Active Noise-Canceling Headsets In Server Rooms? 141
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?"
I use... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [amazon.com]
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.
wear the foam earplugs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Won't Help w/ Hearing Loss (Score:2, Informative)
You obviously have never heard of destructive and constructive interference.
Re:Won't Help w/ Hearing Loss (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Foam_earplugs++ (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I don't trust active noise cancellation (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.shure.com/PersonalAudio/Products/Earph
To make talking to others easier they have this nifty little PTT device that plugs inline:
http://www.shure.com/PersonalAudio/Products/Acces
Both will cost you less than $200. The fit of the earphones will take some trial and error, but it's a great solution.
Shure E2c (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.shure.com/PersonalAudio/Products/Earph
Re:Won't Help w/ Hearing Loss (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Won't Help w/ Hearing Loss (Score:2, Informative)
My best headset has a Noise Reduction Rating (passive) of 23 dB, and an active NRR of 20 dB, totalling about 43 dB of noise reduction. To say that you are still being pounded with 90dB of energy sounds implausable given that waves 180 degress out of phase [school-for-champions.com] with each other would completely destroy each other--drop two pebbles in the water and watch where the waves interfere with each other, the water will be still. Also, here's a bit of a sales pitch [flightcom.net] about ANR/ENC technology.
Several options... (Score:3, Informative)
I've tried several sets, and they certainly work at the noise levels and freqs I've encountered in the DC's and computer labs I've had to work in. Also great for air travel - which is what te technology was first developed for.
The cheapest solution are the foam earplugs. They're also generally more effective than ANC at protecting your hearing. They do, however, reduce ALL the sound, so conversation (already difficult) becomes more difficult. "In the ear" headphones (Shure or Etymotic, for example) can give the same level of hearing protection and provide music. Some of them have an external mic you can use to hear people talking. I went to a set of Ety's for air travel and find I can listen to music clearly at very low set volume while blocking out more external noise than the Bose or PlaneQuite active units did.
The "ugly", but possibly best, solution, is a set of over-the-ear hearing protectors as you see on construction sites or shooting ranges. They look kinda silly, but they have great sound attenuation.
Best for you will depend on your needs.
Foams are dirt cheap. Professional grade over the ear types are $20-$50 depending on how nice you want. ANC starts under $20 and goes well over $300. Same with in the ear headphones. Top end Shure units are something like $500.
Figure out what you want to do, and experiment.
Re:Why consumer ANC headphones don't protect... (Score:1, Informative)
It's true that consumer headphones don't have the ability to cancel all of the noise found in a severe industrial environment. They aren't sold for that purpose. That is why the guys on the airport tarmac don't wear the Sony models sold in the shops on the concourse. However, the question was about dealing with server-room noise. If your server room sounds like an operating jet engine, then you've got a rather atypical situation, no?
Re:Shure E2c (Score:3, Informative)
As an added plus, the E2cs come with about 9 different styles of in-ear attachment you can wear depending on your ear size and comfort level; 3 different materials (foam, soft rubber, harder rubber) x 3 sizes each. Finding a perfect fit was really easy, and I now wear these buds for 8+ hours every day with zero discomfort. Also, I listen to my music much more quietly with these headphones than with others I've had previously, as the noise reduction provides for a much quieter soundstage.
They list for $110, I think, but you can do much better than that via Amazon Marketplace or Ebay (mine were $65 on Amazon).
Find the right earplug, get good ANR's. (Score:3, Informative)
When my (now) wife moved in with me, she couldn't sleep with my snoring. ): She tried my earplugs which helped with the noise, but was uncomfortable to wear over a long period of time. The problem is that my earplugs were too thick and dense for her much smaller ears. After we shopped around, we found much more comfortable ear plugs for her, and she is a much happier camper.
I went through a whole bunch of earplugs before I settled on the ones that I buy for myself and the ones that I buy for my wife -- you might need to do some searching of your own to find the right combination of noise suppression and long-wearing comfort.
This is the "small" earplug that I get for my wife: http://www.am-safety.com/category.asp?catalog_nam
This is the "big" earplug that I get for myself for maximum noise suppression; http://www.am-safety.com/category.asp?catalog_nam
If you buy noise cancellers, buy good ones. My wife and I tried Sharper Image's $100 ANR folding headphones because they were on sale at 50% off... They were terrible -- they cut the low-frequency noise effectively, but added so much high-frequency hiss that we hated them. The only problem I have with the Bose QC's is they are a bit too fragile for the way I handle portable devices*.
In extreme cases, the ear-plug + ANR combo is great. This is what we do when we're flying across the pond.
* Assurion hates me, heh...
As a private pilot I say NO (Score:2, Informative)
My biggest lesson relevant to this discussion is the ANR headsets are most effective at low frequencies and relatively ineffective at high frequencies. And my experience with server farms is that the noise is mostly high frequency.
The three most significant heatsets I have tried were the Bose Aviation X (excellent but overpriced), the Bose QuietComfort 2 (works well for adults, best fit for children, not the best ANR), and the Lightspeed QFR-XC (the generic branded versions are cheap - 1/4 the price of a Bose X - excellent passive headsets, and quiet at the low end with ANR turned on). The Lightspeed headset also has an adapter for cellphones or music players.
In data centers I get some funny looks when wearing a Lightspeed headset, but for me it is the best choice since I sometimes have to be on the phone while at the server.