Patent ID: 7272233

Claim:
A system for preventing acoustic shock comprising: a variable attenuator attenuating an input signal by a variable attenuation amount specified in a single attenuation value signal to produce an output signal; a frequency analyzer operative to convert a time-windowed portion of the input signal into a plurality of frequency bins, each frequency bin expressing the energy of the time-windowed portion of the input signal over a particular frequency range; an energy calculator which determines a relative energy signal having an element corresponding to each frequency bin, each element of the relative energy signal based on energy magnitude in the corresponding frequency bin relative to a total energy of the time-windowed portion of the input signal; a plurality of signal detectors, each detector in communication with the energy calculator, each signal detector generating a detection signal for modifying the variable attenuation amount based on the relative energy signal, at least one of the detection signals comprising a vector of attenuation elements, each attenuation element in the vector of attenuation elements corresponding to one of the frequency bins; and attenuation logic in communication with the variable attenuator and the plurality of signal detectors, the attenuation logic determining an attenuation value signal controlling the variable attenuation amount based on combining the plurality of detection signals to generate the single attenuation value signal.