5 ms·

Right, and now you've achieved the same noise cancelling performance... That off the shelf noise canceling headphones achieve (1 kHz) without putting 10000 micr

• wegs 6y ago
  .... in the same way that having a billion transistors in a computer isn't practical. Or a computer in every car tweaking fuel injection. It's not practical until it is. Electronics goes down in price. Algorithms improve. Insulation stays fixed or goes up in price. I would say it's not a question of "if" but "when." The answer to that might be right now (we couldn't do it before, and we probably can today) or it might be in a decade. But electronics will keep falling in price. 10,000 microphones * $5 per microphone+electronics = $50k. The advantages of cancelling an entire wavefront go well beyond passenger comfort too. Industrial noise cancelling systems are more about equipment life than about employee comfort. I had laptop screws unscrew on airplanes before, due to vibration. If planes need less maintenance as a result of active vibration reduction throughout the airplane, you'll make up that $50k virtually overnight. As a footnote, the crazy part here isn't the 10,000 microphones, but the speaker-at-every-seat part. You'd almost certainly want both the microphones and speakers in the skin of the airplane. But that's a story for another day.