[PD] making puredata headphone-safe

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

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.

.hc

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