estate. You know you're getting close to the end game when the only thing you are frustrated with is infrequent, small aircraft noise.

It's definitely something I'll keep in mind whenever I move. Front of the house is a thoroughfare, back of the house depending on weather there's the noise of the various highways in the neighbourhood, and inside the house there's neighbour noises because it's a connected house.

However. Quiet and disconnected real estate is a premium commodity, either due to base costs, or because it's far removed from 'society' so getting anywhere costs money and time. It's a tradeoff.

I used to grow up fairly quiet, plenty of neighbourhood noises but otherwise quiet... except for the fighter jets from the local military airbase lmao.

Does anyone have much experience with these headphones? I am looking for similar but dont like headphones pressing on my ears. Are the quietcomfort suitable for that? Is the ultra a worthy upgrade? Is there anything better on the market now? Redddit seems to suggest that Sony ANC is superior.

He was operating on outdated advice. Yes, 1990s ANC headphones would only work on repetitive noise, but the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since.

Sony and Apple AirPods Max are considered best-in-class.

> Sony and Apple AirPods Max are considered best-in-class.

Inherited some Sony WF-1000XM4 and can confirm that they're really good at noise cancelling. Plus they have an ambient mode (with optional "filter in voices") which is helpful when you need to interact briefly.

I'm more sensitive to noise than most -- AirPods Max are an incredible tool for me. Sometimes I just wear them without listening to anything to block out office noises, conversations, etc. Unavoidably, they get uncomfortable after a while, but it's on the order of hours.

This is starting to sound like a sales pitch, but if anyone like me is on the fence, they're really an incredible product that has improved the quality of my life, which I don't say lightly.

For me the problem is mainly when trying to sleep, specifically, at Burning Man, where it can be very difficult. I used foam earplugs for years, but they leave something to be desired.

The AirPods Max…get them on my ears correctly, and I’m in a forest. It’s uncanny. It was the most profound alteration to my experience there in years.

Keeping to the spirit of the article, it's maybe simpler to think of all of the "good" ANC headphones (Bose, Sony, Apple) as a tier above standard headphones and just try them all for which one you personally like the most.

I went Sony after trying both them and the Bose. The ANC was about the same (this is maybe 5 years ago) but the sound quality on the Sonys was head and shoulders better than the Bose. They're incredible on a flight.

For some reason, I find the ANC of the quiet comfort to be very uncomfortable. When I turn on the ANC, it feels like there's a sort of pressure and I really dislike it.

On the other hand, I don't mind the ANC from my sennheiser momentum.

I would recommend taking a look at rtings.com: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/best/by-feature/no...

(That's their "picks", but they have reviews and tests on a lot more models. I just can't find a good place to link to just "all of the noise cancelling headphones".)

Don't just skim the list, click in and take a look at the individual products. They do pretty extensive quantitative measurements of all of these headphones and provide useful commentary alongside (e.g., the Sony ones are shallower so if you have big ears they might get uncomfortable). They have full frequency response graphs for the noise isolation, recordings of how it fares against some test samples, etc.

They also measure some less typical stuff like "clamping force" and "ear breathability" that's hard to tell just from briefly putting them on in a store.

I've personally tried some (older) Sony against (older) Bose and I can't really comment on whether the ANC is better because they pushed on the arms of my glasses hard enough and the shape left them resting _on_ my ears instead of over them such that they hurt to wear after a little while. They could be head and shoulders above, but that would be worthless to me because I would never use them. So I'd mostly echo what the other commenter is saying--they're all pretty much "great" in passive/active noise cancellation and sound quality. Just get whichever feels best to you.

I chose the Sony 1000XM4 because the RTINGS graph showed the strongest cancellation in the 60Hz range. All my tormentors are in the AC-powered machine noise range.

https://www.rtings.com/discussions/adsg5oN7w-9Dgb3O/treadmil...

https://www.rtings.com/headphones/1-8/graph/25566/noise-isol...:

> I am looking for similar but dont like headphones pressing on my ears.

I have both noise cancelling "big" earphones and earbuds. I agree with you that the the "pressing on the ears" is annoying, so I usually wear the earbuds: the noise cancelling is slightly worse, but the latest noise cancelling technology is really good enough.

