How do you protect your ears from very loud glitches with headphones on?

justgoscha

Hey guys,

I wanted to ask if there was any way to ensure that when audio glitches, or you modify a parameter?
I just always fried my ears when changing the room size in freeverb~ ...although my mac was on first bar in volume.

EEight

@justgoscha [zexy/limiter~] ?

LandonPD

@EEight is right, the limiter is a great way to go.

And there are other things you can do, depending on what exactly you are trying to achieve or on your style.

Limiters are fundamental but they have to alter the signal, if necessary. So, if you want to listen to a "pure" signal, you may want to avoid limiters. Besides, a limiter doesn't allow you to learn if you are doing it right or not...it's doing the job for you!

My suggestion is that you use [clip~] which restricts a signal to lie between two limits. The advantage of this is that it often allows you to learn to know by ear when a sound is clipping or not.

[osc~ 220]
|
[clip~ -1 1]
| |
[dac]

Notice that the minimum value goes first.

Then, remember that a single loud sound shouldn't damage your ears. Cells don't die because of a loud transient, at least, that's what I've learned. What really damages your ears and its internal cells is exposing your ears to a loud level during a long time. Two hours of moderately loud music will probably do more harm than a single loud transient. That's why there are laws that regulate the number of hours a worker can be exposed to loud sounds. But then people listen to loud music for several hours...and laws don't regulate the amplitude of your headphones or the amount of time per listening session.
Then keeping the levels of your system low is good practice. (You seem to know this already, it seems).
Finally, if you are going to try sthg weird, or sthg that you know it could become loud, move your headphones slightly away from your ears so that you don't get blown away.

Have a nice day!

Don

I usually always make sure that my final signal to the dac is only multiplied by a hslider from 0 to 1 and move it in float using alt-click-drags.

And I always keep Pd; Dsp 0 Message not too far away in case of the big bang exploding.