Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!hayes.fai.alaska.edu!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request
From: claris!netcom!ergo@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Isaac Rabinovitch)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Telecom Peeves
Message-ID: <9729@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 14 Jul 90 21:22:30 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 484, Message 1 of 8


In <9712@accuvax.nwu.edu> roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:

>In <9649@accuvax.nwu.edu> Bill Berbenich <bill@eedsp.gatech.edu>
>writes:

>The problem is room noise picked up in the mouthpiece
>and heard through my earpiece (is sidetone the right term for that?)
>If I cup my hand over the mouthpiece, I can hear fine, but that's a
>real drag.  I think what I want is a push-to-talk handset, but havn't
>been able to fine any.  Any suggestions?

About a year ago, one of those yuppie electrotoy catalogs featured a
phone with *no* mouthpiece; it gets your voice from jawbone
vibrations!  DAK sells walkie-talkies built on the same principle.  I
dimly recall seeing a TV article on the invention of such technology
 -- this was long ago, and it's original use was for helicopter
intercoms during the Vietnam War.  Never seen it in stores, though,
and I've no idea whether it actually works.

>	Also, I'm deaf in one ear.  It always seemed to me that in
>situations like talking on the phone in a noisy place, that was
>actually an advantage instead of a handicap since I don't have to
>filter out ambient noise from the other ear.  Do double-hearing people
>find that noise in the non-phone ear is a real problem, or does the
>brain automatically just filter it out?  I watch people at phone
>booths in the subway.  Sometimes I see them covering the other ear
>with one hand, but sometimes they don't seem to bother.

Most people are good at filtering out sounds they don't want to hear;
a minority (including me) is bad at it.  For obvious reasons, there is
much conflict between these two groups of people.


ergo@netcom.uucp			Isaac Rabinovitch
atina!pyramid!apple!netcom!ergo		Silicon Valley, CA
uunet!mimsy!ames!claris!netcom!ergo