Moin Vorts! Thanks for all the feedback (no pun intended, of course) on the noise problem. I have seen all of the headsets, and I have read that they work pretty well. I decided to give those a miss, mainly because of the prices, and secondly, because I do want to hear what is going on inside my apartment (stereo, phone, firealarm, etc). I also don't like the idea of wearing any more than I have to. I am pretty much a shorts, sandals and a smile kind of guy in the summer.
The house is built out of massive stone. The walls are at least 3 feet thick. The ceilings are 12 feet high - it is a grand old place. If I could find another place like it a little farther back from the street, I would be out of here like a shot, but even by European standards, this place is a real find. My bedroom is shaped like a giant bay window with 3 windows that are roughly 7 feet high and 4 feet wide. Nearly all of the houses here have double-paned, glass windows now, but in the summer, you want to have them kipped open. Nobody uses air conditioning here, and I wouldn't want to miss out on the sea breezes, anyway. I did a bunch of googling, reading, and then waited until after midnight to do some thinking. That is generally when the din subsides somewhat during the week - on the weekends, thought is impossible here. I found a bunch of audio programs that will do phase reversal, etc., and was thinking along those lines. The latency issue can be solved by today's modern hardware with no problem, but the software still has to be pretty lean. I thought about possibly writing some kind of fast fourier transform flip, either in a compiled language or assembler, and running that in Dos or Linux with no GUI on an old dedicated 500 megahertz box. Then it suddenly occurred to me that we still have analog! The microphone signal run through a diode should flip the wave, run that through an opamp, and out to a speaker. What could be faster, simpler or cheaper? Mike Carrell's observations have given me some pause, but I think that with proper positioning of the components I should be able to achieve at least some noise reduction. I think I am going to try out the analog idea, and see how it works on one window. I reckon that if I mount everything properly just outside the window, I might get enough of the effect that I want without the howling, and then do the other two windows. The components will be cheap enough. Come to think of it, pretty much everything I need to do the proof of concept, except for the diode, is included in a megaphone. That I can get locally. I would just need to take it apart and play with the positioning. Now, I just need to find the time to do it. Thanks again! Knuke
