[PD] making puredata headphone-safe

[Martin Peach]

On 2011-08-29 11:52, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
> 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.
>

That make no sense. How can you have two sounds at the same level going 
into a mixer that come out at different levels? Or do you mean that a 
squealing sound is perceived to be louder than white noise? Maybe you 
could demonstrate with a patch?

Martin

"If it seems like magic your assumptions are wrong." Martin Peach