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Tl;dr:

Bathtubs started small due to size constraints of rooms, but got smaller because it’s cheaper to manufacture and handle smaller tubs.

#savedyouaclick

But, but… Dragging things out forever in court is his only move?

Unfortunately I don’t agree.

Good reasons to omit details include brevity, legibility, pedagogy and scope.

Showing the supporting evidence for all steps in an evidence chain is simply not feasible, and we commonly have to accept that a certain presupposed level of knowledge as well as ambiguity is necessary. And much of the challenge is to be precise enough in the things that need precision.

You’re right to be sceptical until more data is presented, but saying no claim of progress is ever true is quite obviously a gross misrepresentation of our current reality. You are doing this on digital devices interconnected with millions of users ar staggering speed and latency. Every part of which are scientific claims.

Thank you for taking the time to explain, we do indeed seem to be closer to each other’s understanding.

So the frequency of a repeated waveform and the shape of the waveform are not interchangeable. Hence my conclusion is that despite… theoretically the amount of energy may be the same, there is a difference in how the energy is transferred.

This is contrary to what I remember having been taught about biomechanics and hearing, but as memory and understanding is unreliable, I’ll cede that I’d need to look up a reference for better precision.

The crux of my argument hinges on there not being a difference. And my understanding of the physiology is that the hairs will primarily bend with pressure, and exhaust with flexion (repeated bending cycles leads to breaking), within the limits of survivable amplitudes.

If there isn’t a difference, my argument continues in that it’s physically very difficult to create a pulse with a ramp up faster than the 20 kHz the ear is evolved to take, that’s 0,05 ms, not many physical processes go that fast to create a pressure wave and those that do typically get dispersed very quickly, unless as part of a harmonic excitation.

But of course all that is irrelevant if that’s not how the ear reacts.

headphones. Those limits are with respects of quality of sound reproduction.

You may be right, the details of what the measure represents haven’t been presented.

From context where it’s being argued as a legal argument, I have assumed it to be part of the safety design, and not of sound reproduction.

Ear phones/plugs have no business reproducing good quality sound at >100 dBA, and would be sued into oblivion as the hearing damage and tinnitus reports rolled in. Which to be fair, is what the OP is about.

Having a physical limit at 105 dB would then be congruent with the same unused overhead you refer to, as it corresponds to a doubling of potential sound pressure, and is about typical as overcapacity for high fidelity engineering applications.

faulty earbuds that emitted bursts of painful high frequency noise despite playback being of moderate volume.

105 dB would probably be painful, and as a surprise would be jarring, which contributes to the perceived risk of injury. It should also not be loud enough to cause lasting physical injury, and you’d typically have full functionality within two weeks.

An earbud/head phone can be designed failsafe, so that casing, driver, or most commonly membranes will break at too high amplitudes. If nothing else, it will be limited by the amount of energy available, which for wireless or portable headphones is typically very low. I can’t vouch for the specific gear in the OP, but given the rarity of recalled gear due to injury, I’d guess it would be widespread industry practice to design it fail safe.

What I’m saying is that it can still be hardware/physically limited at 105 dB, even though it gave a painful squelch before breaking.

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.

I totally get it, it’s a built in flaw of the Lemmy/social media format. Too little supportive language cues, and too little time and/or investment to actually listen.

I appreciate you having the patience to talk this through with me.

Well said!

But good sir, a rapid change in pressure is the same as a high frequency sound wave.

It makes little difference if it has a long duration (a tone, or noise) or short duration (a puff of air).

And the higher frequencies neither carry more energy, nor are more damaging than lower frequencies.

But you are right in that the ramp up in amplitude matters, and which could theoretically be over a very short time period either in frequency or duration with the same amount of damage. In ear plug practice this would however be limited by the electrical pulse in the driver (both wattage and Hz), and the viscosity of air flowing through the back of the speaker cavity.

A significant ramp up is what is typically meant by high maximum instantaneous sound levels, LpFMax, and those are typically long term damaging at >115 dBA, unless other risk factors are present.

(Just to be overly clear, I’m not faulting your use of language (once I understood what you meant), you’re doing admirably, and I fully understand that language is malleable and context dependent - I’m not hung up on the words.

I’m trying to get to your understanding of the physics behind it, which I read as a little muddled. It could still be due to language barrier, but what I pick up is some confusion in the differences between frequency domain and physical domain.)

On the other topics, which you seem to understand, but I’ll try to explain again to see if our models can better converge:

On the topic of the tiny plunger, this is actually how virtually all speaker elements generate sound. You have a little element, called the driver, pushing on a membrane in the frequency and amplitude you’re trying to convey. The driver and membrane can’t be infinitely flexible or have infinite plunging depth, lest they need infinite energy to push an infinite amount of air, and so are typically carefully designed to certain specs, called dynamic range (frequency/speed of driver), and sound power (amplitude of driver).

