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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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