I had reserved a table for two at Tao Downtown, but when I got to the box and was asked if I had any special requests, I hesitated. I did it, but I didn’t know what would happen. Will I be the first customer ever to request a noisy table?
This is not a normal question, but I had my reasons. Recently, I was wondering if there could be an easy way to hear and be heard in a dining room full of loud speakers and screaming guests by simply wearing earphones. To test it, I needed something that I usually try to avoid. It’s a loud as hell restaurant.
As you may know, Apple announced last month that it would soon introduce new software that will allow AirPods Pro 2 earphones to function as over-the-counter hearing aids for mild to moderate hearing loss and be tailored to your ears. (You can also take Apple’s quick test on your device or upload your audiologist’s test results.)
What you may not know is that AirPods Pro 2 already have a setting that increases the volume of the person speaking and a setting that reduces background noise. Other earphone manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, Beyerdynamic, and Soundcore also offer features that make it easier to have conversations in noisy places. But AirPods surpass them all. That’s why I wore my AirPods to Tao and several other Manhattan restaurants known for wreaking havoc on my eardrums.
In my 12 years as a restaurant critic, few issues I’ve written have garnered as many emails or comments as Noise, but never have they caused as much white ire. Up until a certain point, many readers were mad at me when I admitted that I like noisy restaurants. They were even more angry at the restaurant.
Understood. Prolonged exposure to loud noises can cause hearing damage. Even if it’s not terribly loud, it’s frustrating not being able to hear the other people at your table. It’s even worse not to be heard, to have to repeat your words and raise your voice until it sounds like you’re in a shouting match. This is even more difficult for people with some degree of hearing loss. Most of us drown in a sea of angry ambient noise and eventually succumb to a feeling of helplessness. We quietly seethe.
Before taking the Apple White AirPods out to dinner, I put them to the test in a makeshift lab at home. I sat in a chair with bookshelf speakers on either side of my head and blasted “Metal Machine Music,” Lou Reed’s room-wiping experiment with a cacophony of guitars. I placed a third speaker a few feet in front of my face and tuned it to “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC. There, a botanist was being interviewed about autumn leaves.
In the first round, with my bare ears, Lou completely obliterated Brian. For the next round, I stuffed the AirPods into my ears in what Apple calls transparent mode. The point of transparent mode is to tolerate ambient noise. 2-0, Lou.
Then the actual experiment began. Still in transparent mode, I dug into the accessibility settings until I flipped the conversation boost and ambient noise reduction switches to the lime green on position. Conversation Boost uses directional microphones to isolate and amplify the audio in front of the listener. Ambient noise reduction attenuates sounds coming from other angles.
Well, the botanists have come loud and clear. Lou’s guitar purred, like an asthmatic cat, purring but semi-quietly.
In real-world conditions, my earphones’ performance was less dramatic.
Inside two restaurants on the corner of the Lower East Side that people call Dimes Square, I encountered a problem I didn’t expect. That said, the dining room wasn’t too loud. This is not a common complaint about Dimes Square, but it was warm that night, so there were more people dining outside than inside.
Both restaurants had their windows open. This meant that instead of the sound waves bouncing off the glass and hitting the ears of everyone in the room, they flew out of the room like paper airplanes.
The noise wasn’t as murderous as I expected, but it led to an unexpected discovery. I went with a friend who also owns 2 sets of AirPods Pro. Every time I plugged it into my ear to reduce the ambient noise, I would mumble lower, as if I were in a really quiet room. To his delight, I could barely hear a word he said, even with my AirPods.
Tao Downtown has no windows or outdoor seating. When our hosts turned right at a reclining Buddha about the length of the moving van and took us down a 40-foot staircase to a sunken dining room, we noticed that tables everywhere were full. I saw it. Music was blaring. It wasn’t as loud as hell, but it was still good enough.
My AirPods did not eliminate the impact sound. But they were very helpful. It was like turning the volume down from 7 or 8 to 3. I could clearly hear the dinner guests across the table. I could hear him without AirPods, but I had to lean forward, look at his lips, and make other small efforts. When they pile up, it becomes tiring to spend the night in a noisy space.
The fact that I was able to hear his voice at all was definitely the result of careful planning by Tao’s designers. Creating a restaurant where you can converse with your fellow diners is a difficult proposition. Background noise can come from road traffic, subway tracks, air conditioning equipment, exhaust hoods, and subwoofers. But your biggest enemy in conversation is simply other people.
“The biggest sound source we have to control is the human voice,” says Albert Maniscalco, a partner at Cerami & Associates, who has helped with the acoustics at Union Square Cafe and Eataly.
Maniscalco explained that because the voices we want to hear and the voices we don’t want to hear are in the same frequency range, there is constant competition for our ears. This crowding is especially important in the high frequencies produced by consonants, the quick bursts of sound that make the difference between “spanish” and “stein.” Your friend’s voice may be transmitted across the table, but important information that allows you to understand your friend’s voice is lost, especially as high frequencies build up around you.
And they will. People who want to be heard over background chatter inevitably, and often unconsciously, begin to speak louder and louder. This tendency is so well documented that it has been given the name Lombard effect, and is not unique to humans. It has been studied in cats, canaries, marmosets, bats, frogs, and beluga whales.
Braxton Bolen, an associate professor of acoustics technology at American University, said the Lombard effect in crowded rooms is a type of what social scientists call the tragedy of the commons, in which limited, shared resources are used to the point of waste. He explains that this is a tendency for people to go too far. .
In Boren’s analogy, the resources are peace and quiet. People who eat in crowded restaurants probably know that there is a common interest in keeping the volume down to a level suitable for conversation. But we also want to be heard, even if it means speaking out loud. Self-interest takes precedence over the common good.
“Anyone making any noise is a betrayal of our shared promise of quiet,” Boren said.
The two standard ways to prevent tragedies are regulation and privatization. We might all agree to speak more quietly in restaurants, which is a form of social regulation. “But given the way the Lombard effect works, it’s highly unlikely that a group of people will do this for long periods of time,” he says.
Another answer is to privatize parts of the commons. Bolen said restaurants may end up installing booths with partitions that block out some of the noise from large, noisy tables in the center of the room. But he is also interested in hearing aids and earphones with directional microphones. In fact, the wearer can secure a personal quiet zone in a noisy space.
Couples going on dates with tiny speakers in their ears may seem unromantic, but it’s not if it helps them talk to each other. Diners have different hearing abilities and different ideas about a good time. My signal can be your noise and vice versa. There is no restaurant that will satisfy all ears.
So why aren’t more people adjusting the volume in crowded rooms to their liking? In the case of AirPods, part of the answer is that they have conversation-enhancing and ambient noise reduction features firmly in the settings. Maybe it’s because it’s built in, so every time I tried to turn it on it felt like I was crawling through heating ducts in the ceiling.
Both features are nested within accessibility settings, and people who don’t believe they’re hard of hearing won’t see them there. It should become easier to find as hearing aid and audiometry capabilities are introduced in the coming weeks.
Based on my experiments, I don’t recommend buying AirPods Pro 2 just for these features. However, if you already own those earphones, or other earphones with a similar setup, you might want to take them out to dinner. Even small improvements can make the difference between real communication and quiet anger. And it’s cheaper than going to Steyn.
