Wednesday 29 May 2013

Can you Hear A Skeleton Earpiece Whilst Wearing Earplugs?

There’s no motive why not. The principle elements of your ears are actually, fundamentally, removed from the hearing practice when  ‘Bonephones’.

A skeleton earpiece is a conveyable speaker system manufactured to bypass the most sensitive parts of the ear to be able to reduce the risk of hearing loss. Based on current research, any noise over 100 decibels causes hearing problems like tinnitus and short-term deafness, even giving you everlasting harm. Your standard iPod can reach sounds as extreme as one hundred fifteen decibels within the US, but here within the UK, special programs restricts most gadgets to approximately 100db.

Anyway, a skeleton earpiece (a technology occasionally known as ‘Bonephones’) can be the best way to listen to your music securely. Patrick J. Kiger of How Stuff Works.com explains the science behind ‘Bonephones’.

“To understand how bone conduction works, you first have to understand how we hear sounds, which we do in two ways: Sound travels in waves through the air. Normally, sound waves travel through several structures in the ear, before being translated and transmitted through our nervous systems to our brains. First, the waves enter the outer ear, or pinna, which is the big flappy piece of cartilage that helps to focus the sound. From there, the sound goes into the air-filled middle ear, which includes the auditory canal and the eardrum, a flap of skin that vibrates when exposed to the energy from sound waves. On the other side of the eardrum, there are three small bones, the ossicles, which are attached to it. They transmit the vibration to the cochlea, a fluid-filled structure that takes those vibrations and converts them to electrical impulses that are sent along the auditory nerve to the brain. But that’s not the only way our body can process sound. Sound waves can also be transmitted through the bones in your head. When the bones vibrate, the sound reaches the cochlea, just as it would by going through the middle ear and eardrum, and results in the same sort of nerve impulses being transmitted to your brain. This method of sound transmission is called bone conduction”

Based on Kiger, the great composer Beethoven utilized a kind of prototype version of this technique. By attaching a rod both to his piano also to his skull, he might ‘hear’ the music he was making, an revolutionary answer that shares equivalent key principle with bone conduction.

‘Bonephones’ should have no effect at all on whether or not a user is wearing earplugs or not, because the part of the ear that is ‘plugged’ is not actually in use.

My very own private reservations concerned the safety to the user of these new headsets, but Kiger affirms that,

“Deborah Price, a doctor of audiology and vice-chair of the Audiology Foundation of America, told Wired in 2004 that bone conduction is “very safe”

Additionally, ‘Bonephones’ are particularly good for our good for the visually impaired user, who might need to play music, audiobooks or additional content without having to hide their ears.

The tech is still comparatively new, but in the interim it appears being perfectly safe and generally in a position to match the fundamental capabilities of a standard set of earbuds, although questions remain about the level of audio quality achieved via this method.


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