How come almost all cheap digital alarms make the same “beep beep beep” sound?
In: Technology
The alarm sound has to be generated by some kind of computer.
The cheapest computers don’t seem like computers to us at all: they are hard-wired circuits arranged in a way to do one thing and one thing only. Kind of like a game cartridge ROM. Just where the ROM might need millions of transistors (the tiny “switches” that make circuits work), something like a digital watch might need at most hundreds.
So it’s likely someone managed to make one circuit that functions as a digital clock. And someone else made a circuit that can make a beeping noise. The people who did that decided to start mass-producing chips and the tiny speaker to do that. Since they’re mass-produced, they’re super cheap.
So the people designing digital alarms have two choices:
* Buy the really cheap components that have already been made.
* Spend the time and money to design your own, new components and manufacture them.
It’s much, much cheaper to glue together the things that already work. So cheap digital alarms are probably almost always using the same circuits as each other.
Most digital alarm clocks make the same “beep beep beep” sound because it’s practical and inexpensive. The sound is generated by a simple component called a piezoelectric buzzer, which is cheap to make and easy to use. The beeping noise is loud and repetitive, making it hard to ignore, which is exactly what you want in an alarm. Since this sound works well to wake people up, and is associated with alarms, manufacturers keep using it. It’s efficient, familiar, and gets the job done without needing anything fancy.
This is a guess: I would imagine the core components (like the alarm beeper itself) are manufactured in massive quantities at generally few factories, who then sell in bulk to whatever company handles the aesthetic design and assembly of the clock. It would be the cheapest way.
Not to hijack the thread but…. Does anyone no one if there is a reason why “Snooze buttons” on every alarm clock snooze the alarm for 9 minutes? Why not 10?
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