[jacquesm]

Very timely. So, after boycotting a certain manufacturer for more than a decade on account of their root kit debacle I finally relented and spent some money on a noise cancelling headphone. It works pretty good, the tech has matured and the difference between NC on and off is remarkable. Even a neighbour mowing their lawn or using a chainsaw disappears to the point that I can focus on playing an instrument or writing a piece of code or text.

This was a key element for me in overcoming my insomnia, I used to stay awake at night because it was finally quiet enough that I could concentrate. After identifying that as a key part of the problem noise reduction became a focal point. It has created a new problem: the headphones are so good at this that it is very easy to creep up on me and scare the bejezus out of me when I don't receive any other clue such as a changing shadow or something like that. I'll have to figure out some kind of early warning system for approaching people.

Whoever cracks this particular nut without headphones and manages to create a bubble of 2 cubic meters or so that is silent from outside interference will make a lot of money. The article lists one entrant that seems to be a move in the right direction but it does not look like that particular version will be ready for prime time in the near future.

My 'ideal' soundsucker (sonic black hole) is a ceiling mounted device that projects a cone of silence. One possible way in which it could work is by using a phased array of speakers to 'fake' a larger one. But that ideal will likely never be reached due to limitations in physics, imagine the problem as applied to a wavy surface of water: create a wave pattern that cancels out the wavy surface in one circular area without touching the water directly.

Edit: Another - unexpected - benefit is that all the fan noise and other ambient noise in the room I'm in (which I normally don't even notice) also drops by a very large factor with NC enabled.

[hrktb]

> So, after boycotting a certain manufacturer for more than a decade on account of their root kit debacle

TBF It’s not even the same company. Part of the same group, but the entertainment companies are separated from music hardware, have their own heads, their own deals etc.

It’s like boycotting Vox media because of Comcast. It follows a logic, but it feels peculiar.

On your general point, totally agree. There was a company touting to “design” everyday noise by sticking a small module we’d keep in our ear canal, the company seems to have disappeared but I was so sold on the idea. Almost permanent noise reduction, or filtering for nearby voices only would be the dream setup.

[jacquesm]

If you carry the same brand to benefit from the recognition factor then boycotting all of them is the only consistent action imo.

[hrktb]

I get the logic, yes.

Now, Sony has banking, internet provider, insurance, camera sensor, NFC payment companies as well.

Would we also boycott all of these, as well as smartphones that feature a Sony sensor for instance, if the goal is to be consistent ?

I’d totally boycott Sony BMG for life, but I feel it would be the wrong signal to boycott other independent activities, in particular as the headphone devision is one of the last bastion of trying to provide the clearest sound at a fair price, in a world where Beats and Bose are runaway hits.

[mulmen]

I don’t even consider Sony products. Haven’t since the PS2. They’re kinda like Microsoft for me. I just associate the name with scummy actions and user hostility so I never even evaluate their products. Been that way for well over a decade now and I don’t feel like I missed out on anything. Apparently their mirrorless cameras are pretty good but I honestly can’t imagine owning a Sony thing.

I’m not boycotting Sony, I just associate their name with crappy products.

[jazzyjackson]

I have a Sony CD player from 1984 sitting on my desk, the D5. It's pretty sensitive to scratches on disks (no error correction) but otherwise works flawlessly.

The mirrorless cameras aren't just pretty good, they're the new standard unless you have Canon/Nikon brand loyalty. I can't find the stat right away but IIRC Sony supplies more camera sensors than anyone else for smartphones (or maybe its just the high end ones)

I mean I'm not trying to change your mind, just adding my 2 cents that every piece of Sony hardware I've had was extremely well built and lasted years or decades. I have an old Minidisc player too I dig up every few years to listen to recordings I made back in high school.

[windex]

I got burnt by apple's airpods in a very similar way. The unavoidable firmware update made my Version1 airpods useless despite everything else being okay. I now actively avoid Apple products because they seem to not care. Same with the battery related slowing down of iphones. The new version of Airpods also did somehting scummy with the NC being toned down after an unavoidable firmware update.

Also, considering how much these thngs cost, too much money gets thrown out when just the inbuilt lithium batteries wear out eventually. I now avoid buying anything with embedded and unremovable batteries if possible.

[kristofferR]

You probably have a Sony sensor in your phone.

[emiliobumachar]

Well, one possible point of a boycott is to send a message to the extent possible. "Infecting users will ruin your brand" is one possible message. The brand's buyers also bought its legacy.

