OK since nobody has said it yet. How everything has a goddamn LED in it to show its on or off or disconnected or whatever.
I hate how I have to put eletrical tape over all my device lights so I can get some peace at night.
Edit: shit thus thread is specifically about noises not general annoyances. I do not retract my statement however.
Count your lucky stars you cannot hear LED’s.
I can. My hearing is extremely sensitive.
I’ve gone through the effort to set up smart plugs for most of my devices, to turn off automatically, for no other reason than eliminating the buzz.
That is actually pretty interesting! Are you sure it is the LEDs that you can hear? I would probably lean towards the mains 50Hz buzz being heard by you due to internal transformers
Depends; I’m a lot older now and deaf (but have tinnitus, yay) in one ear, but I could hear the flyback whine of old TVs. I can hear the odd switching regulator still, but most these days are switching waaaaay above even the best human hearing range.
50/60Hz buzz should be fairly rare these days except for some high power cases or some really poorly designed electronics.
I could hear the flyback whine of old TVs
Man, I hated that sound. A lot of computer monitors had it too before they switched to LED/LCD displays.
It’s without a doubt the LED’s themselves. Moving closer to the exact location of the LED confirms it.
For some cheap products, I’ve physically cut one side of the LED pin to shut it up, and the buzzing stops.
Though technically it could be the sound of a capacitor charging/discharging or the resistors, not exactly sure on the exact mechanism, but it’s at the very least something on the LED circuit.
Encouragement to do a double blind test on this one; box up some LED’s with a power strip, one on and one off, have the person who set them randomize which are on and then you guess which (neither, R, L, both). Repeat a few times.
I know similar experiences aren’t predictive, the sound is a kind of synesthesia with the concept of running electronics (which is itself pretty cool/interesting!).
A double blind would mean no results are discovered lol.
A single blind test would be fine.
And yes, I’ve done this. I’ve turned away from a device, and my partner either toggled a switch powering thw device, or a switch which wasn’t connected to anything.Perfect accuracy.
Edit: I replied when i first woke up. I didn’t read carefully.
Neat experiment idea but I don’t have a tools for that lol.
If I ever do, I’ll pin this message and reply to it :p
Oof. I hear cheap charging blocks, LEDs would suck
…wow, you just reminded me that i used to hear LEDs, too: i’d totally forgotten about that…anyway, i can vouch that commuting a couple of hours every day in a top-down roadster for twenty years makes the problem go away; heck, the tinnitus even drowns out a lot of electronic-feedback clicks and beeps which are supposed to be audible…
Literally the only good thing about my hearing loss is I don’t have to deal with this sort of thing anymore. I used to be able to hear myself blink if the room was quiet enough. I used to get my hearing tested regularly to make sure my meds weren’t damaging it and I could hear both higher and significantly lower sounds than humans are supposed to hear. Now that one ear is basically shot they don’t care anymore about testing
I’m kinda the opposite—I miss functional LEDs on things. I miss disk activity light the most, but there’s many things that have no indication as to whether they’re even on or connected. Overly bright LEDs are a problem tho
Blue LEDs are the absolute worst. I have to keep my bedroom door shut to sleep at night because the LED clock display on my stove is so goddamn bright it lights up the whole house.
YES, especially when they’re overly bright for their intended purpose. Notify bright, ok. Pin hole sized LED bright enough to light up an entire room at night, NOT OK.
I have an air purifier and one of the amazing things about it that they haven’t actually advertised is that there is a button you can press to make all the LEDs go off. I just bought the best one in my price range, but if they put that feature on the box I’d have gone right for it.
I hate how I have to put eletrical tape over all my device lights so I can get some peace at night.
This was at its worst when blue LEDs were new. Everybody wanted to show how cool they were and used a blue LED, but they were the brightest lights imaginable.
Like, just a hint, if your indicator light actually casts shadows on my wall at night, it’s too bright.
I was part of a “focus group” just some random people that my friend and his team asked questions to about some humidifier or something, I genuinely don’t remember and he was shocked when I said I didn’t want ANY LED lights on the product and he’s like “how will you know it’s on??” On a product that would absolutely make noise while running. We compromised and I told him a completely hidden LED under the product, as long as it had no light leaks would be acceptable.
hitting the upvote so hard and then seeing the community
hmmmmm
Welcome
😜
link aggregators ideally do it in the other way around… Upvotes are supposed to reflect how well the content fits the community, acting as democratic curation. i’m well aware how idealistic this is.