I found the noise cancelling headphones don't completely eliminate loud intermittent noise but prevents them from being offensive and jarring. I use them almost all the time and worry they have negative long term effects. They certainly have positive effects though.

OP is probably autistic. I very clearly see the exact same line of thinking I take towards similar problems.

I don't know why this type of AuDHD drives us this way but Jesus Christ is it awful. I'd have saved so many years of suffering if I'd just listened to the good advice and reason I'm constantly showered in.

Best solution I've got is "suck it up and listen to someone you trust who isn't in your head". Still, that's really hard to do.

I have been on a similar journey. The Bose headphones are nice, but hard to sleep with and they are ON-ear, which hirt my ears after an hour or so. The Bose Sleepbuds are okish, the best of all the products I tried, sadly discontinued. There was(is?) a reboot of the same product but do not have experience with those [0]. Anyone tried those ‘soft’ headband looking headphones for sleeping? Tips welcome

[0] https://ozlosleep.com/

I assume that the article is not about sleeping. For sleeping, have you tried foam earplugs?

Foam plugs absolutely do the job. What I don't like about these is that after listening to a book or podcast before sleep you need to put these in. Some nights, you fall asleep during playback and wake up to dogs barking, annoyed. Other nights, you are on the verge of consciousness and can't be bothered to put the plugs in.

Everything sound-related is always messy in many ways. I bet when we get high quality replacement digital ears you can mute, these will still have some stupid crap going on, like unstable device pairing.

Foam doesnt work against the noise here. Sleep buds plus Quiet Comfort on max works a bit lol

It's a real pity they got discontinued. The sleepbuds work fantastic and are the only product that works for me.

Anker makes these earbuds for sleep:

https://www.soundcore.com/uk/products/sleep-a20-sleeping-ear...

I haven't tried them myself, but they come highly recommended.

I have a set of sleepphones. They are okay. If I sleep on my side with the earphone directly over my ear, it does start to hurt, but just off with the volume a little higher works, depending on the content being played. I've also found they seem to move around a bit inside the head band and the volume varies a lot depending on where the earphone is in relation to my ear. The battery sits on the back on the band which may not be great for back sleepers.

Any particular questions, happy to answer.

Best solution for sleep I think is a combination of earplugs and Shokz openrun bone conduction headphones. Bone conduction headphones work better when you have earplugs in than they do without them so it works amazing.

My favorite earplugs are Loop Quiet because foam earplugs make my ears sweaty and itchy. If foam earplugs work for you they can’t be beaten as far as noise reduction.

I sleep on my side so I wear the headphones backwards and position the bottom one so it’s not between my head and pillow.

I turn on the iOS background sounds dark noise and put on an audiobook to distract from my mind not turning off. Add in an eye mask and I sleep quite well.

The author learned something. It takes balls to describe how dumb you were like that, but that modesty and openness is a great attitude to have for learning.

...and informing and teaching others. We are learning through someone elses mistakes, it costs us very little albeit its one users anecdotal experience, and we should keep that in mind - we don't have their ears or their problem. It should also be noted it cost said author/teacher 2 years and a lot of $.

I explored similar solutions but recently switched from AirPods Pro to AirPods Pro 2. I was genuinely surprised by how much better the noise canceling was for my needs, such as working in the office and doing yard work.

Last night, I used them at a sporting event where loud techno music was playing, and I could hardly hear the music while clearly listening to my podcast.

Proper fit of the earbuds is absolutely key and AirPods don't match everyone's ear shape, so YMMV.

i've fantasized about some kind of external noise cancelling system for use at a gun range. It would be nice to have something that would make it bearable to be behind someone shooting a firearm without ear protection.

btw, you know in action movies when there's 10 people with automatic weapons shooting it out in a building and talking to each other? yeah.right. firearms are so unbelievable loud, there's no way any conversation is happening in that environment. further, video doesn't do the supersonic blast justice at all it's something you have to experience.

AIUI, active noise cancelling doesn't really work well for impulsive sources like gunshots because the impulse does not exist for enough time for predictive interference to function.

Additionally, because noise cancellation depends on the phase of the wave relative to the receivers (your ears) it really needs to be within ~1/4 wavelength of your ears, or 3" at 1kHz.

