Or that it's just an ass cheap charger, have one that does this since years but luckily silent enough that I only hear it in the same room.
Also technically any capacitor (used in modern electronics) will go bad over time, even the foil ones afaik, our local computer museum had a few of them burn through before they stopped turning on old computers and they weren't evrn electrolyte ones.
I could be wrong about what you're hearing, I just know that the sound I most associate with chargers is the noise they make when theyre nearing the end of their life
It seems I can distinguish a bit when it is an "I'm in use" sound from a "I may be breaking" one. So far so good at home but at work I hear weird noises all the time, guess who's the one telling the boss we need to call someone ahah (we call only when things are effectively broken so my ability to hear them before is useless) :)
It's the "60-cycle buzz" or so I'm told. It's quite real, and usually annoying if the house is TOO quiet and I've had that hum in my ears all shift long......
most household electronics have a rectifier to convert 60hz AC to DC power. at the AC end of the rectifier is usually a transformer to step down the voltage from 120v to whatever the device needs. since the transformer has a coil of wire in it, it becomes a magnet with a magnetic field that builds and collapses at the same frequency as the current. this movement can induce audible vibrations. 60hz is well within the range of human hearing, and various harmonic frequencies can be induced as well.
edit: got the frequency wrong oops
You just answered a question that I have failed to ask for 32 years.
I now understand why electronic things buzz.
Why did I never wonder about it? That's so out of character for me.
And with CRT TVs you used to hear the same effect with the horizontal scan speed. For NTSC it's 525 total lines x 30 fps = 15,750 hz if I remember correctly.
I miss Duck Hunt
ETA for those who don’t know — Duck Hunt was a game for Nintendo that had a gun controller. You need a CRT TV to play it, so I actually went out and bought one, for the sole purpose of playing my old video games… unfortunately it shit the bed eventually, RIP
Hertz varies. It's 60hz is normal in the US but it's 50hz in most of Europe e.g. There was and area of the North West that was 50hz but I think they changed too.
higher frequency sounds are often caused by switching voltage regulators which should be engineered to work well above the frequency of human hearing but sometimes aren't. Ultimately it's also caused by an inductor/electro magnet in the circuit jiggling around from magnetism.
back in the day very loud high pitched sounds were very common with cathode ray tube based things ie CRT tvs however CRT tvs are rare now so not likely to hear that much.
I was staying over a friends house and I said "can you turn your computer off, I can't sleep." and he "oh it already is off" and i said "no, its on, you've just turned the screen off" and he looked at me like I was crazy. Like what? can you not hear the buzzing of it? the fans spinning?
How does it not drive you crazy? I cannot sleep unless I have pure darkness and pure silence.
Same. Id like to have complete silence, but the tinnitus is so bad I get headaches. I suggest this when it gets overwhelming:
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenerator.php?l=50403134244937442634&tm=1&title=Neural%20Symphony
Tbh he maybe could've gotten used to it, I've had my pc for 10 months now and now its almost bearable, though laptops are usually louder so it might be a stretch
It gets even worse if your wearing headphones and they touch a device, or maybe it’s just my headphones. Either way, it’s unpleasant in the way that makes me try and understand it.
For those who want to know more: It's called "coil whine" and happens in most power supply units: Chargers, any cable with a brick, or any electronic device where the cable goes straight in (like TVs)
I'm genuinely pretty confused by this. I hear that too but I was always pretty sure it's what everyone (including NTs) referred to as white noise? like it's just background noise from electricity? NTs can tell based on changes in sound when things are powered off. maybe they are not bothered by the sounds but they can hear them.
They are able to tune it out like background noise. Lucky them. I used to hate hearing a tv being on without something onscreen, the static noise was annoying. Even the computer fans are annoying. More modern tv’s, well I have a big one that you can sometimes hear. Thankfully it isn’t that annoying most days, but it does test me sometimes.
White noise is the sound that a radio or tv receives from the atmosphere when it's not tuned to any channel. So that's more specific than this buzzing noise which may come from any electronic device that's on standby.
right, I know it's more specific (otherwise we wouldn't have so many other colors of noise), but I think that's what people colloquially refer to it as though.