[aksjfnkajsnd]

Permanently removing yourself as a customer from a brand does not send a message. It's only good for making yourself feel good. If one wants to send a message, it's imperative to use collective action- organizing or joining an organized boycott. An organized boycott has a specific start and end date and its demands are publicly known. That way the owners of the company can see the dip in their charts.

[arghzzz]

Well, the people who boycott aren’t silent (see above). Maybe someone younger reading this thread thought “what rootkit?” and looked it up. Maybe now that person won’t buy Sony. I certainly don’t. You know Sony’s marketing research departments are aware that this is a thing. One of the great things about capitalism is consumer choice and the way a negative brand image actually hurts their bottom line and helps their competition. Imagine if Comcast had competitors :)

[moralestapia]

>I used to stay awake at night because it was finally quiet enough that I could concentrate.

Same here, particularly during a time when I was living in a noisy apartment building. It was particularly difficult for me as I didn't to take sleeping pills since I'm a bit against those things.

>Whoever cracks this particular nut without headphones and manages to create a bubble of 2 cubic meters or so that is silent from outside interference will make a lot of money.

One of the first things when I got myself an RTX 2080, was learning how to use the ray tracing APIs to develop an idea similar to what you mention. I was using the rays to model the wavefront of an arbitrary source of sound, and then, given a 3D scene of a "room" or whatever, visualize how this wave was traveling through the space and reflecting over surfaces with different parameters.

The point of this was to see if you could find/predict the spots in a room/house/building where noise is naturally damped. The visualization was very nice to look at as I modeled the wavefront as if it had an exaggerated effect over the diffraction of light on the air. I cannot find it now, but there used to be a 2000s or so tv ad for the Beolab 5 which looked very similar in essence, maybe also a bit like schlieren photography [1].

[1] https://ntts-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/t2p/prod/t2media/tops/img...

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> One of the first things when I got myself an RTX 2080, was learning how to use the ray tracing APIs to develop an idea similar to what you mention.

I love the hacker ethos here on HN. Most places, we would here about how high an fps a person obtained on their favorite game with the settings cranked up. Here on HN, we hear about using the ray tracing api to model sound. It is stuff like this that keeps me coming back: hearing how people are using tech in new, really cool ways!

[jacquesm]

HN is more than one thing to multiple people and those things do not have a very large overlap. I'd love it if we could extract out the hackers/makers portion of HN and give it it's own tab so that the threads there would become longer lived.

[jtms]

Did it not occur to you that the word “hacker” is in the name of the site?

[hinkley]

Amongst the stereotypical conference swag, there used to be a tiny fish-eye mirror with a notch out of the back, so that you could affix it over the corner of your monitor.

Poking around I couldn't find them, but there are rather a lot of tiny fish-eye mirrors being sold to affix to the top or corner of a car rear view mirror (so-called blindspot mirrors). Those should be in roughly the correct size classification.

[nimbix]

ThinkGeek used to sell them, but that's not much help since I just discovered that TG no longer exists...

[hinkley]

I discovered that before christmas. The Gamestop website is a joke, and ThinkGeek products don't fit well into it.

I really missed them on April Fool's Day this year. Like what's the point of even honoring the day if I don't get to start it by looking for the fake products in the TG catalog? Maybe I should just go back to bed.

[grugagag]

Any convex mirror would do [1],[7]

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/10cm-Diameter-Focal-Convex-Mirror-L...

[7] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Rear-View-Personal-Security-...

[amatecha]

K what? ThinkGeek is gone? Wow, and the website redirects me to EB Games Canada. RIP :(

[jacquesm]

That's neat and low-tech, I may just do that. Thank you!

[jayd16]

>used to be

Another victim of open office seating, I'm sure.

[hannasanarion]

No, victim of LCD technology. Those little mirror things are only stable on CRTs. If you want em to stay put on a flat screen, you need to glue it down.

[hwillis]

> Whoever cracks this particular nut without headphones and manages to create a bubble of 2 cubic meters or so that is silent from outside interference will make a lot of money.

You can tell roughly how far away a sound source is by measuring the curvature of the wavefront, since sound radiates out in a sphere. The farther away you are, the lower the parallax between two sensors.

If you have sensors with 20 cm separation (each ear) then you would need a minimum sample rate of 34.3 kHz to easily correlate sounds within 2 m. With 5 cm separation (to discriminate sounds coming from your sides), you'd need 550 kHz.

