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IsardIceheart t1_j2eb5hh wrote

Reply to comment by GanondalfTheWhite in Eli5 How exactly does Noise cancellation work? That too in such small airbuds by Professional-Ad3441

I'm pretty sure they use pure hardware, no software to do it, because software is too slow.

(This information may be out of date, but this was true not that long ago)

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frzx1 t1_j2edyaa wrote

Hardware alone cannot do a lot of stuff that we see today, the true power lies in silicon, and consequently the computation it does. Also, software is far from being 'too slow', I'd even go ahead and say that software at present is far more quicker than hardware.

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f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4 t1_j2ekf2k wrote

Hardware meaning integrated circuits, which are made from silicon...

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IsardIceheart t1_j2epxzg wrote

Lmao, yeah this guy is dense.

Also... software is never faster than the hardware it runs on, by definition.

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frzx1 t1_j2eknuz wrote

What do you think I'm talking about? CRT monitors?

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IsardIceheart t1_j2eg99f wrote

Yeah, okay buddy.

I did some research and it looks like active noise canceling is still done with purely hardware, because software cannot process the sound fast enough.

By purely hardware I mean it is an analog system, not digital.

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wbsgrepit t1_j2fc7vq wrote

This is kind of true and kind of false, Software speed is limited by the hardware it runs on — there is certainly software that is fast enough to do this work very well (given the right hardware to run on), however, given the constraints of many noise canceling headphones it is currently much more cost effective to bake that logic into chips especially designed for this work vs using a much more expensive general purpose cpu etc.

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IsardIceheart t1_j2fjr4l wrote

Yeah, I guess the point is that general processing is unsuitable for the work, rather than incapable.

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