On Aug 29, 2011, at 12:19 PM, Martin Peach wrote:
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
I am taking a biologist's approach here: I've observed this happening
multiple times in the wild, now I have to figure out why. Its very
reproducible, I've taken the field mice into the lab and seen them
reproduce ;) Take Ed Kelly's fun LPC cross-synth example, in ekext/
examples/lpc-cross-synthesis.pd. Put some loud samples into it and go
crazy with the parameters and... MELTDOWN! I've never heard my
computer make a louder sound... I knew that this patch has some
feedback aspect to it, so I was doing my standard practice, having the
volume very low.
.hc
Mistrust authority - promote decentralization. - the hacker ethic