(the word aggregator sounds it like should be an animal, like a distant cousin of an alligator)
Easily the assholes on motorbikes who go out of their way to be as noisy as possible and cause a whole row of houses to vibrate tangibly.
At my last place I used to wake up 2-3 times a night from this.
Oof, phuck!
A couple years ago, we had a downstairs apartment neighbor with a fast and very loud motorcycle, that he would literally park inside his apartment, and he’d make a point to rev it up right when he returned or left from his front door…
I confronted him, from a slight distance from our front balcony (he stayed on ground level). Anyways, I kinda lied to him, but not very rude, but I firmly spoke…
“Sir, we’d appreciate if you wouldn’t rev your motorcycle up like that, it’s scaring our dog.”
That motherfucker had the nerve to threaten me, but I stood behind my words, with witnesses around no less. The lie, for whatever reason, the sound actually didn’t scare our dog, but that was my lie, and I was sticking to it.
Well guess what? Within less than a month, apparently one of the other neighbors had that asshole evicted… 👍
I’ll never understand this. Motorcycles are fantastic vehicles (fossil fuel issues aside) – they’re agile, fast, and exhilarating. But none of that enjoyment comes from the noise they make; removing your muffler is purely a selfish, “look at me!” exercise.
There’s a saying in the motorcycle community: “loud pipes save lives”. In other words, cars only notice motorcycles when they can hear them.
Personally, I think that was often used as an excuse for having an obnoxiously loud motorcycle. But, I’ve also seen first-hand how oblivious drivers are. I think Harleys are stupid. They’re a way to get middle-aged dentists to part with their money and to make them feel bad-ass. But, I think that annoying sound does mean that they get noticed, which probably helps keep them alive. I’m convinced that there are riders who have died on electric motorcycles because a car turned into them because the driver never looked to see if there was anything there.
Changing my motorcycle exhaust was purely for performance for me. I hate how loud it is but the stock one was so corked up the engine was choking
I hate that microwaves have to beep like R2-D2 everytime you push a fucking button. I was in a crappy hotel room once, and in that room was a microwave from the '90s. That thing had an analog timer and dials and physical buttons and shit. No crappy capacitive touch sensors. It was amazing. Every microwave should be like that. Oh, and when the food was done you heard a ding (LIKE A FUCKING BELL!) and that was the only sound it made aside from the ooooooooooooo sound of the thing. It was amazing. I still long for a microwave like that one.
I’ve seen a few newer models that have a silence mode. If you have a newer microwave you may want to look into it.
Yeah, but nothing will beat that old fossil. It truly was the perfect microwave.
I’ve silenced my microwave and I’ve never looked back!!
I haven’t had a microwave in a decade and have zero regrets. Every now and then it would be handy, but it’s really not a necessity.
Any noise that I don’t know is an immediate problem for me. If I don’t know what it is and I can hear it, I absolutely have to stop what I’m doing and find out. I can’t convince myself to stop this because it’s actually led me to detecting leaky pipes in my house twice now, right as they broke.
Also the sound of cotton balls rubbing together. Horrendous. And coil whine of electronics, that’s awful too. As is just the sound of electricity in general, like fluorescent lights make an awful noise. I’m gonna stop here before this becomes a novel.
You sound like me. Recently my girlfriend and I moved. One day while packing, my girlfriend came downstairs and I heard a loud-ish hissing upstairs. She had no idea what I was talking about and didn’t notice it at all. I ran upstairs to check on it and it turns out she had packed some things tightly on top of some cleaning supplies. If it were up to her, the entire bottle of Lysol would’ve sprayed out and destroyed a lot of things in that box. I prevented that. So yeah I’m totally with you, noticing sounds that don’t make immediate sense can save you trouble and it could also save your life, so as maddening as it can be it’s also very useful and I won’t try to stop noticing these sounds.
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I feel the same way. I’m always “overreacting” no matter how much trouble or risk I avoid by reacting. It’s pretty exhausting.
Umm, the sound of cotton balls rubbing together bothers you?
Do you live in a soundproof chamber? What is the frequency range of your hearing?
I literally just tried exactly that, and I can’t hear a damn thing unless the cotton balls are like 2 inches or less from my ear, and even then it’s rather quiet and not bothersome…
It’s almost like people on the autism spectrum have different sensory experiences or something.
One of my sensory tortures is the feeling of cotton balls being torn apart. I think my brain registers it as a sound, but as you’ve said, there doesn’t seem to be a sound. thinkymeat is so dumb.
