Our ears are symmetrical, so why do hearing devices have L and R on them?
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Our ears may be symmetrical, but the world isn’t necessarily so.
If you’re playing a game, and in the game, an explosion happens to your character’s left, you’d want to hear it in your left ear, yeah? It wouldn’t do much good to hear it in your right ear.
These are “channels,” and if audio is recorded on the left channel, it will be played through the left earpiece, and so it’s a good idea to mark the earpieces so you can have them in the correct ear.
Depends on the device, but two main reasons.
1- your ears are symmetric, but they’re mirrored, so if an earphone curves into your ear, it needs to curve the other way for other ear
2- music/sound isn’t necessarily symmetrical. This is how you can get a 5+1 system and get surround sound, with things happening behind the camera sounding from behind the listener. Some sounds are given a different balance than 50/50 from the two sides, to create the illusion of sound coming from a specific direction
Ears are symmetrical, but not all stereo audio sources are. Video games, and some movies/shows/songs have asymmetrical audio that gives you cues of whether a sound is occurring on one side or the other, and sometimes demonstrate that things are moving by having their sounds go from left to right or vice versa in the stereo output
The same reason that gloves are built to go on the left or right hand; while your hands (and ears) are similar they are mirror images of each other. As a result, you need to create two components that are mirror images of each other to work right.
For hands, you may want extra padding on the palm. Under the “either hand rule” you would need to put the extra padding on both sides of the gloves (so it would be on the palm either way you wore it) or you would need to have and extra thumb so that you can rotate it. This is more work than just saying “this glove is for the left hand”.
For ears, you also have the need to ensure you play the sound from the right direction. If you don’t know which ear is going to wear each piece, you may have sounds coming from the right when it should be the left.
They are symmetrical in that one side is a mirror of the other (i.e. your head is roughly bilaterally symmetrical), but each ear doesn’t itself have a line of symmetry. The same for your hands, which is why gloves have a left and a right.
I’m super happy for OP and his symmetrical ears, but mine are very, very far from being symmetrical.
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