ABSTRACT
One of the most difficult problems in gear noise investigations is that the final “detector” and arbiter (on whether or not a noise is irritating) is an extremely non-linear, rather temperamental, and extremely variable human being, with office politics and economics playing a major role. It is quite possible for three people to listen to a gear drive and to object to it for three completely different reasons. No amount of technical measurement will determine which aspect of a gear drive noise will irritate a particular customer, so it is most important to identify the problem correctly at the start by questioning the customer thoroughly and by possibly playing tapes of different types of gear noise to the customer for comparisons. A PC with an output card to a loudspeaker can be useful for this.
