how does active noise cancellation works and is it more harmful to your ears than normal headphones or earphones
In: Technology
Sound waves are made up of crest and troughs (loudness and silence). The loudness comes from the air getting pushed and pulled by the speaker. Now imagine what would happen if you could somehow set up another speaker that detects the sound and quickly emits the opposite. So if it detects and loud pushing sound, it’ll emit an equally loud pulling sound. They would cancel each other.
That’s what a noise cancelling system does. It has a sound detector that converts sound into an electrical representation. That electrical signal is fed into an inverter which converts it into the opposite electrical signal. This signal is then fed into a speaker to turn it back into sound. Since it’s the opposite sound to what was detected, they cancel each other out.
This system only works because electricity is far far faster than sound, so the inversion process and the sound emission process are almost instantaneous, so they’re able to cancel the original sound before it travels away.
And no, unless the sounds involved are very loud, noise cancellation shouldn’t damage your ears any more than the original sound might have.
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