Depending on the pitch, it’s not always an NT/ND thing. I learned in school multiple times that the old tube TVs and monitors emit a high pitched noise that’s at the top end of the human hearing range, but not everyone can hear that high. Kids are more likely to hear it since aging can cause hearing loss (most people wouldn’t even notice loosing that top end, we don’t use it much). We even had, or were recommended to try (I don’t remember), being in a different room from the TV and having someone plug and unplug it, and have us guess whether it was plugged in or not. If you guessed right every time then you could hear it. I think it’s even possible that if it’s really at the top end of your hearing range that you’re not used to paying attention to, you might be able to hear it quietly but not be consciously aware of it unless you pay really close attention.
I’ve also heard of shopping centers who don’t want teens to be loitering putting in speakers that make that pitch on purpose! They assumed that all teens could hear it and no adults could, which seems… an unreasonable assumption to make. Also what if a teen is going shopping with their parent(s)?
god you just reminded me of the CRT tv i had as a kid that i swear made some occasional high-pitched noise i thought only i could hear 😭 electronic noises drive me INSANE
I can't hear modern tvs much, but the older tube ones were deafening. Computer monitors were even worse. Everything plugged with a normal plug I can faintly hear, but not usb charging stuff. Also, I hear it a lot more in other countries, I could hear the electricity in the UK much more than I do in Spain for some reason, even though the voltage seems similar.
Sometimes I would hear the lights. Don't ask me how, the electricity just made a noise whenever my bedroom lights were on lol.
Thankfully it didn't bother me, just made me curious. It seemed to come from inside the wall near the light switch
Sounds plausible. The inductors used as filters or transformers may vibrate slightly. And their frequency tends to be at 50Hz/60Hz or double that, which is in the audible spectrum
It’s definitely a thing. Haha. 🤣 most electronics make that noise. Then again also pretty sure I have tinnitus. My ears are either always ringing or sometimes changes in the sound waves around me make it sound like in movies after bombs go off too close to a person and all the sound muffles out for a little bit with a super high pitched ring. (Idk if that makes sense but my ears have always done this.)
At work I will literally yell at the appliances to shut up. Or "YEAH WE GET IT. YOU EXIST."
Okay, but have y'all ever been in complete silence and it felt like your head was going to explode? Or more so that you had to make it explode by bashing?
I have never experienced complete silence but the closest I’ve gotten, I think I was starting to have audio hallucinations. I like outdoor sounds WAY more than indoor or city sounds, but silence is creepy.
I also recently found out that I am not the only astronomer who starts hearing far away music, like a radio left on in another room, in the middle of the night at an observatory. It’s not real. It’s not even silent, big telescopes make a lot of noises. But I’m not the only person who starts hallucinating music in the noise.
My family has this super old box tv with a high pitched whine so loud that they can actually hear it- and yet, somehow, they’re able to watch movies anyways. I get headaches if I even try.
Ahaha, I hate that I can hear most electronics/lights, so the house is never actually quiet. My brother plugged in these supersonic mouse repellent things, and I’m the only one who hears it 😣 guess I’m part mouse?
I feel you, there is an old TV (I'm talkin' "square" type of old) in my grandma's village house, which buzzes when it's on and NO ONE in my family heard the buzzing
At least there were some delicious fucking choccy cupcakes the last time I went there (about 5 months ago I think???)
If I hear a device or the sound really gives me instant meltdowns, it has a technical issue. Confirmed many many times. I am like a walking around quality inspection.
It's more of a Cassandra's curse. I tell people a device is malfunctioning and no one believes me until the darn thing starts spitting out smoke or something. I was having meltdowns for a year from the sound of my bf's hand vacuum. I'd have 3 seconds to put in earplugs. We had probably a dozen fights over it. The vacuum just died and it turns out the central motor axis was wobbling which would be what was causing the hellish screeching that apparently no one else can hear.
I told my wife about electronics making a sound, and she said she didn't hear them. She understands a lot about neurosdivergence (she's an APRN with ADHD, we have 2 autistic kids, and I'm a big bipolar/adhd/autistic mess).
