So I understand the basic principles behind noise cancellation. You essentially use a microphone to record incoming sound waves and create an inverse wave that destructively interferes with the initial wave, thus, cancelling it out. But I don’t understand, practically, how this is done.
Let’s assume the sound wave makes contact with the microphone in the AirPod, which analyses the wave and shoots out an inverse wave, but by that point – the initial sound wave would surely have already reached my ears. The AirPod basically needs to cancel the sound wave before it moves roughly a centimetre or it’s too late.
The speed of sound (in a standard environment like air) is 343 meters per second or 34,300 centimetres per second; this means the AirPod has 1/34,300 seconds or ~0.03 miliseconds to do these operations to cancel the wave. That just seems absurd to me for such a tiny chip in the bloody AirPod.
Someone fix my confusion please.
In: 678
I don’t think you understand how fast computers are.
Remember how photons aka. light is the fastest thing in the universe? Well, your computer can do around 5 to 10 complete operations between the time the *photons* from the screen reach your retina.
Laptops and desktops can do around 3 billion operations a second. *Small chips powered by button cells* can still go into the millions or tens of millions of operations a second. Your *washer* probably has greater computing power than the computer that sent humans to the moon.
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