If I am in the same room as a CRT TV while it is on, unless the volume is jacked way up, I can hear this high pitched whine that drives me crazy and makes my ears hurt. A lot of people I know can’t hear it at all, but I always can if the TV is on and the sound is off or quiet. Btw my TV is LED, this happens if I am in somebody else’s house or a store where they have an older TV.
yeah this is p common for CRT televisions
It’s the flyback transformer and it’s pretty common to be able to hear it if you have good enough hearing.
Not as much now I’m an old fart, but as a kid, yes, definitely.
(I’m hoping that part of it is that they’ve also quieted down the transformer a bit too.)
That reminds me of the first day of high school when we got our ‘fancy’ computer lab back in the late 1980’s. The first lesson was to turn the monitors and computers on. A few students instantly covered their ears and started complaining about the loud sound. Most people couldn’t hear it at all (including me).
CRT’s got much better over the years but some people have always complained that they can hear the high pitched sound especially when they are first turned on and then they learn to adapt to it just like any other background sound. Hearing that from a more modern CRT just means that you just have unusually good hearing in the high range. Most people cannot hear it at all.
There are a number of sounds just outside of the normal range that most people cannot hear but some people can. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing but I would imagine it would drive you crazy if everyone could hear the full range of possible sounds.
Just go give the box a nice solid thump on the side and it’ll go away.
That sound is about 15.7 kHz for an NTSC CRT TV which puts it within the normal human hearing range of 20Hz-20kHz. People lose high frequencies as they get older, so a lot of middle-aged and older people won’t be able to hear it well but I don’t think it should be rare for a kid or young adult to hear it.
Recently around age 30 I spent some time with a CRT and I was able to hear the tone clearly. It was annoying although I would get used to it and the TV audio would mask it to a certain extent.
In high school I could tell if there was a TV on in a classroom from outside the door.
It’s the sound of the flyback transformer. I’m one of those old farts that could hear the tone quite distinctly when he was younger, but not any more.
This. I’ll bet anything the OP is under 30.
I definitely could as a kid. I don’t know if I can any more since I haven’t been around a CRT in forever.
I seem to remember that it’s louder when there’s a lot of white in the picture.
Not unless it somehow kills the power to the tube.
I also have been able to hear this since my folks got their first TV in the early 70s. I have been told that my hearing will deteriorate as I get older & this high pitched whine will go away. I am still waiting for that to happen at 54 years old.
I have lost some of the lower pitches due to all of the engines I have worked around in my life so far. Yet I can still hear this whine.
Yep, I can hear it too. 33, partially deaf in both ears. I have trouble hearing someone sitting a few feet from me, but I can still hear that damn whine.
When I was a kid, I could hear it whenever the TV was on, no matter where I was in the house. After 30 it went away. It is 15,750 Hz, by the way. 30 frames/sec at 525 lines/frame. Actually, it is some number like 29.97 frames/sec. Does anyone know why it is such a strange number?
I heard a whine like that the other day, though I’m not sure where it emanated from. I hope that means my hearing is still in good nick.
40, and I can still hear it sometimes, despite plenty of potential hearing damage over the years from going to lots of concerts. The TRS-80 color monitors my grade school used were the worst, seemingly filling the hallways, but even now when I power up one of my vintage arcade games, I can hear it. It’s similar to some dog whistles, which I can also hear. Never heard it from [a]all* CRTs, though.
Per the Wikipedia colorburst entry, it was an adjustment needed to add interlaced color information to the original monochrome standard.
Well, I always could when I was younger, but I haven’t used one in a while. So I went and checked. I cannot hear it, even with all the noises turned off. There’s a ringing in my ears now that is probably covering it up.
Of course, I seem to remember larger screens being louder, adn I only tried it on a tiny bedroom TV. (I actually was surprised it was plugged in.)
Still could hear it, last time I was around a CRT, even if it was in another room. 52 years old, and used hearing protection around machinery when I was young. I can hear the “teen buzz”, too.
Kids, use your ear plugs! You’ll thank me later!
It’s not just the flyback, other transformers inside electronics can also produce a nice buzz. Take a cheaply built transformer not well attached to the board, throw in some aging, and you got yourself a hummer. Few consumer appliances other than TVs have the high frequency, high power, signal needed to get a really annoying whine going, let alone a good sized transformer sitting on that circuit. So it’s most strongly associated with TVs and the flyback in particular.
But good old 60Hz can be quite audible depending on the situation. I can hear the pole transformer hum in my yard. The theme from the Andy Griffith show it ain’t.
Humbucking is used in audio applications to reduce background hums.
Even if the primary frequency of a transformer hum is outside your (current) hearing range, resonance creates secondary beats that you can pick up.