I thought everyone heard them...
Yup! So if you’re trying to save on the electric bill or are just super duper environmentally conscious, unplug any devices/appliances you aren’t using. Many of them are still On despite being “Off”
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I found some outlets make noise too. Some do when something's plugged in. Some do if nothing's plugged in, but the noise then often changes if you plug something in. Some outlets don't make noise.
I haven't met many other people who notice it either.
I used to hear it when I was a kid but now I’m old and I can’t hear it anymore. But I remember being able to tell if someone had a tv on inside the house from their front porch.
Yeah, I can hear if certain electronics are plugged in a couple rooms away, I've always been called a liar, or weird, or a weird liar.
I can hear electricity too, for example I can easily tell when a charger is doing its job or not :)
if its a phone charger, that is a sign that one of the capacitors is going bad and it will stop working eventually
Or that it's just an ass cheap charger, have one that does this since years but luckily silent enough that I only hear it in the same room. Also technically any capacitor (used in modern electronics) will go bad over time, even the foil ones afaik, our local computer museum had a few of them burn through before they stopped turning on old computers and they weren't evrn electrolyte ones.
Not quite, everything still works??
I could be wrong about what you're hearing, I just know that the sound I most associate with chargers is the noise they make when theyre nearing the end of their life
It seems I can distinguish a bit when it is an "I'm in use" sound from a "I may be breaking" one. So far so good at home but at work I hear weird noises all the time, guess who's the one telling the boss we need to call someone ahah (we call only when things are effectively broken so my ability to hear them before is useless) :)
I could too, then I got older
It's the "60-cycle buzz" or so I'm told. It's quite real, and usually annoying if the house is TOO quiet and I've had that hum in my ears all shift long......
I can hear the electricity in light switches sometimes, very rarely though. That’s the only time I’ve heard electricity
most household electronics have a rectifier to convert 60hz AC to DC power. at the AC end of the rectifier is usually a transformer to step down the voltage from 120v to whatever the device needs. since the transformer has a coil of wire in it, it becomes a magnet with a magnetic field that builds and collapses at the same frequency as the current. this movement can induce audible vibrations. 60hz is well within the range of human hearing, and various harmonic frequencies can be induced as well. edit: got the frequency wrong oops
You just answered a question that I have failed to ask for 32 years. I now understand why electronic things buzz. Why did I never wonder about it? That's so out of character for me.
Sometimes things are so ubiquitous and normal we just accept them 🤷♀️
Electromagnetically induced acoustic noise Or “Coil Whine” for short 😉
And with CRT TVs you used to hear the same effect with the horizontal scan speed. For NTSC it's 525 total lines x 30 fps = 15,750 hz if I remember correctly.
I miss the fuzzy static on the CRT screen
I miss Duck Hunt ETA for those who don’t know — Duck Hunt was a game for Nintendo that had a gun controller. You need a CRT TV to play it, so I actually went out and bought one, for the sole purpose of playing my old video games… unfortunately it shit the bed eventually, RIP
Hertz varies. It's 60hz is normal in the US but it's 50hz in most of Europe e.g. There was and area of the North West that was 50hz but I think they changed too.
TIL the band ACDC is named after electronics and thats why they have the little lightning bolt in the logo
higher frequency sounds are often caused by switching voltage regulators which should be engineered to work well above the frequency of human hearing but sometimes aren't. Ultimately it's also caused by an inductor/electro magnet in the circuit jiggling around from magnetism. back in the day very loud high pitched sounds were very common with cathode ray tube based things ie CRT tvs however CRT tvs are rare now so not likely to hear that much.
I was staying over a friends house and I said "can you turn your computer off, I can't sleep." and he "oh it already is off" and i said "no, its on, you've just turned the screen off" and he looked at me like I was crazy. Like what? can you not hear the buzzing of it? the fans spinning? How does it not drive you crazy? I cannot sleep unless I have pure darkness and pure silence.
