The loudest thing in your office? It isn’t ‘that guy’
July 14, 2009 by Steve HannafordPosted in: Dealers & Channel, Special Report
With more and more workgroup printers, copiers, and multifunctionals on the office floor, most office workers now sit within a spitball’s throw of a noisy machine.
Those sounds can be distracting, both while the printer’s in operation and waiting for the next job. Some machines make such a racket they make telephone calls hard to hear and become a general distraction.
The usual scientific measure of sound intensity is termed “A-weighted decibels,” dB(A), a scale based on typical human hearing characteristics. Zero dB(A) is the quietest noise that humans can typically hear. Above 85 dB(A) are levels of noise (say at a heavy metal concert) that can lead to hearing problems over long periods of exposure. Levels above 100 dB(A) are intolerable even for short periods of time, while 130 dB(A) is near the top of the perception scale (above which human hearing saturates).
The usual ambient noise in an office (lighting, air conditioning, light conversation, keyboard noises) ranges from about 35 dB(A) (library quiet) to around 60 dB(A). Once noise levels get above that, they quickly get more and more distracting, and are likely to hurt productivity. Older copiers, for example, have been known to run at 63 dB(A) or higher.
Many office equipment companies are now working on making their devices quieter. This is in part because of a response to users’ needs, and it’s partly because of increasingly strict standards, especially in Europe. Lexmark has been one of the leaders in this area, so we talked with Marty DeGraff, worldwide marketing manager, and Alex Chapman, vibro-acoustics engineer, both of Lexmark, to learn what they were doing.
The newest line of Lexmark laser printers and MFPs has managed to reduce noise levels on some machines to 53dB when printing, and 35dB when idle. In each product, they have made serious improvements over the previous generation. In addition, all of their laser models announced since October 2008 offer a “Quiet Mode,” which slows down the machine a small amount while cutting noise levels significantly. That’s aimed at workplaces, such as banks, schools, libraries and courtrooms, where there’s an even higher demand for quiet.
Lowering noise levels on these products is no simple matter. Lexmark, like some of its rivals, has built an accredited in-house, low-noise acoustics lab, where they benchmark their machines and experiment on ways to reduce noise by constantly improving various components, such as the motors, gears, rollers, fans, and fuser.
But getting the numbers down is not enough. The acoustics profession has a term called “noticeable difference,” or ND. This is a more subjective metric than decibels, one based on a variety of sound quality factors, including pitch, roughness, grinding, and squeaking. That means two machines at the same decibel level can often be perceived by humans as significantly different in noisiness. To test for this, Lexmark brings into the lab groups of non-experts to rate different machines for their subjective impressions, for added feedback on improvements.
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Tags: copiers, decibel level, noise, printers
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August 16th, 2009 at 7:27 am
I can still remember the loud noise made by printers before and we can’t complain because it’s the latest model so fay. Now, we can enjoy noise-free printers with quality output. Thanks to the newest innovations!