In gun ranges, what you would probably benefit most from is passive energy reduction, so ear protectors (already usually covered) and acoustical treatment. However, acoustical surface is very expensive where flat concrete is cheap, so you end up with gun ranges being big reverberative spaces instead.

Not that this would be practical but could you connect the gun to a speaker and just play the inverse of a pre-recorded gunshot?

You'd need to have lots of pre-recorded shots as I imagine there's some variation between guns, calibers, etc. but I wonder how well it could actually work.

The firearms headsets I've seen use a form of noise cancelling that is an electronic limiter that closes immediately upon excessive noise, so impulse noises like popping and crackling don't reach your ears. But otherwise, you can hear just fine (voices, even the wind).

Sound proofing is really challenging. I've gone through similar dilemmas as the author. Just short of blocking all ability for air or vibrations to transfer, I don't think there's much you can do. Soft textures absorb sounds, which can kind of help. If it's via air ducts you can try to add baffles. I've been curious if there's studies on noise pollution and mental health.

Always live on the top floor. Be the one who stomps.

I get to "enjoy" low-frequency bass from musical events at a public park about a half mile away from my home. It sounds to me like someone in a car just outside my window, just one of those cars that go boom. Sadly, it's just people having their brand of fun. No defense against being in the natural frequency node.

I'm really sensitive to sounds, my neighbours above me and to the sides of me tag teamed my life to almost suicide.

I had bose nc700s, I slept with loop quiets. I tried airpod pros, moving the furniture around but it seemed my bedroom was a bass resonator.

Moved to a semi detached house, it's so quiet.

"a lifestyle composed principally of stomping"

Love that. I seriously considered making a periscope to stick out the window and find out WTF my upstairs neighbors were doing. The whole building shook.

So now I have a house, in a relatively quiet area. My girlfriend does voiceover, and built herself a sound booth in a tiny closet that's perfect for it.

Except we have a next-door neighbor who inexplicably starts his truck pretty much every hour and... sits in it? He just lets it run and run. I have no idea WTF this guy is doing. Sometimes he pulls out of his driveway and goes around the block and comes back. His windshield is plastered with a sticker that says, "Runs on liberal tears." I'm not sure if we've met him or not, because I don't know which of the people he is among two houses.

And I wouldn't normally give a rat's ass about his weird behavior. But the low-frequency engine noise can't be blocked by sound-deadening treatment. It basically means my girlfriend can't work in her own home. This guy has to live next to probably the ONE person in the neighborhood who's trying to record for a livelihood.

I suffer this at work, mainly if I'm more in a thinking-mode than a doing-mode. I struggle very hard to concentrate and get anything done if there's noise around me. I'd be curious what model OP bought, maybe I could consider doing the same thing.

The two brands that could have a claim to producing "the model that everyone says are the best" are Bose and Sony. For Bose, the QuietComfort Ultra are the top of the line, but the cheaper/older QuietComfort 45 and 35 are both good too. For Sony, the WH-1000XM4 is the consensus favorite, even though the XM5 is newer. I own the XM4 and the older XM3 and I prefer the XM3 because I like the way it sounds with nothing playing better. I don't know how to describe it but the "silence" of the XM4 with ANC on but nothing playing feels too artificial for me. For office use, though, I prefer the XM4 since it has bluetooth multipoint and I can use them easily with both my laptop and phone without mucking around in settings.

I'm changing jobs and going from having my own office to hoteling desks, so I imagine I'll be wearing the Sony's a lot more and I'm not sure if they'll be comfortable enough for all day use. At home or on a plane, I usually need to give my ears a rest every hour or so. I'll give one of the Bose a shot if I can't deal with the Sony's all day.

Apple is also very popular. I haven't tried the new AirPods with ANC, but I love the Pros. I have to fuss with them a bit to get a good seal, and they don't stand up to city or airplane use, but they're fine in a relatively quiet environment, and they're so small I pretty much always have them on me. I have no experience with the Max, but from what I've read they can be uncomfortable for some people.

This was a joy to read. This comment is not useful but sometimes I just want to share a reaction.

>the model that everyone says are the best

Is that airpods, or Bose something, or Sony something?

