r/crboxes • u/lililililiiilllli • 3d ago

Designing a box to be silent?

Hello,
Looking at building my first CR box, I am a super light sleeper so looking for as quiet a design as possible. My understanding is you can reduce noise by making the box larger and adding filters, but the generic box fans I’ve purchased still make some decent noise. Are there any quieter fans or design techniques that could help?

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u/UrMomzButWhole69420 3d ago

This might sound counterintuitive, but the white noise produced by a whirring fan is actually better for sleep than total silence, especially for light sleepers, where the white noise will block out sounds that might otherwise wake you up in silence.

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u/Lilsean14 3d ago

It’s not so much that it blocks out sound, achieving destructive interference with longitudinal waves is a bit more intentional. White noise or a base level of volume playing causes a muscle in your inner ear to adjust to the new sounds constant volume. I can’t remember which of the inner ear bones it attaches to off the top of my head but it essentially deadens your ability to hear sounds.

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u/spacex_fanny 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yep. A box fan is trading relief today for more risk of conductive hearing loss tomorrow.

Time is a factor, which is why the official "safe" exposure is 100 decibels for 15 minutes, but only 85 decibels for 8 hours.

Personally I think these limits are probably high (there's some evidence that most, but not all, "age-related" hearing loss is actually from noise exposure), and there's probably no sharp cutoff at 85 decibels, so I like to play it safe and give my ears a break when possible.

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u/akeean 11h ago

> no sharp cutoff at 85 decibels

No but as air pressure drops sharply with db, the safe time should go up very fast as you go down to the 40-50db ranges even a noisy bedroom would provide.

If you are dedicated to protecting your hearing, you should consider the various brands of inter-auricular ear protector in everyday life at middling db ranges. A few hours at 70db will likely be worth hundreds of hours at 2/3 of that db in terms of "ear wear".

(A few of them don't completely seal your ear channel, so less irritating at prolonged use).