Audiophiles and Gearheads - is there any other hobby that has more pseudoscience?

[Doggggboy]

I think audiophile is basically trying to reproduce stage or professional experience at home by understanding and investing into the complete ecosystem from the input source downstream to speakers and even room layout. People do this based on person circumstances like time, finances and space, with all sorts of "hobbies".

I have always heard that the single biggest factor in how your system sounds is the room it is in. Flooring, shape, furniture, ceiling, wall textures, windows and their coverings, etc.

 

[architect]

Most people just hook up PC speakers to their computers or cheap headphones to listen to their Spotify.

I was on the hunt for the best desktop speakers (smaller than bookshelf) and landed on the iLoud Micro Monitors:

iLoud Micro Monitors measurements and quasi-anechoic spinorama

I've had these little monitors for a while. I'm a big fan. Their name might sound like a cheap Apple knockoff product, but for $300 a pair, they sound great so long as you intend to use them in the nearfield and don't intend to listen at ridiculous volumes. I'm a 70dB kind of guy, so that's...

www.audiosciencereview.com

I don't get into the nuts and bolts of it, but these -sound- absolutely fantastic to me when considering how small they are.

 

[architect]

I have always heard that the single biggest factor in how your system sounds is the room it is in. Flooring, shape, furniture, ceiling, wall textures, windows and their coverings, etc.

Absolutely! It's really the next factor after the speaker themselves. The iLoud I mentioned above even have a toggle depending on how the monitors are positioned, whether on the desk angled upwards, or on stands parallel to your head:





Then there's spacing and acoustic reverberation (materials) etc like you mentioned.

 

[whydontu]

IYKYK . I still have my original pair of Koss / Radio Shack silver Minimus 7s, that I sold to myself at my massive 10% staff discount.

 

[someidiot]

As mentioned previously, I've been a college DJ for 40+ years, and way back when I was station engineer as well I did the upgrade from the original 60s McCurdy rim-drive turntables to 1200s - so I know them pretty well.

But after moving the house (which is around when our girls were born too), and with all the business craziness, father on his last legs (perhaps not the best way to describe it, as he was a diabetes double-amputee at the end), etc., I wasn't really thinking of spending money on a new turntable, as I've long been very happy with my modest little Rega Planar (though it does need a new belt at the moment).

 

[someidiot]

IYKYK . I still have my original pair of Koss / Radio Shack silver Minimus 7s, that I sold to myself at my massive 10% staff discount.

I'll never walk by a pair of Minimus 7s at a thrift shop, yard sale, etc., without grabbing them up. Even better with the wall brackets.

 

[architect]

As mentioned previously, I've been a college DJ for 40+ years, and way back when I was station engineer as well I did the upgrade from the original 60s McCurdy rim-drive turntables to 1200s - so I know them pretty well.

But after moving the house (which is around when our girls were born too), and with all the business craziness, father on his last legs (perhaps not the best way to describe it, as he was a diabetes double-amputee at the end), etc., I wasn't really thinking of spending money on a new turntable, as I've long been very happy with my modest little Rega Planar (though it does need a new belt at the moment).

I remember your experience and expertise well and understand why you chose that path! I am posting the bits for the benefits of others who may desire a different sort of practicality and not know the range of available products 🙂

I'm perfectly happy with my free curb speakers for practical reasons as well.

 

[Susquatch]

Then I asked the concrete guys to make sure they had enough to spare to fill the tube. No more skips. (Yes, things are a bit messy and dusty in that corner at the moment. Summer's just about over, I'll deal with it.)

Wow..... That's amazing that you did that. I would not have even dreamed about doing that! Talk about clobbering a problem!

My bride and I are planning our last home. We favour log construction.

So, tell me about that log construction of yours. What do you like and what do you hate? Would you do that over again?

From your photo, it looks like inside walls are also that log profile. Why did you do that instead of framing?

Help me learn from you!

 

[someidiot]

Wow..... That's amazing that you did that. I would not have even dreamed about doing that! Talk about clobbering a problem!

Sometimes ridiculous overkill is the only way to go.

My bride and I are planning our last home. We favour log construction.

So, tell me about that log construction of yours. What do you like and what do you hate? Would you do that over again?

From your photo, it looks like inside walls are also that log profile. Why did you do that instead of framing?

Help me learn from you!

Well, I don't think I really have too much to offer - it was a product of a particular series of events and combination of circumstances, and one dollar.

I can get into the story if you wish.

 

[Susquatch]

Sometimes ridiculous overkill is the only way to go.



Well, I don't think I really have too much to offer - it was a product of a particular series of events and combination of circumstances, and one dollar.

I can get into the story if you wish.

Feel free to PM me any details you wish to share. We are buying. We want a log home next. We want to make sure that it's a good one as we will probably die in it.