Since sound waves are ~10-10,000x lower frequency than that, you need to be able to measure pressure very precisely to distinguish two waves. Rough rule of thumb is 10x, so you'd need up to 1/50,000 precision microphones, or 16 bit. Thats an absolute minimum and you'd probably want ~20 bits.

You might need a DSP and this trick works much better with some high range microphones (electrets are maybe sufficient), but all of that is well within the range of possibility... so I'm kind of surprised nobody has done this yet. I might take a shot at it.

The tricky part is the noise floor, which is only 10-1000x (in terms of voltage from the microphone) below the things youre trying to measure. That means youve got to gather dozens to thousands of samples to determine what should get through, so you need to hear something for up to tenths of a second to decide to let it be audible.

> My 'ideal' soundsucker (sonic black hole) is a ceiling mounted device that projects a cone of silence. One possible way in which it could work is by using a phased array of speakers to 'fake' a larger one. But that ideal will likely never be reached due to limitations in physics, imagine the problem as applied to a wavy surface of water: create a wave pattern that cancels out the wavy surface in one circular area without touching the water directly.

You'd probably want a full network of microphones around your room for this to work, as standing waves will be set up at audio frequencies. It's nontrivial to handle reflections with data from a single spot.

You could do this if you could handle the reflections, but you would need sensors spread around the room (to detect sound before it was already in the cone) and it would only work at a single head height. You'd do it by intercepting the sound, sending opposite waves from above that reached the sound as it propagates across the silenced volume. If you're more than 10s of cm away from the band of silence, the desynchronization will start letting sound through.

It would also be less effective at higher frequencies unless you had head tracking, because the wavelength of sound is not far off from the size of your head.

[jacquesm]

Are you planning an experimental setup? I'd be happy to collaborate on something like this. Agreed about the sensors inside the room, you'd need them in more than one place and quite possibly also at multiple levels to be able to figure out the height of the transmitter. Ideally the sensors can be stuck on flat surfaces and go through a calibration routine where they 'chirp' at each other to figure out their relative positions.

Wireless is hard for this kind of stuff due to latency, wires are ugly but practical and for a first run I would definitely prefer a wired solution over none at all assuming it is even possible. An alternative configuration would be a cylindrical shape that is 'noise free', with speakers radiating outward, microphones would be set in a secondary circle around the first one.

I imagine this sort of setup would use a very large amount of computing power to make it work.

[hwillis]

Unfortunately I'm underwater on work and with my own stuff for the next many months... Electrical engineering is a time consuming side hustle.

Wireless only has latency if you let it! Plenty of bandwidth outside wifi and bluetooth stacks, and communication over infrared is always an option. You are correct that wifi and bluetooth have way too much latency, though- 50 ms is 15 meters of distance at the speed of sound.

Computing power is surprisingly relaxed. The problem of figuring out what waveforms to output from a line of speakers to create a given distribution of sounds is actually just a fourier transform, funnily enough. Creating a volume of sounds is just a 3d fourier transform. Both are unreasonably fast to compute, given how powerful they are.

If you want to know more about how the math works and what it applies to, check out fourier optics. IMO its one of the coolest natural phenomena.

[jacquesm]

Thank you for the pointers. This is all super interesting to me, both because I really am bothered by sound pollution on a daily basis and because I think we have all the parts in place to really deal with this, even if it is anything but a trivial problem. And in a way those are the best problems to be working on.

[Anechoic]

You can tell roughly how far away a sound source is by measuring the curvature of the wavefront, since sound radiates out in a sphere. The farther away you are, the lower the parallax between two sensors.

That only works in the free field. In a small room (defined as dimensions being larger than ~1/6th to 100% of a wavelength) you no longer have waves, the entire room is pressurized. And as you mentioned, modal behavior is also an issue.

If you're trying to measure the parallax of outdoor (free field) waves, that works in a truly free field, but once you have reflections (from, say, the ground) you have to account for that as well.

[hwillis]

You are referring to the reactive near field region, lambda/2pi, which is used for antenna characterization. At the lower end of human hearing (20-40 Hz, using 40) that figure is 1.36 meters. Any room larger than that -literally all of them, unless your ceiling is very low- will propagate a traveling pressure wave instead of just pressurizing.

Further, that figure isn't very helpful for fluid acoustics. Within the equivalent distance you instead would get tons of nonlinear effects, because fluid flow dominates acoustic transmission. In addition to heavily changing transducer loading, things like vorticity also start to dominate. The net effect is that near field issues arise much earlier, at more like a third of a wavelength. Still, only the very lowest audible waves and quite small rooms create non-acoustic behavior.

