What’s your understanding of the trigger level for noise which
evaluating hashmaat kol on shabbat?
KT
Joel Rich
Igeros Moshe vol 6 / OC 4:60.6 says hashma'as qol is about sounding
like a melakhah was done on Shabbos. If by "trigger level" you
mean volume, he says there that if an alarm clock cannot be heard
outside the sleeper's room, or if anyone who heard it would know
from the kind of alarm that it wasn't necessarily set the night before,
it would be permissable. (Which is any alarm clock nowadays,
but that's tangential.)
So it sounds like (sorry!) RMF holds that the volume is anything
loud enough to cause someone to be chosheish you.
Tir'u baTov!
-Micha
R’ Joel Rich wrote:
What?s your understanding of the trigger level for noise which
evaluating hashmaat kol on shabbat?
As I recall, R. Moshe writes that if a sound is audible in an adjoining room, it constitutes hashmoas kol. I do not recall any explicit definition of this in the Gemara, and it appears to be a subjective concept. For example, if one lives alone, it could be argued that the sound would need to be audible outside the house to qualify. On the other hand, one could equally argue that even within that house it constitutes a zilusa de-Shabbos to operate loud implements.
Moreover, the air conditioners extant at the time when the Minchas Yitzchak permitted, under certain circumstances, asking a gentile to turn on an air conditioner would likely have generated more noise than many contemporary appliances. A related issue arises today with respect to robotic vacuum cleaners. As I understand it, they generate the most noise when expelling dust into the receptacle. I am not aware of any posek who has defined hashmoas kol in terms of decibel levels.