 

[someidiot]

My bride and I are planning our last home. We favour log construction.
So, tell me about that log construction of yours. What do you like and what do you hate? Would you do that over again?
From your photo, it looks like inside walls are also that log profile. Why did you do that instead of framing?

The construction decisions long predated us. It was built in/around 1970 by a Calgary company called "Cee-Der Log". I think there was a descendant company out in Airdrie, but have no idea if they're still around. These machined logs are sometimes generically referred to as "Pan Abode", which is the company out in BC that still does this stuff.

What happened in our case is that (thanks to my wife being horsey - a mistake I would not make in a second life), we moved in 1991 to an acreage on the edge of the city on which this was the main residence (already rented out along with the front 5 acres) and a barn and 25'x25' metal bunkhouse on the back 15, which we rented. Skip ahead ten years (and abbreviating a lot of detail - some of it rather entertaining), and the property was sold to a developer building the next subdivision. We'd been rural-property-hunting for a while, found some undeveloped land in the woods a little further from the city and pulled off a very risky, high-pressure deal in which we paid a buck for the house (which would have been bulldozed anyway) and moved it to a foundation we'd had put down on land we didn't own yet, because CMHC won't insure a mortgage on land alone, just on a habitable property. All did not go smoothly, but ultimately we pulled it off.

So there was nothing about this that involved choice, as a major component of being able to do the deal at all was getting the bank to recognize as $100K worth of equity the house that we'd just paid a dollar for (this involved having an appraisal done by someone who had enough imagination to put on paper "This house on that piece of land will be worth..."

So, to your questions: What do I like? That it's really goddamn solid. A few years ago we had a 75' tall spruce blow over in a big windstorm and nail the house. There'd been a whole bunch of (very) near-misses over the years, but this wasn't one of them. About the top 20' hit the house, (almost) breaking off the roof overhang, but stopping there. If it had been a stick-frame, that tree would have cut through the wall like hot butter, all the way down to the foundation (suboptimal in the middle of December). All of the walls - inside and outside - use the same logs, so although one could stick-frame inside, that's not what happened here (but I did in the new basement - the old basement was rudimentary, just room for furrnace and laundry, and no inside stairs). It's certainly a PITA to add wiring - the odd outlet or switch or light involves ship augers and the Hole Hawg - but leaving the basement ceiling unfinished has made that sort of thing reasonably doable (it's just a bungalow).

The major dislike would be energy efficiency, but even that is contentious - it's hard to get people to agree on the R value of solid wood. What I do know is that although the inside walls feel warm, if you happen to leave a pillow pushed up against one while it's -40 outside, that pillow is gonna get frozen to the wall because it too is an insulator and what you've just done is moved the thermal gradient in. Nothing to be done about that, though, that won't seriously compromise the appearance and reduce the resale value (inside or out) - just comes with the territory. The roof, though, is another matter. It's a vaulted ceiling (i.e. no attic), and the original roofing was simply a 2" layer of styrofoam with shingles nailed over it, which is about five different kinds of wrong. Aside from the heat loss, the result was nightmare ice dams that - sometimes - cause water to trickle down the walls, though, I might add, if you're going to have that problem, better it be out where you can see it rather than trapped inside a wall, growing mold. That was an extremely inconsistent problem, year to year, given that we're smack in the middle of the Chinook belt, so no two winters are alike. The solution is a properly-designed roof, meaning an air gap above the roof (so the interior cosmetics aren't lost), polyisocyanurate ("iso") insulation over that, then shingles. On the other hand, if you opt for the non-wood ceiling over the living space, you can just do a conventional attic and roof. But again, we were working with what we got.

Here's an extra little kicker, though: Prior to our moving out to the original property in '91, though, some mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging moron painted the entire exterior white. So for the last five or six years, concurrent with the construction of a massive (about 1K ft^2, though I've never gotten around to actually measuring it) deck spanning the entire front of the house, we've been (water+abrasive) blasting off the paint, sanding, and staining. Didn't quite finish this year (the scaffold we'd borrowed got called back a little too soon), but next year for sure. But it does raise the issue of maintaining the finish.

My question to you would be: Do you know whether you want to take the milled-logs approach like this, or actually cut+fit logs? The next-door neighbors (a portion of whose property we bought to put this house down on) built a real log house as we were in the process of moving our out here. That's an entirely different skill set I have no knowledge of.

Does that help? If further questions, happy to continue to blab on about it.

 

[Susquatch]

Does that help? If further questions, happy to continue to blab on about it.

Yes, it does help. Quite a lot.

Other than the fact that we favour the idea of a log cabin in the woods, we are totally undecided about the style and the construction methodology. Ants, bugs, and mice are problems we would prefer not to have. So I favour milled logs.

I would not have thought about pillows freezing to the wall or water leaking from the roof. But what you describe makes very good sense to me.

We have so much to learn.

