I have a small hard drive that is making a constant high pitched sound that is typical of the drive, and not very noticeable to the average person, but I have pain induced noise sensitivity. I am curious about how to calculate damping potential. As an initial guestimate, the frequency is very near to my maximum audible range and likely around 12kHz-16kHz. It is a little higher than the switch mode power supplies that I can also hear if it is dead silent in the room, although the drive is a higher amplitude. Addressing the noise with a solution is probably beyond the scope of anything I would actually do, but knowing how to solve it is far more interesting to me. (ELI15 )

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    I think my point is being missed.

    If you were to take two identical waves and line them up with each other, matching up the peaks and troughs, the two waves are said to be “in-phase,” which, when summed, results in an even larger wave (louder sound). But what happens if you delay one of the waves by exactly one-half wavelength, matching up the troughs with the peaks of the other like in the picture below?

    Imagine illustrating noise cancelling by adding two identical but opposite soundwaves.

    Source: https://www.soundguys.com/how-noise-cancelling-headphones-work-12380/

    • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      19 days ago

      what happens if you delay one of the waves by exactly one-half wavelength, matching up the troughs with the peaks of the other like in the picture below?

      Noise cancellation relies on precisely controlling the distances to listener. If OP were to simply set up a tone generator near the hard drive, the waves would alternately constructively and destructively interfere as OP walked around the room.

        • Lupus@feddit.orgEnglish
          2·
          19 days ago

          With low frequencies, where it is hard to locate the source of the sound anyways, it works well, even without carefully arranging the distances, higher frequencies get trickier and you’ll likely get good cancellation in some places and a terrible mushy noise in others.

      • Lupus@feddit.orgEnglish
        11·
        19 days ago

        That’s not entirely true, cancelling sound waves can also be done on a large scale. I’ve seen it on festivals or other open air venues, where they stack two rows of subwoofers behind each other in a precisely calculated distance to cancel out the bass notes towards the back of the stage, meaning walking in front of the subs you could hear it normally, walking behind them and the bass notes where very faint and clearly coming as a bounce back from walls or the like. So they effectively cancelled out the frequencies towards the back.

        But that doesn’t help OP since that works way better on lower frequencies, with higher notes you’ll need the precise localization you’re talking about. So the high pitched noises from a hard drive probably won’t work.

    • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      If I play a sound from a driver on my left, and the noise is from a device on my right. I believe they will not cancel out and I will hear two noises on each side of my head. My head will act like a shadow to the wave front as it propagates right? I suppose one could build a device to play the sound at the drive, but that is a bulky solution.

      I was asking about passive damping here, not that I mind the tangent.

        • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          Pain is due to neck and back. So the root of the problem is the weight of my head, and why I’m stuck in bed in the first place. I have some noise canceling headphones already, but between the weight and positional constraints they cause they are an issue. It isn’t a real problem because I usually do not leave the thing on or plugged in. I have been doing so lately because I have needed to test a lot of AI models with Emacs looking for the most capable, with thinking and function calling, and the largest available context, along with others that can be switched in an agentic system and are more capable and potentially specialized with my own fine tuning.

          I should just get another larger NVME drive, but purchasing anything right now sounds stupid.

          • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
            1·
            19 days ago

            Okay.

            Completely different track.

            I’m assuming that this drive is connected by USB.

            Sound attenuates with distance.

            Plug in a longer cable and put it further away?

            Or move to ethernet and put it in another room?

            • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              1·
              19 days ago

              Could, but then I lose portability like with mounting it in my laptop stand.

              Everyone here seems to want to solve everything but the actual abstraction of wanting to know a way to calculate a thin liner material to add to the portable box that is not reliant solely on empirical brute force.

              If someone else asked, I’d be saying the same things. It is easy to assume people can replace such knowledge with empirical testing and observations, but when the physical efforts become harder, working smarter has value to me.