Sound cancelling speakers in bedroom for traffic

[SL4P]

Hire a spectrum analyser, and get a handle on what you’re trying to attenuate.
Some will be audible, some will likely be subsonic / infrasound.

[SkyMaster]

...
This is a problem that I am currently dealing with -- I live in an apartment and work a night shift which means trying to sleep during the day with the sound of lawn mowers and leaf blowers and the neighbors yelling at each other.  I have a particular problem with my next door neighbor as there young daughter has no inside voice.  It may be that she has Tourette syndrome or something similar, but ....

Sleep deprivation is not fun!

You really need to use ear plugs. Ear plugs will not block everything, but will probably reduce the noise enough to help you sleep peacefully.

When I travel I always bring ear plugs with me, as hotel rooms are often noisy. In fact, I always carry a pair of ear plugs with me; just in case.

 

[cdev]

If I were you I would focus on sound deadening materials and ear plugs. Active noise suppression is unlikely to work.

Can you put an additional layer of dense wallboard on the wall?
wall material over the wall you share - with a thin layer of foam beneath it and carpet on the room-facing side.

[tooki]

I looked around on the net for a few minutes, can't seem to find much hope. Are there any consumer products out there, not headphones, speakers, that could help reduce traffic noise in a room ?

I'm considering moving to a place right on a busy street. I don't want to go crazy, yet.

For what it’s worth, it might not even bother you. You get used to it pretty quick. I’ve lived fight next to a commuter rail station, and on a rather busy street, right in a front bedroom. Despite being sensitive to things like speech when trying to sleep, I very quickly adapted to the rail/road noise.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out whether you’ll adapt to it is to move, since you can’t really judge it based on a single trial night (or even a week).

[cdev]

Maybe a good HEPA air cleaner would be a good sound masker that also cleans air?

[filssavi]

Unfortunately Noise cancelling is technically quite challenging to pull off,

1) you can only do ANC in a single point in space, with effectiveness dropping off quite significantly as you go further (it creates a bubble of silence around your head (let’s say 30-60 cm in diameter)

2) ANC is only effective on relatively low frequencies, for example even with the best ANC headphones (which is the best case scenario, much better than open space ANC) high frequencies pass straight through and are only attenuated physically

3) ANC is most effective with periodic repetitive sounds, against white noise is almost useless, thus is because you cannot do pure feedback ANC, it needs to actually predict what the sound will be in the future so that the cancelling signal is exactly of the opposite polarity, even if your algorithm was single cycle, which is not, the D/A conversion, signal filtering/amplification, and actuation all introduce delay that makes it impossible for all but the lowest frequencies to cancel anything in the first cycle

[raptor1956]

...
This is a problem that I am currently dealing with -- I live in an apartment and work a night shift which means trying to sleep during the day with the sound of lawn mowers and leaf blowers and the neighbors yelling at each other.  I have a particular problem with my next door neighbor as there young daughter has no inside voice.  It may be that she has Tourette syndrome or something similar, but ....

Sleep deprivation is not fun!

You really need to use ear plugs. Ear plugs will not block everything, but will probably reduce the noise enough to help you sleep peacefully.

When I travel I always bring ear plugs with me, as hotel rooms are often noisy. In fact, I always carry a pair of ear plugs with me; just in case.

 

I do use ear plugs but the girl next doors voice could melt through 2m thick Krell metal easier than a blaster at full power.


Brian