 

[someidiot]

LOL I think someone needs to make a video of you to go along with the guy with his own electric pole! If this isn't "pseudoscience" I don'tknow what is 😱 😵 😀

I say this with affection and respect, of course.

Oh, come on now... no pseudoscience involved, just pure, simple empiricism. When the turntable was mounted on the floor or wall it skipped in response to energy being added to the house. Put it on a concrete column attached to the earth beneath the structure and skips no more. No pseudo-anything anywhere in that equation, just hard facts.

 

[Elektrishun]

Oh, come on now... no pseudoscience involved, just pure, simple empiricism. When the turntable was mounted on the floor or wall it skipped in response to energy being added to the house. Put it on a concrete column attached to the earth beneath the structure and skips no more. No pseudo-anything anywhere in that equation, just hard facts.

This discussion makes me think of this idea:

 

[architect]

Oh, come on now... no pseudoscience involved, just pure, simple empiricism. When the turntable was mounted on the floor or wall it skipped in response to energy being added to the house. Put it on a concrete column attached to the earth beneath the structure and skips no more. No pseudo-anything anywhere in that equation, just hard facts.

I got you! Makes perfect sense based on your particular circumstance, as you have outlined! For any other mortal soul looking from the other side of the glass, that looks pretty ass-backwards wouldn't you agree? "To stop my vinyl player from skipping, I cut a hole into the living floor and poured a giant concrete pedestal, just for the player". Common! My wife is leaving me if I ever showed her that picture and said those words! LOL

 

[someidiot]

Yes, it does help. Quite a lot.

Good to hear I'm not just running on...

Other than the fact that we favour the idea of a log cabin in the woods, we are totally undecided about the style and the construction methodology. Ants, bugs, and mice are problems we would prefer not to have. So I favour milled logs.

I'm not sure I'd make a direct connection between milled logs and superior air- (and pest-) tightness. This house is pretty breathy, but there are various factors involved in that. One is whatever gaps are in the mated logs, especially in the corners. Another is how the windows are set - we've always had a lot of flies make it inside during the fall, and I suspected gaps in the placement of the windows in the cutouts. This was confirmed during the exterior refinishing - I pulled off all of the window trim as we went, pulling out the fiberglass that had been stuffed into the void and replacing it with canned foam (the guns you use with the inverted cans are just great - and really cheap), which has made all the difference in the world.

But when guys who know what they're doing fit round logs, I think they're probably even tighter than these, plus they get chinked, which these aren't.

I would not have thought about pillows freezing to the wall or water leaking from the roof. But what you describe makes very good sense to me.

If you've never experienced ice dams, you're lucky - this was our first time dealing with them. Important to note that it's a problem that plagues all inadequately-insulated roofs, not just houses like this one. Heat loss melts snow, water runs down, hits unheated overhang, refreezes. When enough of it accumulates, the new water running down is forced back up underneath the shingles, and in our case then ran down the inside of the wall. Best way to solve it is to build roof properly. Stopgap measure is heat tapes.

We have so much to learn.

I think a good start would probably be getting in touch with Pan Abode and asking them pointed questions about the optimization of appearance and energy-efficiency.

 

[someidiot]

This discussion makes me think of this idea:

View attachment 88071

In a car that's sitting still? Nothing I can think of...

 

[Elektrishun]

In a car that's sitting still? Nothing I can think of...

Sitting still? Might as well be in your living room.

 

[someidiot]

I got you! Makes perfect sense based on your particular circumstance, as you have outlined! For any other mortal soul looking from the other side of the glass, that looks pretty ass-backwards wouldn't you agree? "To stop my vinyl player from skipping, I cut a hole into the living floor and poured a giant concrete pedestal, just for the player". Common! My wife is leaving me if I ever showed her that picture and said those words! LOL

Now that's funny. Honestly, I don't think my wife ever so much as blinked over that one. But that's as much a reflection of my thoroughly bizarre life as anything else - I mean, compared to the rest, that's just perfectly normal. And also the circumstances at the time; with all of the uprooting and transplanting and life chaos - including having twins - why would something as harmless as a concrete pillar even register?

 

[architect]

Now that's funny. Honestly, I don't think my wife ever so much as blinked over that one. But that's as much a reflection of my thoroughly bizarre life as anything else - I mean, compared to the rest, that's just perfectly normal. And also the circumstances at the time; with all of the uprooting and transplanting and life chaos - including having twins - why would something as harmless as a concrete pillar even register?

Makes perfect sense! I love the creative thinking. Bizarre is good in my books!

I'm also partly laughing imaging my partner's reaction and based on previous history. I've seen my share of "pseudoscience" eye rolls and stares from her when I've tried to (unsuccessfully) convince her why it "makes perfect sense" to store and work on my motorcycles in the living room... LOL Buying a $500 audio cable would be more acceptable to her 😛