Headphones under $50

Jul 23, 2015 at 4:58 AM Post #16 of 21
I wonder if anyone has been trying to develop closed circumaural headphones with a built in ear cooling system? It seems like this would be much easier to do for a studio headphone that has access to plenty of power rather than a portable one that runs on low power.
 
Jul 23, 2015 at 12:05 PM Post #17 of 21
But cooling would require moving air... which would be very noisy over your ear, not to mention the noise from the fan itself.
 
Jul 23, 2015 at 12:32 PM Post #18 of 21
  But cooling would require moving air... which would be very noisy over your ear, not to mention the noise from the fan itself.

Not necessarily. there are passive heat sink designs. aluminum would be needed to keep the weight manageable.. Other issues though might be that that they might not look good. There might also be some possible designs with fluid filled earpads, with special fluid to direct heat away from the ears to outside the headphone(perhaps also with heat sinks on the outside. This would be a nice engineering challenge to make it function properly, not be too heavy, not be too expensive, and not be too ugly looking.
 
Jul 23, 2015 at 12:54 PM Post #19 of 21
Speaking as an engineer... none of that is going to work.
- Any type of heat sink requires a large surface area, and still wants convective flow to draw the heat away. Natural convection is extremely slow (especially when the temperature differential is so low) and air that doesn't move acts more like an insulator
- A natural temperature gradient will develop regardless, and your ears will still be warm. Maybe if you had freakish anime-style wings coming out of the headphone, it would be marginally cooler.
- Fluid filled earpads would require a watertight seal in the pads, rendering them impermeable. Pads that don't "breathe" are almost always warmer than pads that do. Even if the liquid was somehow highly heat conductive, again it wouldn't move very much from slow natural convection.
 
Jul 23, 2015 at 12:59 PM Post #20 of 21
I was thinking about a heatsink that has one end inside the sealed earcup, and the other end of the heatsink emerging to the outside in contact with the room air. 
 
Another idea might be a water cooled design. One could have a small cooling device that then circulates cold water through water filled earpads. Of course this probably couldn't be made to be portable. Some use water cooling for PCs. So why not have it for headphones?
 
Jul 23, 2015 at 1:35 PM Post #21 of 21
Added weight, noise of a pump, energy required for said pump... and once that water warms up it won't really do much.
 
A heatsink with one end in the cup and the other end outside... isn't going to do anything. It really won't.
 

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