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Making Your Room Quiet
el_flynn writes "This may be a cure for those of you with loud computers, or perhaps those who spend lots of time in NOC rooms that generate lots of noise: NewScientist.com mentions about a "Silence Machine" that gets rid of unwanted noise. I want one to quiet down my neighbour's loud dogs. " These are also being tested in cars, to make the car quieter. I've got a pair of the headphones that the article alludes to - they make airplane travel much nicer, and having something like this to cancel machine noise would be excellent.
I tried out a friend's pair of Bose noise cancelling headphones with an iPod in a crouded restaurant the other day.
I was absolutely amazed- I'd tried cheaper noise cancelling technology years ago and not really been able to tell the difference, but this time I was turning the noise cancellation on and off with glee!
I hope they catch on so we can get some volume pricing going:)
I am a PC consultant / PC Builder / Small time business OEM provider / AMD Fanboy
Anyhoo, a company I do a lot of work for recently gave all agents brand spankin new Dells. While they are the shities P4s available and they are paired up with SDR mem - they are REALLY REALLY quiet. My trick of the trade is to get 1.2 GHz Durons and take the voltage down and underclock them, then they run nice and cool and there are some quiet fans out there and I use a nice sparkle psu that has a quiet fan on it, but I can still hear them in a small office. This P4 however is damn near silent. They have not been in dusty office environment long enough for me to tell you if the fans go over time, etc.
I know the computer lab @ my school (in the chem library at least) has a bunch of the almost same Dells (same hardware, different case) and its whisper quiet in there
You can do quiet cases with full clocked AMD AXPs - look for the screw mountable Zalman HSF @ www.2cooltek.com - it comes with resistors to slow / quiet the fan down. Good airflow / tied down wires help a lot to keep the case quiet. Also, check out the sparkle PSUs -- lots of power, little noise.
PPS - Silent water rigs are popular since only one fan is needed for the radiator and you can get pretty big fans that run nice and quiet
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I find it difficult to sleep at night without the whoosh of the fans from the handful of servers I keep in my room. What kind of geek likes quiet machines?
This is not a Fugazi
try breaking your eardrums, then you cant hear diddly.. and its cheaper than buying these 'quiet' solutions!
:-)
I can say myself, I've been deaf since I was born ( I was born deaf ) so I can say that its the easiest solution since I cant hear diddly so all of my computers are supposedly "quiet" for me! Soundproof padding for my room? Nah! dont need it!
I would love to have one of these, as I am a very light sleeper.
That being said, the technology is the same thing as noise cancelling head phones (such as these, these, or these). These headphones simply rock if you have not tried them.
alternatively, you can use more traditional methods to quiet things down, like insulation. Putting some dynamat in your car will really dampen the noise and make it nice.
One thing I have always wanted to try for fun, is get a really sophisticated sound cancellation system with many microphones and many large speakers to broadcast the "anti"sound, and put it in a large area like a park or the mall.
then, don't tell anyone about it and watch the puzzled look on people's faces when they can't hear each other.
maybe it's not possible, but I sure do think it would be funny.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I wonder if this will stop bass vibrations. I work nights and during the day when I try to sleep I get my neighbor playing his music real loud. I can't hear the music, but the vibrations from the bass keep me up until I get out of bed go over and knock on his door to get him to turn it down. This would help if it could block bass vibrations, but I don't think I want to spend a four digit sum on it.
How about this idea: have an extra soundcard installed in your machine, hook it up to a small mic and speaker, and put the mic and speaker inside the PC casing.
Input from the mic would be fed to some app that could analyze the sound coming in, generate the appropriate cancellation frequencies and output via the speaker. Tada - quiet PC!
Of course you wouldn't want the mic to be on continuously - there would be feedback when the mic accepts signals from the speakers. But we could possibly run a cron job that turns on the mic while shutting the soundcard output, and perform the analysis once every minute/5 minutes/whatever your fancy. This would be a good way to make use of your spare cycles.
Howzat?
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
Build this.
Cost? About $10 - $20 depending on how much you have lying around. Best thing? It lets you use any headphones you like instead of being stuck with the inferior quality of many noise cancelling headphones.
I've done it and it compares well to most sub $100 noise cancelling headphones.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
You could build a system that cancels for a small target area from a distance, but it's going to produce twice the sound in other places.