As to what the ear is designed for, it is actually very well protected against high frequencies, this is a large part of why we can’t hear higher frequencies than ~20 kHz. But you are right that it’s not made for sudden loud noises (a steep ramp up in amplitude). And although I don’t actually know, my motivated guess would be that human reaction time for the protection against sudden loud noise is at best 1/8 th of a second.

I’m also not a native english speaker, but I am however a professional acoustician. I’m not opposed to you defining your terms in a way uncommon to both acoustics and audionomy, and with this explanation they’re clear, although I don’t understand how the contrast is relevant to the topic. No matter how the signal is created, it will have to be a pressure wave of amplitude and frequency, travelling through a medium, like air, to reach an ear.

However,

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?

Headphones and earbuds certainly can produce harmful amplitudes, that is why most of them are designed to be physically limited not to be able to. This is what the upper limit OP mentioned usually refers to, the maximum physical level the ear plug can produce. Limited by available airflow, membrane, driver, power, and seal.

Excellent question!

The energy is typically dispersed by hairs moving, muscles moving, eardrum moving, soft tissue deforming, the hearing system behind the ear drum, your eustachian tube, the movement of the ear pod against your outer ear, and the imperfect seal of the ear pod.

105 dB is probably the max sound pressure level at optimal seal.

Also, it’s easy to verify, as resonance is literally the reason why violins, guitars and pianos have a ringing sound. Whereas regular sounds do not, because your ears don’t have audible resonances (they do have resonances in other frequencies though, just as your eye sockets, lungs and other stuff).

You’re almost right in so many aspects it unfortunately becomes utterly wrong.

Digital and analog noise aren’t real things, or at least not the words that are used for it. Digital and analog noise has to do with signals and frequency spectrums, not with the actual pressure differentials that are physical sound waves.

But there is a similar concept, where a thing happening can create a strong pressure wave, typically called an air blast, and are common when talking about blasting and other explosions (where the pressure wave is significant, but not really a noise). Ear pods do not create a significant pressure wave.

The ear does have tiny hairs for hearing, and they do break at sudden and loud noises (@soleinvictus explained our defence mechanisms brilliantly in another reply) and also at repeated exposure to loud noises. A breakage typically results in partial, temporary, hearing loss and “ringing in your ears”, whereas permanent death of the sensory cells leads to tinnitus, which isn’t the same as hearing damage/loss.

I can answer this conclusively for you, ear canals do not act as neither echo chambers or are subject to resonances for audible frequencies.

If they did you would have a literal ringing in your ears.

Not typically. Instantaneous noise levels of Lp 115 dBA have a significant risk of permanent injury, and long term exposure above Lp,den 50 dBA (especially at night) will shorten your life.

But hearing damage is cumulative, if you go about shooting guns without protection or other noise pollution, you might get injured at lower levels.

Actually it’s the opposite, skepticism isn’t the questioning, it’s the proportioning of conviction to the amount of available evidence.

Disbelieving the claim of the Big Bang might be warranted, depending on the level of personal ignorance, but there’s much much more evidence for a big bang than an “eternal, ever expanding void” supported by tingling feet.

Feel free to refer to the Wikipedia article on Scepticism, and better sources.

Do you have evidence to support your position? Or is this just wishful thinking?

And also, the bear isn’t out to cause trouble, not worth the hassle to fight anything when you’re out exploring.

Cats don’t fight to take anyone down, they mostly fight to scare eachother off, as they are so fragile as beings, both in attack and defence

Might be that they just transfer that to anything they want to get rid of.

Had my elderly, whole life indoors cat stare down a British Mastiff (130 kg dog, bred for guard duty), and consequently train it what surfaces she was allowed on and not.

I don’t know where you’re at, but around here there are stores with refurbished phones, where you can play with last year’s models, and buy them at low-mid range prices. Sometimes they have 2-3 year old phones at a steal, some of the online ones have generous return policies as well, where you can try it for a bit and then send it back.

I’ve had Samsung androids for over a decade, and they’ve had smoother animation and less loading lag since about iPhone 4 (which I’ve used for work in the same period). They’ve also had comparable feedback on presses.

Then again, the HTC androids I’ve tried occasionally have been real bad, so I get the question.

You shouldn’t have to rely on the words of Internet random though, go try one out.

On the topic of pie of the week.

You can make dishes with similarly upcycled leftovers in burritos, stir frys, pizza, pasty/pirog, and often in a pasta and/or au gratin (with melted cheese on top). Although I find none of them are quite as versatile as the quiche, they are excellent for variety.