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The volume is too damn high on flights

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Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#71

Post by batbomb »

azth wrote: post #57
nate_meurer wrote: post #46

My comment from another thread on this subject: --- Earplugs! I bought a box of foam earplugs that has supplied me for years now. I cut them in half; half an earplug is the perfect length for unobtrusive everyday wear. I have quantities of half-earplugs stashed in all my pants pockets, in my car, my work bag, and in a little container on my keychain. I wear them in the car, on planes, at the shooting range, when grin…

> I wear them in the car Hopefully not while driving though :)

Deaf people would disagree

Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#72

Post by suvelx »

Recently spent over 48 hours in the wonderful company of Cathay Pacific. Their announcements (and especially their English announcements) are always a quiet high-speed mumble. 10/10 would (try to) listen to them again.

Everything else was terrible.

Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#73

Post by superme »

sukilot wrote: post #47
superme wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do it on purpose. The less patrons talk to each other the more alcohol they drink. That's why the music volume is increased as the night progresses. They get them into the establishment, customers start drinking, eventually it gets to a point where they can't hear each other so they just focus on drinking. Not all places do this, just the places that are strongly focused on the profits.

Why would such a bar have any repeat customers? The music is loud at a bar because the people are loud because the bar is crowded. If bars wanted to sell more drinks, they would have more bartenders to reduce the wait times.

There you go: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/jul/19/medicalresear...

It mainly happens in busy city bars/pubs, where repeat customers aren't so important.

Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#75

Post by k-mcgrady »

sukilot wrote: post #42
userbinator wrote: post #22

I've had the opposite experience - PA systems so quiet they're drowned out by the plane's noise. Perhaps he was sitting very close to one of the speakers. Given that the announcements are usually important, not continuous but made in short bursts, and that volume level (99dB) is discomforting but only harmful with prolonged exposure, I don't think it's too loud. The whole idea of an announcement is to get the attenti…

If the announcements were safety related they would he repeated several times and FAs would single out individuals who needed to react.

>> "FAs would single out individuals who needed to react"

Yes, because in a real emergency (plane going down) we need the FAs spending the precious few seconds we have going up and down the cabin telling prats to take their headphones off and listen up...

Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#76

Post by yourcelf »

userbinator wrote: post #70
uptown wrote: post #63

Sort of off-topic, but maybe somebody commenting on audio acoustics and decibels will know -- When you call a business and they pipe their automated music into the call while you're on-hold, why is the audio quality of that music frequently horrible? You'll get fuzzy music, or drop-outs of the music track - but when a human picks up the phone, it tends to sound just like most other phone calls. It seems like such a b…

Music is basically never going to sound good over a POTS because it's a low-bandwidth channel optimised for human voice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceband It may also be a legacy system using old worn-out looping casette tapes for the music.

It's even worse if the sound is going through a digital (VOIP / cell phone) system. Most modern codecs for voice are using some form of Linear Predictive Coding[1] (e.g. ACELPC) which is basically modeling sound as a resonator at the bottom of a tube with a filter bank (sortof like your voice box). With voice, this is a reasonably good approximation, and the codecs are aggressively tuned to be efficient at that. But if full-band music gets piped through it will sound roughly like that music is being produced by a flapping plosive at the bottom of a long tube.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_predictive_coding

Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#77

Post by TillE »

chadgeidel wrote: post #55
joshuaheard wrote: post #28

They probably do it because no one pays attention to the announcements anymore. It's the same reason they (used to) turn up the volume on TV commercials. Has the author tried asking the flight attendants to turn the volume down?

The volume is not "turned up" on TV commercials. The perceived increase in volume is due to dynamic range compression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression#Broad...

Which means the commercial is playing at maximum volume. Of course it's not physically changing the volume control on your television, but the source is as loud as it can possibly be.

Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#78

Post by sjm-lbm »

city41 wrote: post #66
Alupis wrote: post #56

Few thoughts: > and opened the decibel meter on my iPhone These are notoriously inaccurate. To get accurate decibel readings, the mic must be calibrated to absolute known levels (something your App can't do). The App's are basically just comparing relative sounds (this sound is more prominent than this other one, and therefore must be louder... after establishing some relative baseline). Real decibel measuring equipm…

I often take issue with the "pilot greeting". Many pilots just ramble on and on. Often on and off throughout the entire flight. I really don't care nor do I want that blaring in my ears. I don't understand why airlines think this is a good idea.

I would assume that a large amount of the public actually feels comforted knowing that there's a real human up in the room with all the buttons making sure the airplane stays in the air. Given, I'd doubt very many of those people are engineers, so I'd assume the HN crowd would mostly consist of people that just want to put on headphones and only be contacted if there's some sort of "exception" thrown at some point in the flight.

My biggest question is how much training airlines give pilots about exactly what to say on these updates - on a recent flight, the pilot said that a critical system in the plane went from "too broken to take off" to "yep, that looks fine" with a couple of restarts just before we left the gate. I'm sure he did everything per spec, but I'm not sure how helpful it is to tell everyone that they are riding on equipment that's only legal because the turn-it-off-and-on-again principle isn't just for IT.

Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#79

Post by Zigurd »

I have for a long time used unobtrusive IEMs with Comply tips (MEElectronics, small, black, with a memory wire that guides the headphone wires over and behind the ears). They shut out the world very effectively, and are cheap enough that it's not a tragedy to lose them. I have never had a flight attendant bug me about them.

United is particularly bad about cranking their PA system up into distortion screeching range. It's pure sadism.

Re: The volume is too damn high on flights

#80

Post by miahi »

MichaelGG wrote: post #43
ZoFreX wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stopped using the in-flight systems because of this. I use in-ear earphones on flights, as the design of them (basically ear plugs with speakers in the middle) blocks out sound and as a result I can have the volume lower, with the idea of preserving what's left of my hearing. Because of that design I not only _can_ have the volume low, but _have_ to have the volume low - and when the PA announcements override th…

I'm sorta curious why anyone is using in in flight systems in the first place. Doesn't nearly everyone own personal devices capable of playing hours of music or videos? Even with 32 GB of storage, total, I'm able to hold more video than I can watch in a day.

You have to prepare for it - have a full battery (most of the planes don't have USB or the plug doesn't supply enough current), have the movies/music already on the phone/tablet. Not everyone is using the phone for this kind of entertainment, so they have to prepare before, and because most of the entertainment is now "in the cloud" and consumed on the fly, you have to know how to copy them for offline use.

Also, the in-flight entertainment system is better positioned than a normal phone or tablet - you need a special case or something to hold a tablet/phone in a kind of vertical position on the little table (also needs preparing for), and you have to look down to it all the time - which is bad for your back, especially in the crammed plane seats.

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