Audio and Alarms

Audio can mean:

• Sound that can be heard.
• Vibrations made by electronics or other signals of frequencies audible to humans (about 20–20,000 Hz).
• Broadcasting or reception of sound.
• high-fidelity sound reproduction.
• Sound recording and reproduction in general.
• "I hear" in Latin.

Audio is also the debut album of the Blue Man Group.

Audible can also refer to:

• Audible.com, an online audiobook store.
• In American football, "calling an audible" refers to a tactic where the quarterback decides to change the play at the line of scrimmage before the snap by calling additional signals. This is usually done if the quarterback notices changes in the opposing team's defensive setup on the field.

For the British anti-radiation missile, see ALARM.

An alarm gives an audible or visual warning of a problem or condition.

Alarms used for different purposes include:

• burglar alarms, designed to warn of intrusions; this is often a silent alarm: the police or guards are warned without indication to the burglar, which increases the chances of catching him or her.
• alarm clocks can produce an alarm at a given time
• safety alarms, which go off if a dangerous condition occurs. Common public safety alarms include:
  • tornado sirens
  • fire alarms
  • car alarms
  • Community Alarm or Autodialer alarm (medical alarms)
  • air raid sirens
  • tocsins — an historical method of raising an alarm
  • Distributed control manufacturing systems or DCSs, found in nuclear power plants, refineries and chemical facilities also generate alarms.

Alarms, from innocuous sirens to actual smoke detectors, have the capability of causing a fight-or-flight response in humans; a person under this mindset will panic and either flee the perceived danger or attempt to eliminate it, often ignoring rational thought in either case. We can characterise a person in such a state as "alarmed".

With any kind of alarm, the need exists to balance between on the one hand the danger of false alarms (called "false positives") — the signal going off in the absence of a problem ; and on the other hand failing to signal an actual problem (called a "false negative"). False alarms can waste resources expensively and even dangerous. For example, false alarms of a fire can waste firefighter manpower, making them unavailable for a real fire, and risk injury to firefighters and others as the fire engines race to the alleged fire's location. In addition, false alarms may acclimatise people to ignore alarm signals, and thus possibly to ignore an actual emergency: Aesop's fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf exemplifies this problem.

See also

• Many different types of alarms
• Alarm management
• Clock
• Burglar alarm