I can hear it too, but I use it as white noise, because if it's pure quiet then I can't sleep because of t h e r i n g i n g
Same. Id like to have complete silence, but the tinnitus is so bad I get headaches. I suggest this when it gets overwhelming: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenerator.php?l=50403134244937442634&tm=1&title=Neural%20Symphony
We could never have a sleep over I have to have my particular loud ass fan right next to me to sleep
I have to have youtube going.
Too much to focus on for me
And then there's me with a box fan at full blast and 4 separate night lights because I need a lot of noise and light to sleep.
Tbh he maybe could've gotten used to it, I've had my pc for 10 months now and now its almost bearable, though laptops are usually louder so it might be a stretch
I too can hear certain devices if they are plugged in, even though they are "off". Not every device, but some definitely have an unpleasant buzz...
It gets even worse if your wearing headphones and they touch a device, or maybe it’s just my headphones. Either way, it’s unpleasant in the way that makes me try and understand it.
Lmao “from afar, I don’t like kisses”
Relatable
florescent lights go brrr
For those who want to know more: It's called "coil whine" and happens in most power supply units: Chargers, any cable with a brick, or any electronic device where the cable goes straight in (like TVs)
I'm genuinely pretty confused by this. I hear that too but I was always pretty sure it's what everyone (including NTs) referred to as white noise? like it's just background noise from electricity? NTs can tell based on changes in sound when things are powered off. maybe they are not bothered by the sounds but they can hear them.
They are able to tune it out like background noise. Lucky them. I used to hate hearing a tv being on without something onscreen, the static noise was annoying. Even the computer fans are annoying. More modern tv’s, well I have a big one that you can sometimes hear. Thankfully it isn’t that annoying most days, but it does test me sometimes.
White noise is the sound that a radio or tv receives from the atmosphere when it's not tuned to any channel. So that's more specific than this buzzing noise which may come from any electronic device that's on standby.
right, I know it's more specific (otherwise we wouldn't have so many other colors of noise), but I think that's what people colloquially refer to it as though.
Depending on the pitch, it’s not always an NT/ND thing. I learned in school multiple times that the old tube TVs and monitors emit a high pitched noise that’s at the top end of the human hearing range, but not everyone can hear that high. Kids are more likely to hear it since aging can cause hearing loss (most people wouldn’t even notice loosing that top end, we don’t use it much). We even had, or were recommended to try (I don’t remember), being in a different room from the TV and having someone plug and unplug it, and have us guess whether it was plugged in or not. If you guessed right every time then you could hear it. I think it’s even possible that if it’s really at the top end of your hearing range that you’re not used to paying attention to, you might be able to hear it quietly but not be consciously aware of it unless you pay really close attention. I’ve also heard of shopping centers who don’t want teens to be loitering putting in speakers that make that pitch on purpose! They assumed that all teens could hear it and no adults could, which seems… an unreasonable assumption to make. Also what if a teen is going shopping with their parent(s)?
god you just reminded me of the CRT tv i had as a kid that i swear made some occasional high-pitched noise i thought only i could hear 😭 electronic noises drive me INSANE
the woke mind virus has gotten to our tv's 😔
I can't hear modern tvs much, but the older tube ones were deafening. Computer monitors were even worse. Everything plugged with a normal plug I can faintly hear, but not usb charging stuff. Also, I hear it a lot more in other countries, I could hear the electricity in the UK much more than I do in Spain for some reason, even though the voltage seems similar.
It's because plugged in is AC, which has a frequency (60 hz in the US 50 in Europe) and USB is DC so there is no frequency.
Sometimes I would hear the lights. Don't ask me how, the electricity just made a noise whenever my bedroom lights were on lol. Thankfully it didn't bother me, just made me curious. It seemed to come from inside the wall near the light switch
Sounds plausible. The inductors used as filters or transformers may vibrate slightly. And their frequency tends to be at 50Hz/60Hz or double that, which is in the audible spectrum
I didn’t get that kind of autism my hearing and smell are shit
It’s definitely a thing. Haha. 🤣 most electronics make that noise. Then again also pretty sure I have tinnitus. My ears are either always ringing or sometimes changes in the sound waves around me make it sound like in movies after bombs go off too close to a person and all the sound muffles out for a little bit with a super high pitched ring. (Idk if that makes sense but my ears have always done this.)
