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Active Noise-Canceling Headsets In Server Rooms?
An anonymous reader asks: "Recently I co-located our computer room to a temporary hosting facility. It's a big shop, with everything you could want, along with quite a high dB of background noise. I've no desire to wear those silly little yellow earplugs for several hours when I'm on site there, and standard headsets are such non-IT apparel. Given that technology is the cure to many of todays evils I was wondering if any people had experimented with active noise canceling headphones and has something to say about them. Does anyone use any active noise canceling headsets in a computer room or data facility, and if so how good are they?"
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-MDR-NC50-Noise-Cancelin g-Headphones/dp/B0007N55OQ/sr=8-1/qid=1163179023/r ef=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-1893536-4549558?ie=UTF8&s=elect ronics
The customer reviews pretty much sum them up - I've even got one in there. They do a FANTASTIC job at filtering out our 500 servers, with or without playing music.
I've owned and sampled various active noise cancellation headphones. At best, I've found them to be good. At worst I've found them totally ineffective.
To attenuate high dB environments, I'd consider the "good" of headphones I've tried to be less than satisfactory, i.e., my subjective evaluation has been about a 10 dB or so drop in levels, good, but if you're looking to get rid of noise these won't do that. If the room is loud enough, I think they'd only lessen the noise to barely acceptable levels.
You mentioned you don't want to wear the silly yellow ear plugs... there are some available in other silly colors. ;-) On the other hand, you aren't likely to be anymore comfortable with headphones on the whole time, and you're going to look no less silly. I've found earplugs to be quite effective, and they're something you can get used to.
If you're looking to "use" headphones, i.e., listen to music, you might consider various ear-canal headphones. I own a pair of those, and aside from the amazing sound quality of the music, I get about a 30dB attenuation of ambient noise. Two birds with one stone. YMMV.
Good luck!
Check out the SAGE sysadmin toolbox page, and scooch down to "What's the scoop on hearing protectors and noise-cancelling headsets?". (The whole damn page is useful, too...)
Carousel is a lie!
Uh...no.
If you're trying to cancel a 90dB wave, you generate the same 90dB wave, inverted. This means that every particle that receives a sound vibration in one direction receives an equal sound vibration in the opposite direction, resulting in a net movement of zero.
No vibration of the air means no vibration of the eardrum, which means no sound doing its mechanical damage to the moving pieces in your ear, which means no signal doing its neural damage inside your cochlea. Notably, earplugs do exactly the same thing to a lesser degree: they reduce the total transmission of vibration (that's what reducing the amplitude is, after all) into your ear canal.
In both cases, you haven't changed the total amount of energy reaching your ear, it's just that some portion of the kinetic energy (sound) that can damage your ear is now thermal energy that won't.
(Of course, noise-cancelling headphones have widely varying effectiveness in various regions of the audible sound spectrum, and won't do anything to prevent transmission of vibration from other parts of your body into your inner ear - but then, neither will softies)
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
You may not like the stupid yellow foam earplugs, but there are better alternitves. Check out http://earplugstore.stores.yahoo.net/profmusearpl1 .html for instance. The idea is that they are both more comforatble and allow you to hear better even while reducing the volume. All of the musicians I have mixed for LOVE them and I've tried them and found them to be much more comfortable than regular foam plugs. In fact, I find having a large headset on, is uncomfortable for long periods and adds strain to your neck. Check them out, they aren't too expensive. (and I have no affilation with this paticular store, it's just the first site I found)
These are the best portable headphones i've ever used. They're not active noise cancelling, because they're so damn good they dont need to be. Put them in and be amazed. I used them extensively in a large (and very loud) server room and was very VERY impressed with their noise cancelling abilities.
o nes/ESeries/us_pa_E2c_content
http://www.shure.com/PersonalAudio/Products/Earph
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Yea, the original poster needs to get over it. Standard ear plugs should work great for canceling the noise of the thousands of small fans he or she is hearing. Using noise cancellation headphones will only introduce something new to carry around and something new that can break. Often the best solution is the simplest one.
The original poster said, "I've no desire to wear those silly little yellow earplugs." Well luckily for him or her, the "silly little earplugs" come in more colors than just yellow, they also come in reusable and washable rubber, rather than just disposable foam.
I've got to second the in-ear canalphone recommendation. For one, they use less power (and don't require their own batteries) as most noise-cancelling phones do (better for portable player life). They have excellent broad-spectrum attenuation -- typically far superior to noise-cancelling. And if you invest in a decent pair (even the $80 Shure e2c's) they'll sound a heck of a lot better than most any noise-cancelling set. If you really step up to the plate, Shure's E5 series or Etymotic Research has some models that will simply blow you away -- Shure's even has a "push to hear" feature that allows you to hear outside noises clearly without removing the phones. And the sound quality on these higher-end models is right up there with the best -- period. The same can't be said for ANY noise-cancelling phones.
Of course you have to get used to having something stuck in your ear....