I remember seeing a long time ago on the TV a system similar fitted to an exhaust on a pokey 4 cylinder Audi. The car was practically silent, and people had a lot of trouble stalling the car when pulling away from a standstill, because you had no real feedback on engine RPM.
:-)
Best bit was that after the car was 'silent', they simply put some nice beefy speakers in the car, linked it to engine RPM and load, and added a bit of computer wizardy. Suddenly the Audi sounded a whole lot more like a Ferrari, or at the flick of a switch , a F1 car (with 12,000 rpm 'wired' to about 4500 real engine rpm), they even had (heh) a jet turbine, but it was a bit crappy, cause turbines don't quite spool up like 4 cylinder cars do
The presenter was having a ball, caning this little car around town - from the camera's position in the car it was pretty realistic.
Pretty much the 'killer app' for noise-cancelling tech in my opinion.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Give Noise a try. It's free and it works pretty well for me.
A little tip: I think you'll find that pink noise works best if it's being generated from a source that sits between you and the noise you're trying to block out.
Another tip: pink noise are also good at keeping your noise masked. If you want to have a conversation with your girlfriend and don't want your roommate listening in, turn on some pink noise.
Eliminating bass can be much simpler than that with just an amplifier, speakers, and a... signal generator: position the speakers against the dorm wall where the source originates. Set the amplifier for test purposes at medium volume. Slowly calibrate the signal generator to achieve resonance of the walls. This is determined when picture frames rattle off the walls. Once this point is determined, maximize amplifier output. The resonant energy building within the walls will then be transparently delivered to the client in what can be described as a non-maskable interrupt.
What can be described after that is guaranteed to be silence. Except for breakage of items in the host's bookshelves, etc... Slight profanity may be also side effect. Use with caution and deny any knowledge when questioned.
Does anyone ever consider that I might *want* noise? The dorms I live in are so damn loud that I'll do anything to bring the ambient noise above the human- and stereo-created noise threshold.
Right now I've got a non-functional AC unit and dual in-window fans going primarily for this purpose alone. The frige is right next to my bed and since I don't have any money for food, I sometimes leave the door propped open just so the compressor runs and lulls me to sleep. I'm also considering buying a monster box fan to put next to my bed so my frige doesn't have to work so hard. (Or if I actually want to put anything in it.)
And don't get me started on my computer. I think my neighbor can tell when I shut this thing off.
For the curious, I have tried those anti-noise machines and noise-cancelling headphones, but they don't take care of 99% of the problem for me: bass. Until I started working nights, I'd usually be up until the wee hours of the morning because some dipshit wants to have a Jurassic Park marathon with his dipshit buddies. Let me tell you how fun that is when I had to get up a 6AM for work every day.
And yes, I have also tried earplugs, but again, they don't block out the bass... the sound has such a low frequency that it travels through your skull rather than through your ear canal.
Especially for air travelers - Sony makes some earbud noice cancelling headphones, the NC10. Their performance is much better than Bose's, and since they're so tiny, you can just slip them into you shirt pocket, rather than having to lug a huge package around with you (the Bose ones are HUGE).
And, as I recall, Bose headphones have a pretty severe feedback problem. If you cover the port (say, by falling asleep and rolling over), you're welcomed to a delightful, ear-piercing shriek! So much for noise cancellation.
Oh yea, the Sony's are less than half the price, too. I've been using a pair for years.
No one would suspect a thing!
The power of denial is the great leverage of communication when they KNOW you have done something. Give them enough suspision, but not enough proof. The social engineering object is to use this opportunity to drive your loud argument into their weakened, desperate state.
Intimidate by the power of denial. When they accuse, use this precious time to illustrate their vulnerability. Be mad, not just pissed off. Twist their logic into epic proportions of insanity. They will either leave you alone, or try to match wits. Always trump their argument with a more grandiose element of insanity and do not let them win. After all, they have been playing rap (or other lame noise) at unhuman levels for an inordinate amount of time. Illustrate the chaos they have created.
But always deny knowledge. In this war, you must fight noise with noise. This is insanity at its best. Replace it with your projection how annoying they are. It will throw them off if they try to make a logical case against you. The resulting communication about noise is sure to be music to the ears of other victims.