On: I Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His Musi...

[williamdclt]

There was an HN post recently (or a comment? can't remember) about playing a beep when memory is allocated/released in a program. The claim was that you can hear weird allocation patterns.

Similarly most of us could probably diagnose some faulty hard drive issues by ear

[kthejoker2 → williamdclt]

My wife told me her external SSD was failing. I asked what the symptoms were and she said it was making a noise.

With all the paternal condescension I could muster I told her, SSDs don't make noise.

She said it's making a noise right now!

I listened - no it isn't!

A fracas ensued.

Later after the armistice was signed, we Googled and discovered the power supply can emit sounds in the 16Khz range when voltage is inconsistent.

And sure enough I've lost that hearing range and my wife hasn't.

I told her that's proof I didn't hear her about taking out the trash - she must've been using her 16KhZ voice!

[touisteur → kthejoker2]

Power supplies... Phone chargers, ebike battery charger, laptop chargers... So many switching power supplies tend to whistle it's a major pain. Even worse when you're the only one hearing it... Even even worse is that unshakeable feeling that the thing is shit and is going to blow up soon (I played the 'blowing up electronic components' game when a teenager instead of sports or dating or studying).

I can also hear some GPUs around me, and I'm not sure whether it's the draw of the power supply that makes the PC sing or something within the GPU itself.

[detaro → touisteur]

Likely the GPU itself, which has it's own powerful switching converters (to get from the voltage it gets from the PSU to core voltage for the GPU chips)