> once you have reflections (from, say, the ground) you have to account for that as well.

Ish. Only for quite high frequency sounds which change very quickly. Otherwise reflections tend to mostly just overlap with the primary source. For low frequency waves the distance between the microphone and your ears is much smaller than the wavelength, so you don't need to worry about multiple waves very much.

[danielheath]

> Only for quite high frequency sounds which change very quickly.

I have young kids at home. Those are the exact sounds I’d want to cancel!

[jacquesm]

That's still < 4 KHz.

[nordsieck]

> Whoever cracks this particular nut without headphones and manages to create a bubble of 2 cubic meters or so that is silent from outside interference will make a lot of money.

This exists today, it's just not a device, it's building materials. The more sound deadening you want, the more expensive the room will be. It's possible to deaden sound in this manner to the extent that many people feel uncomfortable[1].

___

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber

[gambiting]

Yes, but the entire premise of this article is: can you do this, but also keep your windows open. No amount of sound deadening will help you if you have a window opened to the outside.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

I suspect noise-insulated fans that let air in with the window closed will be simpler and cheaper.

[hwillis]

There is no such thing. You can have quiet fans, but there are no fans that block noise. It is not possible to do so; the best you can do is long baffling. An example would be central air in an apartment building: the vents are very long and do not join each other until they reach a central point, which helps attenuate sound. This is a very inefficient process, and the baffle has to be much longer than the distance you'd have to stand in a free space to not hear anything.

[danielheath]

Depends how much air you need to move.

For one person, a baffle of 10x 1cm sheets of plywood with a 2cm air clearance will do wonders (works out to be approx a 30cm cube with a 30x2cm slot at the front and back).

You can push ample air for one into a studio without any audible sound getting through.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

There are companies that sell these (mostly to keep homes habitable when a new noise source like an airport runway affects them). I don't know how they work, but I'd assume that they pull the air through baffles and/or noise-absorbing material.

[NickNameNick]

Could you put active noise cancelling into the ductwork?

[hwillis]

sure, but the whole point was not using noise cancellation.

[aahhahahaaa]

Yeah sure but in the meantime there are hundreds of millions of us living in existing housing stock (and many rent), if a room device worked nearly as well as noise cancelling headphones I'd pay $2k for it. That's still fairly cheaper than renovating and soundproofing an entire room.

[nitrogen]

We should still press for better soundproofing and sound management in new buildings and communities whenever we can.

[aahhahahaaa]

Yeah that's fair, on the other end I think cities should take noise pollution and reduction seriously. Banning things like fireworks and gas powered leaf blowers can have a bigger impact on mental health than many people realize.

[shahar2k]

as someone who sleeps with bose qc35s on I have intermittently also used cheap construction hearing protection and found those to be just as effective (with the difference ben that the passive construction headphones do BETTER but the quality of the sound is less calm if that makes sense, the bose are also slightly more comfortable due to being smaller and having less pressure)

I'm assuming one of the biggest things limiting sound cancelling is processing speed? being able to react to changing waveforms as they arrive at the ears

[kranner]

> I have intermittently also used cheap construction hearing protection and found those to be just as effective

I use both (Bose QC35ii and 3M Peltor X5A) and I find the Bose is better in two ways: ear comfort and it doesn't trigger my tinnitus. It seems the Bose lets in just enough ambient sound that my brain doesn't go into a tinnitus-crescendo-loop.

Also, of course, the construction headphones don't play bluetooth audio.

[nl]

Processing speed isn't a huge issue anymore.

Fitting both microphones and speakers in the device is the current challenge. The Bose device shows we are very close to solving that too, and the rapid shirking of wireless in-ear headphones is helping.

[jacquesm]

Maybe the speakers could serve as microphones at the same time that they are driven by measuring their back-emf?

[WizardAustralis]

Same here with the boycott, caved and got some NC headphone and they live up to the hype. Said company have always been masters of audio.

[StavrosK]

Does anyone else get this weird nauseating feeling from NC headphones? It's been a while since I wore some, but the silence felt... loud.

[Tempest1981]

Here is some info on stuffed ear syndrome https://www.soundstagesolo.com/index.php/features/178-eardru...

Mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22078517

[StavrosK]

Huh, that's very interesting, thanks!

[coldtea]

Not really, but I do get tired of wearing most headphones for prolonger periods... It's also difficult to lay in a pillow to sleep with NC headphones.

