[PD] making puredata headphone-safe

[Jonathan Wilkes]

----- Original Message -----

> From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
> To: Martin <martin.peach at sympatico.ca>
> Cc: pd-list at iem.at
> Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 11:52 AM
> Subject: Re: [PD] making puredata headphone-safe
> 
> 
> On Aug 23, 2011, at 3:43 PM, Martin wrote:
> 
>>  On 23/08/11 03:29 PM, Stephen Lavelle wrote:
>>>  I've managed to hurt my ears twice over the past two days when 
> using PD w/ headphones.  Even at lowest system volumes, it seems that Terrible 
> Things can happen.  Are there any precautions that I can take to make it feel 
> less like I'm taking my life into my hands when I have to use headphones?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>>  Try making a [noise~] connected directly to a [dac~] and set the headphone 
> volume so you can live with that. Nothing will ever be louder than that.
> 
> 
> Hmm, I don't think that's actually true in all cases.  On a MacBook Pro 
> running Mac OS X, I've had the volume set to one above mute, but had massive 
> feedback from LPC patches that were very very loud.  [noise~] would be very 
> comfortable at that volume setting.  I think some platforms do the output mixing 
> in the digital domain, so my min volume would be [*~ 0.01], so that this would 
> still make a very loud sound:
> 
> [noise~]
> |
> [*~ 999999]
> |
> [*~ 0.01]     (i.e. the Apple output mixing)
> |
> 
> In this particular case, the sound output actually gets shutdown entirely, so 
> you have to reboot to get sound output again.

Please try the following and see if you get different results:

[noise~]
|
[*~ 999999]
|
[clip~ -1 1]
|
[*~ 0.01]     (i.e. the Apple output mixing)
|

-Jonathan

> 
> .hc
> 
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