I ordered a cheap chinese optical refractometer from Amazon to use for convenience instead of a traditional hydrometer. It seemed accurate enough after calibration, I don’t expect magic or lab results. Ballpark is fine by me....
I think the “people are free to believe what they want to believe” is a mistake. This is the very statement that relativitises opinions and belief systems with facts and creates the illusion that they are all equal.
Look at the “facts don’t care about feelings” crowd that believe wholeheartedly that statements pandering to their feelings are facts and disregard any actual facts as fake news. I don’t think it’s because they decided one day to pick and choose what is a fact and what is not, but they actually can’t tell that there is a difference in opinions, beliefs and facts in the first place.
People need to accept that sometimes the truth is painful, that it contradicts what you want it to be, and worst of all - that you may have been wrong.
Edit: that said, I think people are free to believe whatever they want to believe when it comes to unprovable existential esoterica like personal values, afterlife, religion, whatever. As long they accept it is a personal belief and not an universal truth.
In 2022, a Texas family filed a lawsuit against Apple for damaging their son’s hearing after an Amber Alert went off while he was wearing Airpods. According to Google, the maximum volume of phone headphones is around 105 decibels. The family are claiming that the son now requires hearing aids after his eardrum ruptured....
Haha, uh oh, I will try to not take offence. I’m in no way an audiophile, though I do have a nice stereo system for listening to music rather than listening to the equipment. I did venture into doing sound based arts and installations and stuff when I was younger though so I do have some insights of how sound works. It was a “colleague” l knew back then that had the injury mentioned from an incident in a sound studio. If memory serves me right it was an accidental digital feedback loop that hit the ears like a brick wall and despite it was less than a second it was enough to cause permanent damage.
Acoustic noise is what you hear outdoors from the wind, waves, leaves, whatever. An absolute myriad of tiny impact noises and scrapes and brushes and whatnot mixed together that become a dense complex texture that can be characterized as noise, although technically it is just a massive amount of single individual sounds. Acoustic noise can be found in many frequency ranges but human ears are generally good at handling with the common organic ones. Thanks, evolution!
Digitally generated noise. A sequence of random^1^ values that plays at the frequency rate of whatever means of digital to analog conversion is used. Digitally generated white noise consists statistically^2^ of all frequencies within the range of the sample rate at all volumes reproducible by the bit depth.
Digitally generated noise^3^ is not limited by common physics for generating sound waves^4^, but can be of any frequency range at any amplitude, i.e. pressure differential, within the range of the means of digital to analogue conversion and playback. That is, potentially in a spectral distribution of sound that is straight up painful for human ears.
However, the big difference is that digital noise is not a mix of endless impact noises or brushes or whatever that each follow an envelope curve, but are rather a sequence of shifting values without transitory ramping, i.e. pulses. That is, a sequence of shifts in air pressure that is literally as fast as it can possibly be.
Note that in the case of glitching^5^, the digitally generated noise may be limited only by the physical properties of the hardware and goes beyond what amplitudes the equipment is artificially limited to for pleasant and non harmful playback of music.
Can headphones or earbuds or loudspeakers reproduce a digitally generated noise in frequencies that are painful in amplitudes that are harmful for the human hearing apparatus? Oh, I think they do.
Anyway, I trust you are correct in your other point. It seems I used the wrong medical terminology as I was silly enough to speak in vernacular as non native English speaker without medical expertise. I expected to get away with a delirious misnomer to call years of continuous tinnitus and distorted audio perception a permanent hearing damage when it is clearly not.
My apologies for causing confusion.
^1^ Since attention to details are important; Most likely pseudo random generated. I know. I know.
^2^ Details, people.
^3^ Any digital noise. Audio that has been distorted until it has a frequency distribution that can be confused as pure noise, a data stream not intended for audio playback, a software/hardware glitch that flips significant bytes rapidly enough to cause a sequence of pops in such density it is perceived as a burst of noise. Whatever, use your imagination for further examples.
^4^ In our living conditions, on planet earth, at this time.
^5^ Generally speaking, not specifically to any example mentioned in this context.
Dude, I’m not trying to speak like a acoustician. At closest I’m speaking as an engineer with some knowledge of sound and acoustics from ages ago or maybe a musician, I don’t know. If you expect random people to use professional terminology to have a conversation it’s really your own mistake. I mean it in a constructive way from my own experience of taking with people on whatever I happen to know more about than them.
The contrast of a pulse as a rapid shift of air pressure and multiple ones in rapid succession of high amplitude in the context of causing damage to the inner ear? I am honestly struggling how to explain it any clearer.
