loudness + bright lights = eat it and get out
The shift over time appears to be a dwindling respect for people.
How Restaurants Got So Loud
131–140 of 319 posts
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does wearing noise-cancelling headphones actually protect your ears? My understanding of noise-cancelling(at least the active kind) is that it would play the noise you would normally hear but in a mirrored fashion to dampen out the noise you'd hear. I'm just wondering if that would protect your ears, do as much harm, or double it.
Noise is noise, and if you cancel it out it's gone. Sound waves obey the superposition principle, which means that if I take 1 psi and superimpose -1 psi, I get 1-1=0 psi.
That's true, of course. But it's much harder to actively cancel higher frequencies. This is why noise cancelling works brilliantly on an airplane (relatively low frequency background noise) but it does almost nothing to filter out the sounds of conversations around you.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#133There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books. One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter. They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing thei…
It's funny how obvious some people make it that they don't want business. I don't really care about power plugs or wifi when I visit a café (my battery running out is a great motivator + natural time limit, I can tether to my phone for internet) but I always pay close attention to how a new café is outfitted.
Some cafés that genuinely want your business make plugs available to the customers, some will even go as far as to put in plugs with USB adapters as well because they are making it clear: I want you to be here. Other places have no special extra plugs (just what you'd expect for a room that size) and that's fine, but some places have intentionally NO plugs and that's not an accident, that's by design.
Same thing with the wifi policy. I don't care if you have wifi, or don't have wifi, but if you aggressively block ~50% of all sites, seemingly at random, or have a time limit on usage…the message it clear, you only have Wifi so you can say "we have wifi" but you don't really mean it.
I only hope to patronize places that are welcoming, even if I'm not relying on those facilities that day. Those are the kinds of places I want to stay in business.
The kinds of places with limited internet and no plugs are the kinds of places that I don't want to be in business tomorrow, so I had better make sure not to give them a penny today.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#134Note that restaurants are not loud if you go to Europe (except for the UK) or Asia. I don’t know why it’s so loud in the US.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#135There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books. One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter. They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing thei…
Does wearing noise-cancelling headphones actually protect your ears? My understanding of noise-cancelling(at least the active kind) is that it would play the noise you would normally hear but in a mirrored fashion to dampen out the noise you'd hear. I'm just wondering if that would protect your ears, do as much harm, or double it.
I don't know if it truly protects them from damage overall. That would take science. See "complicated" below :)
But the basic answer to your question is, no, it doesn't double the sound energy.
To the extent the headphones are successful at creating an inverse sound to cancel incoming sound, that will reduce the sound energy reaching the inner ears. The sound and its "mirror" don't add up to increase energy, rather, the energy reaching the ears is reduced where waves cancel.
(The same thing happens in, say, optical interference patterns, and coastal waves. All the energy which seems to mysteriously disappear where waves cancel is, in fact, accounted for by increasing at the places the same waves interfere contructively. In the case of headphones, it's going to be rather more subtly accounted for either elsewhere in the spatial pattern around and on the speaker, and/or by the speaker acting as a net energy absorber.)
Active noise-cancellers also have a passive component. The big squishy cups on mine (Bose QC-35). These of course reduce incoming sound energy too.
But it's more complicated than that. Ears have a sort of physical volume control of their own (using tiny muscles), which reacts to the sound level. As far as I'm aware, damage is more likely deeper in the ear, past that stage.
So anything which alters the ear's coarse volume response might produce a more complicated damage response than simply measuring incoming levels would suggest.
I apply that theory: I sometimes listen to music on the headphones, in high volume environments. This seems to mask out the environmental noise better, and my theory is this isn't just psychoacoustic masking, it's causing my ears to block out more sound physically, helping to protect them physically. When doing this I listen to music which has a consistent sound level, rather than, say, a podcast or something subtle like classical.
I've read that noise-cancellers produce a hiss which annoys some people. I can't say I've noticed much volume to the hiss, and I used to assume it was residual signal from the signal processing. But it may be that's intended to interact with the ear muscles too.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#136Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year. It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the build…
The architectural style and decorations are part of the problem as the article says. An equally big one though is, as you say, the apparent need to have blaring music, TVs, etc. just about every place.
I was just at an event a month or so ago that had a DJ in the exhibit hall blasting music at a volume that was actively preventing people from having easy conversations. Which is sort of the purpose of being there. Not listening to some DJ who apparently has to work corporate events to pay the rent but nonetheless thinks people are there to listen to him.
After complaining to the organizers, they turned things down a bit but this is a pervasive problem. Even when I'm eating by myself, I still find the music in some restaurants both annoyingly loud and not what I would consider pleasant background music for a meal.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#137Note that restaurants are not loud if you go to Europe (except for the UK) or Asia. I don’t know why it’s so loud in the US.
it's quite venue dependent. in some italian trattoria you can get people almost screaming at their table, even without a loud music, because they need to overcome the loud mouths at the nearby table to have a conversation.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#138There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books. One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter. They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing thei…
It's funny how obvious some people make it that they don't want business. I don't really care about power plugs or wifi when I visit a café (my battery running out is a great motivator + natural time limit, I can tether to my phone for internet) but I always pay close attention to how a new café is outfitted. Some cafés that genuinely want your business make plugs available to the customers, some will even go as far…
In Palo Alto, there’s a cafe (more or less) call Hana House that has three big sections. One of those sections is very comfy, quiet, has proper acoustic design, lots of outlets, and, gasp charges for time.
It’s actually a fairly nice model. If you want to work in someone’s commercial space, paying for it is entirely reasonable.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#139There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books. One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter. They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing thei…
It's funny how obvious some people make it that they don't want business. I don't really care about power plugs or wifi when I visit a café (my battery running out is a great motivator + natural time limit, I can tether to my phone for internet) but I always pay close attention to how a new café is outfitted. Some cafés that genuinely want your business make plugs available to the customers, some will even go as far…
They do want business, just not the kind that people who sit and stay bring. When you’re trying to improve your sales velocity, keeping existing customers moving so as not to dissuade new ones from coming in makes sense.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#140There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books. One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter. They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing thei…
It's funny how obvious some people make it that they don't want business. I don't really care about power plugs or wifi when I visit a café (my battery running out is a great motivator + natural time limit, I can tether to my phone for internet) but I always pay close attention to how a new café is outfitted. Some cafés that genuinely want your business make plugs available to the customers, some will even go as far…
John Lawrence Aspden on eating-place pathology:
http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com/2018/09/do-right-thin...