No OP, but I can vouch for for Sony WH-1000X3 (not the most recent model but I assume they haven't gotten substantially worse). I know many autistic folks who use them for very similar audio sensitivity and use them myself.

In the article, "quiet" and "comfort" are bolded in that section, indicating that they are referring to Bose QuietComfort headphones

Judging by the phrase “quiet and comfortable” (emphasis in the original), the author is using headphones from the Bose QuietComfort series. Those are, indeed, widely acklowledged as the most comfortable in each generation, including for prolonged periods. The ANC is also state of the art though possibly a bit worse than on the Sony XMs, and the battery is decent with the same caveat.

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the AirPods Max called the best on any of those fundamentals, only on the Apple ecosystem integration and the spatial audio. (The tuning is also ostensibly less plebeian than on Bose or Sony, but if you care for sound enough to be willing to spend AirPods Max money you’re probably getting the Focal Bathys instead anyway.)

I'm curiously watching the room noise cancelling tech that manta sleep is building. Looks promising. Curious if folks have experience with similar devices?

> Hyundai’s World’s First Road‒Noise Active Noise Control, RANC

I don't mean to be insensitive or offensive but this has always seemed like an XY problem to me.

There are certain activities that humanity needs to do that need to produce noise, that's just how it is (e.g. building houses). We as a society have acknowledged this and that's why we have laws that restrict the activities to certain hours (e.g. 6:00 to 22:00 in my country.

I also can hear the noises and they are also not pleasant to me, but I have learned to deal with it mentally or physically (leave while the noise is being made until it's illegal to make it).

I see it as an XY problem because it seems that the people who mind the noise think that they can make it go away by "muting" or "ignoring" the noise instead of accepting that the noise is inevitable and learning to deal with it.

You assume other people are not more bothered by sounds than you. Also, I don't see how this isn't an example of 'dealing with it'.

You say you physically leave your house to escape the noise sometimes - getting a pair of noise-cancelling is significantly less disruptive to one's activities in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, I did not mean to disagree with the article, it was an interesting read.

By physically leaving the house I was slightly hinting at the occurence where some of the buildings were not expected to be used for home working (or "being in use" during working hours) and therefore the construction and standards couldn't have considered that this might be a problem. (the rest of the time is covered by laws mandating no noise during night).

I feel extremely priviledged to appear to not be bothered by noise, although that's who I have always been - just as the people who are bothered by it.

Often times writing an e-mail in silence can be objectively less important for the society than someone building or maintaining a house. Other times people do make unnecessary noise or they make it at a time where it's expectably inconvenient to others around them - see germans not recycling glass at certain times of the week or not running a washing machine during late hours.

All in all it's a complex problem of society vs individual (vs another individual)

When someone is using a tool, improving their house, working in their yard, I have very few issues with that psychologically. Yes it's a bit irritating, but generally my neighbors are courteous enough to not do that at night, and I can certainly talk to them like adults if it becomes a problem.

When it's a dog barking multiple times per second, in that deep boomy hound voice that is impossible to cancel in any way shape or form, for the 6th straight hour... I see red.

One of these things is reasonable. One of these things is not. When someone is driven to extreme lengths to try to block out the sound, it's somewhere in their personal second category of noises, and it's often *persistent.* In my case, I'm reasonably convinced that the only true solution will be to move, as I'm a musician and need actual quiet. Sometimes the damned dogs take away entire days.

Really appreciate this write up. Problems with noise almost destroyed my life a few times in SF, Marin, NYC and LA. Ironically moving to a more central urban location with mixed use zoning up in Sac seems to have solved my noise problems. Maybe a coincidence but go figure.

When some dog starts losing it for 6 hours straight though I still reach for my shop earmuffs and wax plugs over regular plugs. The trifecta. It's literally like being at the bottom of the ocean. I should do it more, my efficiency at work or on personal projects jumps up an order of magnitude. It's seriously like a super power everyone should try it.

PS would really love to see this entire post as an amazon review for Sony 1000XM4s. Just saying.

I very much miss our local Covid lockdown. For quite some time there were no cars on the road, people walking past and yelling at each other, planes overhead etc.

(2023)

smashing molecules

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