hearing

Randall and Wilson talk today about crazy Apple lawsuits handwritten on notepads, 90210 could be returning from the grave, plus dolla-dolla-bill-y'all, the purple $5 bill hits the streets, and Mark the Intern kicks some ass. All that, plus Jeff is on the phone and 404 best buddy Demetrius Wren joins us in studio. Listen, or else you'll get the clap, too.

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Sophisticated baby boomers and Gen Xers pride themselves on their ability to appreciate the finer things in life. They're wine snobs, crave gourmet food, drive exotic cars, buy 1080p high definition TVs, but for some bizarre reason think low-end speakers are just dandy. At a New Year's Eve party I polled perfect strangers about their hi-fi systems, and the three men and one woman all said that, sure, music was once really important, but now it's mere background. And they now owned very small systems, because "I can't hear the difference anymore."

Hmmm, I … Read more

Apple is developing a volume control device for its iPods that would automatically calculate how long a person has been listening and at what volume, before gradually reducing the sound level, all in an effort to protect users' hearing, according to the London-based Daily Mail.

Citing a new patent application, the report--to which Apple declined to comment--says the "device will also calculate the amount of 'quiet time' between when the iPod is turned off and when it is restarted, allowing the volume to be increased again to a safe level."

In February 2006, a Louisiana man filed a class action suit against Apple, … Read more

Does hearing actually go first as you get older? For those who've always feared dead giveaways like hearing aids and bifocals, help is on the way. Perhaps taking a cue from Oakley's MP3-playing Thump, a company called Varibel is developing eyewear that hears.

It won't give provide bionic auditory powers, but it does promise vastly improved hearing through a device built directly into a pair of eyeglasses. Embedded over the length of each spectacle arm are four tiny microphones that transmit sounds from the front and simultaneously block background noise.

The result is "directional sensitivity"… Read more

This is my new all-time favorite YouTube video.

Most people with any interest in music understand that sound moves in waves. A vibrating object (guitar string, speaker cone) causes air to compress and decompress in a rhythmic motion. The air itself doesn't travel far, but the waves travel through the air--similar to the way waves move across the surface of water--where they hit your ear, which turns them into signals your brain understands as sound.

The length of the wave determines its pitch. The lowest notes we can hear are approximately 30-foot waves, while the highest notes are fractions … Read more

A reader wrote asking the age old question--Do all amplifiers sound alike? "Mr. Guttenberg, I've been enjoying what you write about since I am a budding audiophile. A guy I know claims that amplifiers do not alter the quality of the sound and pointed me to a web site with a $10,000 challenge by Richard Clark that states that the human ear cannot discern the differences between amplifiers. What are your feelings on the subject and do you think there is any merit to this man's challenge?"

Well, I do believe that there are important … Read more

The graphic on this page, taken from a Wikipedia entry, shows the current ISO standard for something called equal loudness contours.

If you've studied audio production or audio equipment, you might have seen this or similar charts. (The earliest version, created in 1933, was known as the Fletcher-Munson curve, and recent studies have proven it was quite accurate.) But what does it mean?

The horizontal x-axis represents pitch, measured in Hertz (Hz), or vibrations per second. The lowest threshold of human hearing is around 20 Hz--that would be a very low bass note on a church organ. Human voices … Read more

Don't get us wrong: We're all in favor of using fashion, or whatever else it takes, to de-stigmatize ailments. But a gold and diamond hearing aid isn't exactly what we had in mind.

Unlike the tasteful designs we've seen in other versions, Widex is offering a horrific 24k hearing device and controller studded with 220 diamonds, according to Gizmodo, for the princely sum of $49,590. Even if carbon-bearing materials have some kind of audio-enhancement properties that we don't know about, this has got to be one of the more ridiculous examples of egregious excess … Read more

It's not unusual--and a good thing, in our opinion--for designers to come up with ways to de-stigmatize diseases, as we've seen with such products as fashionable asthma inhaler cases. What we didn't anticipate, though, was that hearing aids would be the next cause.

Although they may look like new Bluetooth headsets, the items pictured here are actually "Personal Communication Aids" created by the Phonak Group, which describes them as "the ultimate high-tech accessory," according to Inventor Spot. The Swiss company is apparently targeting those Boomers who actually believe that stuff about 50 being … Read more