Identification of annoying sound emitted by consumer electronic devices

There is a growing interest to integrate hard disc drives in many consumer electronics (CEs) for storage of digital data. Many of these new applications dictate low overall noise operation by the whole system in extremely low noise background environments. In these quiet surroundings, simple analysis of the amplitude of sound may not be sufficient to assess the impression it might have on an observer in terms of its annoyance. This work attempts to develop a new approach to gauge the annoyance of sound emitted by all types of equipment slated for operation in very quiet environments. The proposed process is intuitive and may be directly related to the perceive sensation of sound by humans. As such, it provides a means by which the designer of either a subcomponent or the system may be able to assess the acoustic emission and hence its potential annoyance in advance during development.