Never had my hearing tested but I can say anecdotally that many times I have been at work listening to music from my computer and had people walk up to me to talk to, which leads to me saying “let me pause my music” and them to respond “what music?” I often have the volume on everything that has controllable volume as low as I can possibly set it.
I very often hear things no one else does, to the point people think I’m insane because I’m absolutely hearing it but no one else can so they don’t believe me.
My wife is the same way with cotton balls and cotton pads. She will not touch them or be near anyone using them. She recently bought reusable makeup remover cotton rounds thinghy things which made makeup removal much easier for her.
She’s always been like that, and we only recently discovered she most likely have autism.
My partner got me a GPU a while back (oh my god I looked it up and it was ten years ago aaaaaaaaa) that was an incredible deal for its power, but had a TON of reports of coil whine. I was delighted to hear nothing from it the first few days of playing! Then it promptly died. To death. To shreds, even. ah well, it happens, better now than out of return period. I sent it back for a replacement and got another one, TERRIFIED its replacement would be an auditory nightmare after being lucky the first time.
I got lucky the second time, and it still works to this day!
I feel you on that one. Cotton balls don’t bother me, but I know that’s a nightmare for my mum. That and just the idea of
The Idea that some might not wanna think about
chewing tin foil
(I’m sorry to put that in anyone’s head if that bothers them oh god lemme spoiler that just in case) bothers her a ton but doesn’t really hit for me.
Electronic sounds can be a nightmare. I love CRTs but I can’t be around many of them because they hit my brain in The Bad Spot. One tiny benefit to my tinnitus is I’ve found a few CRTs that seem to have a similar/the same frequency so I can be around them when they’re on!
Babies or toddlers crying is one of the big reasons I won’t be a parent. My reaction to the noise is incredibly intense and I pretty much lose all sense of thought past getting away from the noise any way possible. People most of my life be like “nobody likes it get over yourself / you get used to it / it’s worth it”. No Susan you don’t understand how badly I’d neglect a child to get away from that noise, it’ll create a feedback loop, and I refuse to do that to a kid. Thankfully in my thirties now and people have for the most part finally stopped trying to convince me otherwise
Its not just the crying for me, its those random shrieks of delight that also get me, especially in supermarkets with all that noise and light reflecting surfaces
There are many reasons I never had children, but the crying would have been a special kind of torture
I don’t like kids so I can relate
Yeah, big same. Most noises I can tolerate even though they bother me, but baby cries elicit a similar visceral reaction as what you’re describing. Part of why I hate public transport.
One of the kids at my job managed to tune his whine into a fucking siren. Seriously. He’d ramp up the volume and pitch, ramp back down, and repeat, just like an ambulance.
I can see why he did - it’s very good at getting someone’s attention. Our practice is to ignore it and prompt functional communication instead, and thankfully it’s working as I haven’t heard the “ambulance whine” in a while. But wow, it was a truly awful sound. I’ll take straight screaming over that noise any day.
Man, teaching became a lot harder when they outlawed tasers.
Reversing trucks. “For safety”!? I don’t need to hear a truck reversing half a block away on the other side of the road! If you could sell a sound laser for trucks, you’d start a new business.
This video was 12 years ago but I’ve noticed that newer trucks had the new ““beep”” instead of the one you’re thinking about https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fa28lIGuxq8
This right here. I lived near a narrow road, where a building project was being realized. The trucks al had to reverse the entire road.
The construction noice didn’t bother me, but the beeping did.
I know it’s for the visually impaired, but it clashed with my impairment.
For the past several months, in my neighborhood, there is a periodic very low frequency thumping sound. Imagine a chopper motorcycle idling, but lower frequency and very distant. It comes, lasts about 20 minutes, and then stops. I’ve only heard from one other person in the neighborhood who has noticed it.
Closing the windows does nothing because it’s such a low frequency. Also, because it’s a low frequency, it sounds the same whether inside or outside, and it’s impossible to figure out which direction it’s coming from. I usually miss it during the day, but at night, if I hear it I can’t get to sleep until it stops.
Everything annoys me, notifications, kids making noises, my own kids making noises, the sound of an extractor fan whilst im trying to shit in peace… getting older is mad. Explains all the grumpy old men.
I don’t have kids so this might not work for you, but for me getting a nice pair of noise cancelling headphones has been a real godsend. They were a little pricey but being able to just have a silent bubble you can turn on whenever you want is great. They also completely cancel out the background sound of being on a plane.
