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I can second the author's conclusion. I fly regularly and have noticed in the last 6 months, PA systems have become much louder than usual on most flights. It's especially bad if you have headphones plugged in to the XM radio -- they don't seem to have separate volume controls for the PA speakers and hardwired headphones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is work being done on crowdsourcing ambient sound: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520606/noise-pollution-... It's a neat problem. You can turn on smartphone microphones and listen for noise levels to measure for noise pollution and law violations, etc. However, you have to develop algorithms that filter our human conversations (for this application linked above), and the privacy implications are astronomi…
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I've always wanted to buy some good earplugs to protect my hearing from noisy environments (es. near public transport in the city). Does anyone have a product they recommend?
I've always wanted to buy some good earplugs to protect my hearing from noisy environments (es. near public transport in the city). Does anyone have a product they recommend?
I've always wanted to buy some good earplugs to protect my hearing from noisy environments (es. near public transport in the city). Does anyone have a product they recommend?
There are also much more expensive concert earplugs for musicians, which do an even better job at preserving the spectrum, but I'm not that picky.
I can second the author's conclusion. I fly regularly and have noticed in the last 6 months, PA systems have become much louder than usual on most flights. It's especially bad if you have headphones plugged in to the XM radio -- they don't seem to have separate volume controls for the PA speakers and hardwired headphones.
I'll hazard a guess--and I might be completely wrong--that there is some sort of legal reason for this. Maybe there have been lawsuits in which people claimed not to have heard the in-flight announcements, and therefore, did not feel not bound to them. I dunno. It just seems as if there's a reason for this. Not necessarily a good reason, but a reason.
Anyhow, this is 100% armchair speculation. It just seems like the sort of thing that could have happened.
The PA when heard over the headphones (when watching a movie, etc.) is even worse - I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 100dB. Sometimes a movie has quiet audio, or quiet moments requiring you to turn up the volume a lot. More than once I have been painfully ear-raped by the flight attendant PA system in my earphones for this reason. Just another instance of outrageously bad customer service in the airline industr…
The PA when heard over the headphones (when watching a movie, etc.) is even worse - I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 100dB. Sometimes a movie has quiet audio, or quiet moments requiring you to turn up the volume a lot. More than once I have been painfully ear-raped by the flight attendant PA system in my earphones for this reason. Just another instance of outrageously bad customer service in the airline industr…
Then turn the airplane's volume to max and adjust your inline volume to a comfortable level. In my experience, the announcements will then also be at a comfortable level.