eli5 how does noise canceling/transparent mode work on earbuds?
In: Technology
Sound is a wave. If you take two waves and overlap them, they add together. If you have two waves where a peak of one lines up with the troughs of another, they will perfectly cancel out and act like there’s no wave there at all.
The headphones have a microphone on the outside, recording the ambient noise, and then play the exact inverse of that sound on the headphones, what hits your ears is no sound at all.
It’s not perfect, so some sound does get through, but it does a very good job.
You can also still play music by just adding the sound waves of the music to the inverse of the ambient noise, and what hits your ear is just the music, and no ambient noise.
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