None of the others in town have these, thought it was unusual enough to share
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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some models use a wire in the ground that emits a low frequency radio signal... which can be also be transmitted by the speaker in a phone by simply playing these mp3 files: https://www.tmplab.org/2008/06/18/consumer-b-gone/ (!)
It's absolutely insane that a speaker coil works as an antenna in this case, but perhaps even more insane that the signal survives mp3 compression.
Why is that insane? The entire point of an mp3 file is to be able to reproduce signals with reasonable accuracy. Seems like the signal has a frequency of around 8khz, which is very much in the range of human hearing and should be preserved by an mp3.
No, the point of MP3 is to compress audio in a lossy manner while minimizing the introduction of artifacts detectable by human hearing using psychoacoustic analysis. The coincidence that the necessary parasitic EM signal induced by speaker drivers happens to be created by a signal that doesn't suffer degradation by a relatively specific lossy compression method is remarkable.
Right, but artifacts in the ~8khz range will be detectable by human hearing. mp3s are going to be perfectly acceptable for many sounds in that frequency range... The fact that this works is evidence of that.
Plus, you know what else is lossy? Radio. If the signal is that fragile there's a good chance the locking mechanism wouldn't work in the first place.
Go actually read about MP3 compression before you continue misusing the term "lossy."
It's just going to be pulses of an 8khz signal. Why would an MP3 not encode this just fine?
Like I said before, the coincidence is what's remarkable.