Airpods fare a little better, but I'd like something even more improved... if it could somehow let fresh air in and cool my ears a little too, that would be great...

[robmsmt]

Yes this is a known phenomenon, it's on the rare side but definitely exists. I have it too.

[milkytron]

> I'll have to figure out some kind of early warning system for approaching people.

I put my sunglasses under my monitor with the lenses facing me and whatever is behind me. A rounded mirror works well too.

[anonmidniteshpr]

Sony's ANC isn't anywhere nearly as good as Bose's. I'm not a fan of Bose for anything other than aircraft headsets but the QC35 I is as good as consumer ANC gets.

[mamcx]

> spent some money on a noise cancelling headphone Which one? I also facing a noise issue with some people that move closer, and getting crazy...

[sqlacid]

I'm not OP, but I'm sure he's talking Sony, I did a similar boycott (rootkit on Sony music CD's), but recently bought WH-1000XM3 and the NC is phenomenal, battery life is very good; very comfortable and lightweight; not sure I could sleep with them on though.

[mgkimsal]

Can't say about the Sony, but you can't sleep in Bose QC20. Well... you can, and they were pretty comfortable, but they'll very likely break pretty quickly. I went through several pair until I finally twigged that sleeping in them was probably the root cause. Have had fewer problems with the QC20 since not sleeping with them in.

[TylerE]

Really, for sleeping just get a good set of passive earmuffs like shooters use. Cost about $20 and will provide 25-30db of real noise reduction (and unlike active NC will also work on non-periodic sounds like sirens or revving car engines). Can double up with foam earplugs too for even more blockage.

[dahfizz]

Where do you people live that you need ear muffs capable of deafening gun shots just to sleep??

[TylerE]

Anywhere noisy? When used around guns that don't (nearly) deafen them, just bring them down to non-damage causing levels.

[mgkimsal]

FWIW, I use cheap dollar store headphones - $4-5 - with white noise from the phone to sleep. they typically last 1-3 months.

[nitrogen]

I found that my Bose NC headphones would produce deafening feedback squeal if I rolled onto my side, so beware that possibility.

[mgkimsal]

oh yes, without a doubt, I'd noticed that in some cases, and eventually, if/when they 'crack', it's just a tiny sliver of a hairline crack in one which lets air in and produces that same loud feedback squeal. ouch!

[cjsawyer]

If you sleep on your back or stomach, airpods Pro would be great for you. I side sleep so they’re not an option for me

[samatman]

The batteries on Airpods Pro don't last long enough to cover a night's sleep.

They have blessed me with some blissful naps, however. Possibly their greatest superpower is making robot vacuums disappear.

[the_pwner224]

As others have mentioned, the Sony 1000XM3. However, while doing research on this I found a few YouTube videos on it from a channel called Jim'sReviewRoom or similar, where he put microphones inside the headphones so you can listen to what it's actually like, and it seems the XM3s have a huge overemphasis on bass. I ended up buying the Bose NC700 which have a much more neutral sound profile, and slightly better ANC too iirc. They are a bit more expensive though.

[fomine3]

I bought WH-1000XM3 and satisfied for superior NC quality but I don't like its sound profile like boosting bass and poor other sounds while boosting bass.

Finally I realized that I need NC for removing some fan noise like HVAC and server but I don't need superior one. I got Beoplay H9i for $300 and satisfied for both. Fewer battery life is cons.

[throwaway743]

Sennheiser earbuds and hunting earmuffs. Beats anything out there and at a better price.

[gorbypark]

I’m going to go out in a limb and say Sony XM3s, since the comment says something about a root kit, which I always associate with Sony. I have the XM3s and they are pretty darn good.

[mamcx]

Oh, I was asking about what he actually buy!

[Tade0]

For me it got to a point where I hate being outside without my headphones.

The silence is pretty addictive.

[mtrycz2]

> Whoever cracks this particular nut

Why not just put a mirror on your desk?

[jacquesm]

Ah sorry, that was in reference to the noise cancellation problem, not in reference to the creeping up problem. I could have worded that better.

[on_and_off]

which headphones do you use to sleep ?

I have NE headphones but they are too big for me to comfortable sleep with them (I tend to turn in my sleep)

[taf2]

Which brand did you buy?

[dylan604]

Root kit debacle suggests Sony

[ww520]

The Sony WH-1000XM3 Headphone most likely. It's pretty good and there're substantial discount during sales.