Webinar on measuring headphone levels to prevent hearing damage

June 19, 2009

The formidable Susan Sillitoe sent along a press release informing us that Prism Sound, an audio testing company, will be giving a webinar on June 24 on how to measure sound levels of various headphone types in order to insure your product is not causing hearing damage. They will broadcast the webinar twice, once at 9AM EDT and once again at 1PM EDT. You will have to register to view the material. Worse yet, they will expect you to install software on your machine so you can participate. Perhaps the good folks at Prism don’t understand that IT departments, at least most that I know, don’t give administrator privileges to us peons so I can’t install anything on my work laptop. I certainly am not going to install anything on my personal workstation intended to open it up to the whole world.

On July 8^th they will have a different webinar on test strategies for AES3 digital audio in HD Radio. The program for the June 24^th headphone sound level webinar includes:

· The present standards environment regarding human safety

· Fixtures for testing circumaural, supra-aural, and supra-concha headphones, ear buds (intra-concha) and insert earphones (intra-canal).

· Test techniques for headphones, ear buds and portable players

Details

· Who? Dan Foley, Prism Sound Telephony Solution Strategist.

· What? 20-minute online seminar, with 10 minutes for questions.

· Where? Online. Registered attendees will receive an email with details.

· When? Wednesday 24th June 2009, 9AM EDT (13:00 UTC/GMT, 14:00 BST)

· How? Details will be included in the email sent upon registration. See also webinar FAQs

This does look like a great presentation and guess I should take the bullet for you all and install the software in my machine so I can report about it, but I finally have a nice stable WinXP service pack 3 install and I’ll be darned if I am going to risk the kind of misery that can come with installing sharing software. Five years ago I did that at a work machine at National— it was one of the popular packages—I forget which one. It went in and changed so many things I can guarantee you that when you uninstall it there will be things wrong with your OS. The anti-virus software started complaining since they opened up so many ports and redefined so many things. Worse yet, having software on your machine that is just made to open it up to the whole world is a pretty scary proposition.

I know, the diligent engineer should find a work-around. I can thing of a few. I could create a Windows profile of my present install, install the software, watch the webinar, then go back to my old profile. Better yet, I could image my OS disk, install the software, watch the webinar, and then over-write my OS with the disk image. I have to take an image anyway, if only to save the 10,000 little settings Windows scatters all over the place. I am really happy with this install of XP and want to keep it forever, at least 5 years. Another tack might be to use my spare OS. See, I install Windows XP on two partitions, so when one gets corrupt I can just boot into the other and instantly have email and web access and all the programs I need to do my job. I guess I could consider one XP install to be the “whorehouse” where I install all these insidious little programs, and then just use that partition when I have to use these programs. Heck, my Orcad 9.3 is one of those, I always cringed when the install procedure said it had to change file associations on existing file types. That is why I have not installed it, even though I would like to play around with PSPICE and draw article figures in Capture.

I don’t think non-technical types understand the reticence we engineers have to installing anything on our computers. I have an entire backup computer that has the exact same hardware and also has a double install of XP, and yes, I got tired of being a crook so I bought a whole second legal copy of XP for that machine even though it is only a backup. Kudos to Microsoft, since they seem to understand when I install two XPs on one machine. The install never gives me grief, and both installs verify over the internet.

Now the sharing software for this webinar comes from the UK, and I do have a better feeling about European software writers being a little more polite about hacking up my machine. Still, before I install any sharing software on my machine, or any silly little program, I would want to see a twenty-page dissertation about every single thing that gets changed or overwritten, as well as a binding legal contract that specifies that the uninstall will leave my machine EXACTLY the way it was. My buddy John once had some Colorado tape backup software that overwrote a Windows dll but did not change the file date. Of course they did not restore the old dll on an uninstall. Fortunately the dll was a few bytes longer so he figured out what they did. And yeah, the new dll made some other program not work right.

No, anything to do with software resembles walking over the Grand Canyon on a tightrope. One little change, one misstep and I have to spend 5 to 10 hours re-installing Windows XP and losing all the settings I have not figured out a way of backing up. I hate the way Microsoft has put registry files in user directors, so you can’t just make a copy …/Paul Rako/ of it anymore, at least not while the system is running. That is one benefit of having two installs on one machine. You can do copies of partition that you are not booting from. This is OK, but I still need to learn how to take an image of both boot partitions so I can recover from the inevitable hard drive crash even though I have both my OS drive(s) and data drive(s) redundant in RAID arrays.

So yeah, I have redundant RAID drives with redundant OS installs and a complete redundant machine. And if I install some software on one of them, good configuration management and that Intel “Copy Exact” philosophy dictates that I should install the software in all four partitions. No thanks. If it corrupts my OS, a 5 to 10 hour reinstall of the OS and all my programs is multiplied by four, so it takes the better part of a week.

So how might a webinar be run without special software? I could see streaming the video and then just taking emails and posting them to a comment or question section of a web page. Heck, I really don’t see why we need real-time participation anyway. Just post a video to a blog the way Brian Dipert does and let the comments fly. I know EDN will be doing audio seminars later this year so lets see how we structure that. Audio is much easier to produce than video but the real-time aspect is a pain. When I was with National Semi we did a web show once in real time and then gave up. Sorry for the long rant on computer installations and software, but do let us know how you feel about installing viewing or sharing software on your box, as well as if you like live seminars or prefer time-decoupled ones.

