Making Your Room Quiet

el_flynn writes "This may be a cure for those of you with loud computers, or perhaps those who spend lots of time in NOC rooms that generate lots of noise: NewScientist.com mentions about a "Silence Machine" that gets rid of unwanted noise. I want one to quiet down my neighbour's loud dogs. " These are also being tested in cars, to make the car quieter. I've got a pair of the headphones that the article alludes to - they make airplane travel much nicer, and having something like this to cancel machine noise would be excellent.

Beyond!

[aznxk3vi17]

I saw a similar invention used in "Batman Beyond" a while ago... I no longer watch it of course, but yeah the idea is intriguing. What worries me is the possible military uses. By cancelling sound, armies could cause mass confusion by making illusions of silence, deafness, the list goes on. I fear the day when I am sitting at home, and all of a sudden, the fan of my computer goes silent, and the clicking of my keyboard goes quiet. We wouldn't even hear the explosion.

In-box silencer

[el_flynn]

How about this idea: have an extra soundcard installed in your machine, hook it up to a small mic and speaker, and put the mic and speaker inside the PC casing.

Input from the mic would be fed to some app that could analyze the sound coming in, generate the appropriate cancellation frequencies and output via the speaker. Tada - quiet PC!

Of course you wouldn't want the mic to be on continuously - there would be feedback when the mic accepts signals from the speakers. But we could possibly run a cron job that turns on the mic while shutting the soundcard output, and perform the analysis once every minute/5 minutes/whatever your fancy. This would be a good way to make use of your spare cycles.

Howzat?

Re:bass

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't hear the music, but the vibrations from the bass keep me up until I get out of bed go over and knock on his door to get him to turn it down. This would help if it could block bass vibrations, but I don't think I want to spend a four digit sum on it

Well for a three-digit sum you can purchase a gun that would have the absolute effect you are looking for.

Hmmmm

[gvonk]

I would imagine that you hold down a button and all of the sound it hears during that time it works to cancel out but then if you talk it knows that's not what you wanted to cancel out... like synchronizing a wireless mouse with the base station by holding the down a button to get it in sync...

Why only Apple ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

If Apple can make a silent machine, why can't other manufacturers?

Because other manufacturers are not using PowerPC CPUs. One of the PowerPC's advantages over Intel/AMD is power consumption / heat generation.

Another factor is that Apple has absolute control over the interior of those silent Macs (later model iMacs and Cubes). The location of heat sources, careful selection of components to meet design parameters, unobstructed cool air intake, unobstructed convection paths to remove hot air, and most important of all: they don't let the end user screw around with it (adding RAM is about it).

Life is much simpler when you don't let the average clone shop "technicians" or do-it-yourself'ers pick a bad case and powersupply, block a hot component's airflow with a rats nest of cables and crap, and try to compensate for their poor work by adding a few more fans.

As for Apple's tower configurations that more closely resemble PC's, they are very noisy.