Re: Loudness calibration?

most

nput

;-)

Have you considered trying that little blue pill? :)

Rich Grise mentions

This reminds me of a story from university:

A group of students sharing a house had one member who was very proud of his super audio system (this is back in the early 80's when hifi power and distortion was a status symbol, before cheap stuff became good). He would often retire to his room and turn the volume up irritatingly loud, claiming that it sounded best at a volume setting of 7 or so.

Eventually the other lads raided his room while he was out and wired some power 8 ohm resistors in series with his speakers. They were 4 or 8 ohm speakers.

After this everyone was happy; he believed he was still getting the ideal volume; the others could hear themselves speak, etc. This went on for a year, until he noticed smoke coming out the back of one of his speaker cabinets and opened it up to find a charred resistor.

Reminds me of a person at Motorola... obnoxiously loud on the telephone. One day I went into his office with a circular piece of thin black cardboard, unscrewed the mouthpiece, inserted cardboard, probably 10dB of attenuation. He never did notice ;-) ...Jim Thompson

In my old job, some moron decided that they should put horn loudspeakers in every lab, just so deaf people working with their ears pressed up to cryopumps would be able to hear safety announcements. The result was that every time there was a blood drive, or some management droid was coming to give a talk, I got my ears blasted. Of course putting in a resistor would have been Officially Frowned Upon.

So, I went to the stockroom and got a small selection of rubber test tube stoppers, opened up the speaker, crammed a stopper down the horn, and put it back together. Announcements were still more than audible, and I didn't run the risk of sticking a soldering iron into my leg.

I noticed that quite a few labs seemed much quieter after a few weeks.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

On a sunny day (Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:35:23 +0000) it happened Nemo wrote in :

I had a Philips HiFi (was written on it) transistor amplifier. It had 2 connectors for loudspeakers, one for 4 Ohm speakers, and one for 8 Ohm speakers. The 4 Ohm speaker connector was connected inside via a 4 Ohm resistor to the 8 Ohm speaker connector, that one was connected to the amplifier output. Damping? What damping? Power? What power?

Widlar's method"

"Plumber's helper", held "cup" end up.

Add lighted cherry bomb into "cup".

Hold "cup" against ceiling speaker until discharged ;-)

I kid you not, Widlar really did this... source of information: Jim Foster, my technician for many years, worked at National when I left Philco-Ford, until I could hire him back to Motorola ;-) ...Jim Thompson

I was an attendee at Intel's announcement of the iAPX432 in the Grand Hyatt in NYC. The hotel was brand new at the time and nothing worked right, elevators going to the wrong (non-existent) floor, etc. During the announcement festivities the fire alarms went off, several times. One of the Intel execs finally had enough and took a swing at the horn with a chair. The horn flew across the room, but after it landed was quite silent. The speaker made some comment about RHIP.