I already commented, but after going through the other comments I realized nobody’s brought up one of the worst offenders - the sounds of eating. The squishing, chewing noises, the lips smacking, even the “ahhh” that soda commercials include whenever somebody takes a drink. It makes my skin crawl and can even make me irrationally angry.
A lot of ASMR also triggers me. It’s creepy and unsettling to hear a close up recording of someone whispering. I can’t explain it, I know it’s not rational, but there’s something about it that makes me deeply uncomfortable. I simply can’t wrap my head around how people can find that sort of sound pleasant.
Yup. I could kill in cold blood the person I love most for this. ASMR is already terrible, but the sound of chewing downright transforms me. I know one person who has it as bad as I do, we are very similarly brained, if that makes any sense. I’d love to make sense of it but when science itself has so few clues…
Leaf blower
Every time I see someone raking leaves I get the urge to thank them profusely. I wish lawnmowers and leaf blowers would just vanish. What happened to scythes, anyway?
That ‘untz untz untz’ sound that techno/ravers emit from their mouth, in a pathetic attempt to mimic their techno music.
It sounds like a cat trying to vomit, and literally starts triggering my own reflex to puke as well… 🤮
For the techno fans out there, I have nothing inherently against the music style, but your bodily organs do NOT lend themselves to the same sound effects as the synthesized instruments in your preferred choice of music!
I thought people only made that sound jokingly to mock the repetitive nature of that music.
Nah my dude, back when techno was seemingly more popular, like in the mid 2000s to mid 2010s or so, all the actual techno nerds that enjoyed the music, created their own techno in Fruity Loops, and/or loved playing DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), would all make this sound when discussing their music interests and works (and game scores).
It wasn’t a mockery, the verbal sound literally came from the techno/raver scene. They were often fucked up on MDMA, LSD, and who the hell knows whatever else, for them it’s all a fun sensory overload…
Thank goodness I haven’t heard the ‘untz’ sound verbally emitted in over a decade, but I bet there are still some techno fans that still do it.
Haha alright. I mean, I make that sound myself sometimes. Always as a joke.
I can respect it as a rare brief short joke these days, but seriously back around 2008 to 2014 or so, at least 2 other employees plus the boss loved techno and would make that sound verbally at least 4 times a day.
Hehe yeah I don’t go past 3-4 untzes typically. Would definitely be annoying over a longer timespan
The music is much more evolved now and there isn’t really one specific genre (ie techno) any more. The four-to-the-floor beat you describe was (and arguably still is) the core of most electronic/dance style music. And yeah, it’s usually the start of most of the stuff I write in Fl Studio (aka Fruity Loops), as a simple and driving core beat is what is the best for the largest possible group of people to dance to. (It’s universal, regardless of genre.)*
Example from NTO here: https://youtu.be/xF0Qx9XQCNI (This is technically in the electronic/techno genre, but really can’t be classified that way anymore. The FttF beat is still driving that song though…)
Probably the pinnacle of where techno and synthesizer music has evolved to is music by Mr. Bill. It’s more of a full sound design thing now, and less legacy Fruity Loops’ish now. (https://youtu.be/WCrgI4ne1Kw) TBH, Mr. Bill isn’t, and probably will never be “my style”, but I respect the hell out of his music though. Fucking genius stuff.
Alas, I could find a million-and-one examples of modern trash-club music and it’s never going to go away. Strongbad summaries that genre the best: https://youtu.be/JwZwkk7q25I
You do you, and making fun of what still is the core rhythm of nearly all electronic music ain’t exactly a hard thing to do. ;)
I just thought it kinda sucked that you sounded like you might not have been exposed to, or were even aware of, how that type of music has evolved. “Techno”, “90s House” or whatever, is actually dead for the most part though. The modern iterations of the scene are still massive and probably 80% of those people don’t realize that the core rhythms have been exactly the same for +30 years or more.
And nah, I ain’t butthurt about you making fun of “my” music and not at all trying to be argumentative. The music is so much better now, even if you can still cleanly overlay an untz-tsh. :)
- note: The “four to the floor” is the underlying beat, but it usually has the “swing” knob pushed hard in dance or club, hence, the recognizably short pattern of untz-tsh. The disco beats themselves have some super cool history, regardless.
Radio ads with alarm clocks, ringing phones etc. make me want to murder.
most high pitched squeals