Ok, I’ll give it one more go.
As you say, it is not important what or how the pulse or burst of pulses are created, but digital to analog conversion of a signal can create impulses that are literally as rapid as can be by the laws of physics that are extremely rare organically and in particular by amplitudes that you get in headphones. A burst of such impulses, I’m avoiding the previously used terminology, of random but high frequency and amplitude is like having a tiny plunger jerking like crazy in your ear like nothing the ear has ever evolved to be able to deal with.
Not because digital vs analogue, vinyl vs CD vs mp3, gold plated monster network cables or helium cooled SPDIF connectors. No magical thinking. Only changes in air pressure. Changes in air pressure of the very fast and strong variety.
Yes, we agree on most everything and my understanding of both physics, mechanics and biology seem to agree with yours.
I guess the one main disagreement is if a pulse, either single or repeated, might potentially be more harmful than a sine wave of a single frequency. According to the teachings I’ve had, or my recollection thereof, a pulse or impulse may carry the sum (or zero sum) difference if any ramping wave, but the nature of the impulse it literally hits differently. A transition of difference in state versus a forceful immediate change. A push or a slap. Or a push and pull versus a slap and yank, should we speak of a complete cycle.
This was what I attempted to illustrate with the plunger example. If you are familiar with a plunger, you’ll know that the method of operation is not to keep a harmonious cycle, but to yank it aggressively in order to transmit a whole lot of impulse-like energy and forcefully release buildup or blockage in the pipes. My argument is that should we have two identical sinks with identical blockage and we’d manage to conduct an experiment where both plungers operate at identical frequency and amplitude, but that one plunger pumps in a harmonious cycle while the other does a pulse-like push pull, the latter would yield more successful results. Hence my conclusion is that despite the state being identical before and after, theoretically the amount of energy may be the same, there is a difference in how the energy is transferred depending on the curvature of the actuation on the plunger. Or the speaker cone. Though through air instead of water and air compress while water doesn’t. But still.
So the frequency of a repeated waveform and the shape of the waveform are not interchangeable. I’m sound the frequency carries the root tone, the shape carries the multiples. A perfect impulse (or other digitally generated waveforms) carry in theory an infinite amount of frequencies. Again, carry may be a misnomer depending on the discipline and of course the perfect is unobtainable so in practice the frequency spectrum is limited to one bandwidth and spectrum or another. Not that really had any bearing in our discussion.
Finally, I disagree with the argument of the engineering in headphones. Those limits are with respects of quality of sound reproduction. They are not a guarantee of hard limit of potential output and not intended to be. I don’t engineer speakers but it’s quite common paradigm in engineering in general that you benefit in quality and reliability should you accept a modest degree of unused overhead. Mistakes and bugs happen and it is especially vulnerable when it is reliant on hardware and software in the earpiece itself, as with my personal experience of faulty earbuds that emitted bursts of painful high frequency noise despite playback being of moderate volume. There are no intermediate steps of filtering, as with analogue gear, so should a faulty component cause a pop, it may well do so from the one extreme to the other.
I apologize for my frustration. I’ve been experiencing lately that I try to communicate one thing and the recepient keep projecting it into their own frame of reference and insist I’m talking of something that I’m not. I’m a bit touchy and I’m sorry about that.
hmmm (lemmy.world)
What if the great filter of humanity is to overcome it's own nature that made it the dominant species of the planet and what if that is the universal great filter that makes the cosmos silent
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"Pipe" (lemmy.world)
Everything on the Internet is true (lemmy.world)
You think people do that? Go on the internet and tell lies?
Of course (lemmy.world)
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What's the most embarrassing thing about you?
Refractometers
I ordered a cheap chinese optical refractometer from Amazon to use for convenience instead of a traditional hydrometer. It seemed accurate enough after calibration, I don’t expect magic or lab results. Ballpark is fine by me....
Using Ubuntu may give off hipster vibes to the average PC user, but within the Linux community its has the opposite effect.
hot take?...
If somebody spends the whole day watching fox or religious propaganda, gets worked up and all he can think of is owning a liberal or converting an unbeliever, is this person a victim or just gullible?
Let me explain the question:...
Is a sound level of 105 decibels for a few seconds enough to rupture a person's eardrum?
In 2022, a Texas family filed a lawsuit against Apple for damaging their son’s hearing after an Amber Alert went off while he was wearing Airpods. According to Google, the maximum volume of phone headphones is around 105 decibels. The family are claiming that the son now requires hearing aids after his eardrum ruptured....