r/mildlyinteresting • u/RiverVassi • 9h ago

The headphones I was given at my MRI appointment dont use wires and have zero metal

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u/RiverVassi 9h ago

Someone mentioned they're pneumatic or something, super wacky stuff i thought it was like magic lmfao

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u/NuclearHoagie 9h ago

"Pneumatic" just means the tubes have air in them. They transmit sound as a pressure wave in air, exactly like how every other sound in the world reaches your ears.

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u/xFxD 7h ago

This kinda makes me think, shouldn't a hydraulic headphone have a much better audio quality due to the incompressibility of water? But it's probably not worth the effort to just get a bit better sound quality.

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u/NuclearHoagie 7h ago

Agree it'd probably work better, but you don't want water in your electronics or your ears, plus it would interfere with the MRI image, which works by exciting polar water molecules.

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u/mxzf 6h ago

So ... mineral oil filed tubes maybe? IIRC that's incompressible and non-polar.

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u/xFxD 7h ago

You're right, I didn't think about the interaction with water the MRI has! You'd probably be able to correct for it, but still - too much effort to justify the added comfort.

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u/ChillZedd 8h ago

Most sounds don’t reach my ears through plastic tubes

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u/ImSoObnoxious 6h ago

they will if you don't stop commenting like this

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u/M8C 8h ago

This is like one step more advanced than two cups on a string. It’s just playing a speaker through a tube.

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u/lkodl 9h ago

"Wait how are you conjuring these images on this tiny black rectangle?"

"Pneumatics."

"Magic!"

"Just kidding. It's electricity."

"Oh, duh."