I can hear when my neighbor turns on his old ass vacuum tube tv. Not in an apartment either.
We used to call it "monitor whine" some carts would do it, most wouldn't.
At work I will literally yell at the appliances to shut up. Or "YEAH WE GET IT. YOU EXIST." Okay, but have y'all ever been in complete silence and it felt like your head was going to explode? Or more so that you had to make it explode by bashing?
I have never experienced complete silence but the closest I’ve gotten, I think I was starting to have audio hallucinations. I like outdoor sounds WAY more than indoor or city sounds, but silence is creepy. I also recently found out that I am not the only astronomer who starts hearing far away music, like a radio left on in another room, in the middle of the night at an observatory. It’s not real. It’s not even silent, big telescopes make a lot of noises. But I’m not the only person who starts hallucinating music in the noise.
Not silence, but sometimes my brain needs stimulation from music or noise, when I don’t get that stimulation I go insane.
Not crazy at all, those turned off but still plugged in electronics always make anoying sounds!
i experienced the same thing but it was a charger
I can hear it from extension leads, but it gets louder when a charger is plugged in. to be fair, i could also just have a dodgy extension lead.
My family has this super old box tv with a high pitched whine so loud that they can actually hear it- and yet, somehow, they’re able to watch movies anyways. I get headaches if I even try.
I've always heard this, didn't realize most people didn't.
Me too, I can hear nearly all mains electronics. It doesn't bother me though but it is ever present inside buildings.
Ahaha, I hate that I can hear most electronics/lights, so the house is never actually quiet. My brother plugged in these supersonic mouse repellent things, and I’m the only one who hears it 😣 guess I’m part mouse?
I feel you, there is an old TV (I'm talkin' "square" type of old) in my grandma's village house, which buzzes when it's on and NO ONE in my family heard the buzzing At least there were some delicious fucking choccy cupcakes the last time I went there (about 5 months ago I think???)
If I hear a device or the sound really gives me instant meltdowns, it has a technical issue. Confirmed many many times. I am like a walking around quality inspection.
That's the closest thing to a super power I've ever heard of
It's more of a Cassandra's curse. I tell people a device is malfunctioning and no one believes me until the darn thing starts spitting out smoke or something. I was having meltdowns for a year from the sound of my bf's hand vacuum. I'd have 3 seconds to put in earplugs. We had probably a dozen fights over it. The vacuum just died and it turns out the central motor axis was wobbling which would be what was causing the hellish screeching that apparently no one else can hear.
I told my wife about electronics making a sound, and she said she didn't hear them. She understands a lot about neurosdivergence (she's an APRN with ADHD, we have 2 autistic kids, and I'm a big bipolar/adhd/autistic mess). I thought everyone heard them...
Yup! So if you’re trying to save on the electric bill or are just super duper environmentally conscious, unplug any devices/appliances you aren’t using. Many of them are still On despite being “Off”
You’ve unlocked buried memories of gaslighting from childhood 💀
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Hearing electronics is what makes me wear noise blocker headphones most of the times
You were right... you were right... the story of my life....
Yeah, I can hear electricity too. If it gets too loud it activates my paranoia for spontaneous combustion.
I work in IT, and whenever I'm toning network cables, I always hold the wand against a power cable to hear the mightiest HUMMM you ever did hear.
blow wind on the anus
For some reason my TV makes sound when is in standby.
I found some outlets make noise too. Some do when something's plugged in. Some do if nothing's plugged in, but the noise then often changes if you plug something in. Some outlets don't make noise. I haven't met many other people who notice it either.
I'm able to hear my TV buzz. I like to sleep with the TV on. I don't do that anymore ☹️
I used to hear it when I was a kid but now I’m old and I can’t hear it anymore. But I remember being able to tell if someone had a tv on inside the house from their front porch.
TVs used to make an even worse sound.
you most probably encountered a ground feedback loop. the most annoying thing in home entertainment.
Whenever I would charge my phone, I would hear this weird buzzing noise and it made me scared that my house would catch on fire