Posted by Paul Rako on June 19, 2009 | Comments (3)

June 19, 2009

In response to: Webinar on measuring headphone levels to prevent hearing damage
Paul Rako commented:

Andy, Google Real Alternative and you can get a player that is not modified spyware. Be sure to first uninstall Realplayer and go into the registry and remove every single key that has Realplayer in the key string. Paul, I agree Microsoft OS could be easier to manage but we were the ones that started it when we stole so many installs that Bill Gates figured we should pay for. I once kept 5 Win2000 boxes running on one OS disk. Sure, the machines never got used at the same time, but that is not Bill's idea-- the Borland licence concept is long dead. I ranted about Microsoft once before: www.edn.com/blog/1700000170/post/1180029918.html And re-reading it I regret that I was so over--the-top. Never ascribe to criminality and liars what can be explained by Dilbert. No, when I complain to my programmer pals they are remind me how insanely complex software is and how we hardware guys would have it all balled up if we had to design it. I am the one who tells people that 20 things arranged every way you can is 19! (19 factorial) and that is more seconds than the universe has existed since the Big Bang. And here is my dream of the way software should install: www.edn.com/blog/1700000170/post/1800041180.html And yes, when I backup my Opera browser profile to my backup machine, and then open Opera on that machine, it starts with the exact same tabs open and skins that I have on my main machine. It is so neat it is scary. It is obvious that the man of the house is expected to be the IT department. I think we deserve a better, easier way to maintain and migrate installations to new machines. Oh, and if you have a motherboard die like Paul did, here is the trick that Paul Grohe taught me on how to force Windows XP to do a plug and play on boot and hopefully install the right drivers for the new motherboard: www.edn.com/blog/1700000170/post/1480016148.html www.edn.com/blog/1700000170/post/1670018567.html I have done a motherboards swap under an existing Windows OS, but for this last go-around I just did all four installs-- two partitions in two computers all at once. The best advice was from my mentor Big John Massa: Take notes when you do the install. It will be a savior in nine months when you have a problem. I am going to think about my disk image problems and let you folks know what I do to protect my OS installs. My OS partition is 12 GBytes, so I guess I could back them up to 3 DVDs. Problem is, I don't know how to back up the Master Boot Record and the other stuff. Maybe I will work on this and do a test migration when I put in one solid state disk (SSD) in my box to replace the 2 drives I have in a redundant RAID that I use for the OS. The SSD should be as reliable as a mirrored RAID if you believe the hype.

June 19, 2009

In response to: Webinar on measuring headphone levels to prevent hearing damage
Andy T commented:

I too had avoided installing the allegedly spyware-rich RealPlayer up until this past week - I had to have it to view the Building Battery Arrays webinar cohosted by TI this past Wednesday. After forcing me to upgrade WMP to version 10 (I see no reason why we should upgrade to degrade our privacy/rights), the streaming audio still didn't work, forcing me to reluctantly install the RealPlayer app I was bent to avoid. And, of course, during the installation, it wants to be the default player, it wants to install other software that is irrelevant to what I want, it embeds itself into the registry making removal nigh impossible, and it connects itself to RealPlayer's home site, sending who knows what to them as part of the install. Meanwhile the seminar had started.... When will we realize that our current versioned email client programs are fine, the browser versions are fine, the media players are fine, the word processors and powepoint are fine (I actually use OpenOffice), and XP does the job to where there's nothing more I want? A 3D web browser - yeah, I'd be motivated to install that one when it comes. Vista? Win7? WMP 12? RealPlayer V742562.0? Other bloatware with no discernable difference in functionality other than skins? No thanks.

June 19, 2009

In response to: Webinar on measuring headphone levels to prevent hearing damage
Paul Freedman commented:

It is like a breath of fresh air to have someone in the media openly describe the hellish nightmare that Microsoft has made of computer use. My life has been frittered away 5 hours here 10 hours ther for years on end while trying to get Microsoft's OSes and applications to work. Here is the important thing. They don't intend to fix the problems! Disk management and application installation/running are two of the most fundamental responsibilities of an operating system and Microsoft's OSes do them so badly they are indescribable. Microsoft thinks that tweaking a graphical user interface is all they need to do year after year after year, without addresssing the basic flaws in disk management via Windows Explorer and their abysmal application management. One very brief example recently, on my work computer if I delete a file the "Deleting" dialog box sometimes stays up for a full minute. The IT support staff have the same approach everyone else dealing with microsoft software does - install a new OS image and reinstall the applications. But it doesn't fix the problem. I agree with you Paul, I wouldn't think about installing the webinar software you described. By the way, I have kept a hard drive crash managable more than once with backup drives, but just hope your motherboard doesn't crash. Mine did once and the OS install is so dependent on the motherboard drivers and configurations that a backup disk doesn't work. You have to start from scratch and waste a week of work to get your system running again. Microsoft pushed out several oses to ensure security - securing their software from being copied while making everyone else miserable and broke. I hope Microsoft and their managers get what they have coming someday. Perhaps they'll Enroned into orange jump suits.

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