Active Noise Cancellation

[whitecotton]

Is there anything preventing Tesla from implementing active noise cancellation. I feel like Tesla would be perfect for this type of system.

 

[DoubleE]

At minimum, perhaps speed sensitive volume, or similar.

I'm always adjusting the volume when getting on/off the freeway.

 

[whitecotton]

Yes! Exactly!

 

[Max*]

At minimum, perhaps speed sensitive volume, or similar.

I'm always adjusting the volume when getting on/off the freeway.

I've mentioned this many times. Apparently people on this forum think this is a useless feature and mentioned that their previous cars have sucked at it.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I want speed sensitive volume, and on my previous cars it's worked near perfect.

 

[Skotty]

Someone had a very long and technical post awhile back about why there is limited ability to implement any type of noise cancellation. I can't remember what thread it was in, but if I run across it I'll post it. I was something along the lines of noise cancellation only working well for certain frequency ranges and something also to do with 2D vs 3D or the complexity of the sound behavior or something like that. The gist of it being that there may be high tech reasons why it wouldn't work or at least wouldn't work well. I think there was also discussion of some other car having that kind of tech but it was more to quiet the known engine noises, which of course Tesla doesn't have an issue with.

A speed adjusted volume option seems reasonable. Semi-related, might be nice to have an option to reset the volume to something low when getting into the car after it has been parked to eliminate the blasting your ears off effect (volume goes up and up and up on someone's drive home, and that someone may also like to listen to music louder than you, then you get in the car to go somewhere and when you get in THE MUSIC IS *THIS* FREAKING LOUD!).

 

[SherSlick]

I too would love speed controlled volume.

 

[DoubleE]

My Lexus, Audi, and Range Rover had some sort of microphone that would detect ambient noise, and raise the volume as needed.

I don't think it was "Active Noise Cancelling" but it worked well in my opinion.

I'm sure they could do this in a firmware update.

 

[MarkS22]

I think we're talking about two very different things here.

The primary question is "active noise reduction" which listens to the sound inside the cabin and sends an opposite sound wave to cancel out the unwanted sound. This is very difficult because of the wide variety of sounds, locations, and volumes. You want a system to eliminate "noise" frequencies without interfering with speech and music that share a lot of those frequencies. I believe it could help with the A/C noise and maybe some road noise, but this tech works best in headphones where you have a known source (e.g. music) and a seperate external noise. In a car, the wanted and unwanted noise are mixed.

Adjusting the music volume simply tries to overpower the road noise with increasing the volume as you drive faster/louder.

It's a cool optional feature that makes music easier to hear but, unlike a working active noise reduction system, it doesn't help (and could hurt) speech intelligibility with passengers and lessens the ability to hear external noises (like horns and sirens).

Passive sound reduction is much easier, but at a weight expense. Eventually, with enough microphones (and possibly dedicated speakers near the source of the unwanted noise) blanketing the car and the right software, I can see significant gains in active noice reduction... but we'll probably have Level 4 autonomy first.