User Guide

Plantronics Acoustic Safety White Paper

Draft #4

Plantronics Acoustic Safety

White Paper

ACOUSTIC SAFETY 101: A TECHNICAL GUIDE FOR EVERYONE

An overview of the Plantronics role in shaping global acoustic safety standards and building

products to meet them.

by Allen Woo

I. Introduction: Sorting through a world of regulations

Like many aspects of the working world, a signiﬁcant number of regulations govern the type and

amount of noise we are exposed to. It is important to understand key government regulations in

order to protect affected employees, and to best judge the efﬁcacy of the technology chosen to do

so. This white paper provides a simple, easy-to-understand explanation of the major acoustic safety

regulations in force around the world, and an overview of technology developed by Plantronics to

comply, or help users to comply, with regulations to safeguard auditory health.

As a Principal Engineer at Plantronics, I not only get to work with a team of outstanding engineers

in developing solutions for high-quality communication devices; I also get to lead a number of

committees at global standards organizations.

Through my committee work I am privileged to

interact with industry peers, authoring standards that manufacturers rely on to make safe

products and protect users’ hearing.

A QUICK WORD ON MEASURING SOUND LEVELS

Most people are familiar with the word “decibel” (dB), the measure for sound pressure levels.

The mathematic formula for sound pressure level is:

dBSPL = 20log ( ——— )

P is the effective pressure in Pascal

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is the reference effective pressure in Pascal

Allen Woo’s current service on standards committees includes ITU-T SG12, ETSI STQ, TIA TR41, BT SIG eAudio, IEEE

WGCE, IEC TC108 and CENELEC TC108x.

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