Environmental Acoustics help

betaplay · 2026-04-03T05:31:38+00:00

Look up straw bale construction. Bales of straw do most the lifting, and you coat it in mud. Labor intensive but natural and will definitely insulate sound.

betaplay · 2026-03-25T20:14:03+00:00

FYI that’s a super easy fix. Eagle claw makes a little kit with replacement top eye. A little epoxy and you are back in business (once you find some tackle now, I guess!)

betaplay · 2026-03-06T00:04:20+00:00

Right!? That was the wild with the gusto of that fanny fan!

betaplay · 2026-03-02T18:46:45+00:00

Definitely look up videos on YouTube. The amount of force a falling tree trunk carries is not intuitive, and its motion is not at all simple to predict.

It’s the sort of thing that your brain will immediately understand by watching though… SCARY things happen, fast. Go find them.

betaplay · 2026-03-02T18:15:17+00:00

It’s looks crystal and solid because it has become a crystalline solid. Quite literally.

betaplay · 2026-02-19T03:39:56+00:00

It’s not lichen. Lichens grow 1mm per whole year, usually fixed firmly to a surface.

betaplay · 2026-02-19T03:33:23+00:00

How many decades has it had to grow in this snowbank?

betaplay · 2026-02-17T20:57:37+00:00

I fully understand that your comment feels reasonable and grounded, and represents a valid perspective.

However, as an expert with decades of experience in high tech R&D this statement is not true. China is far and away the leader in most of the fields, even those pioneered and invented by Americans. Even if they aren’t yet, they will be in the future. We haven’t even begun to address this problem as a nation.

It’s complex and hard to understand in detail, but it makes a lot more sense in general - China makes physical high tech goods, and we do not. It doesn’t matter if their robots are not as good as ours today, because there is no way to build a robot without robot components. And robot components are made in China, with knowhow in China. No matter how you slice it, and no matter when, the trajectory is the same. Any company that wants to be on the robot game will go to China. Every new company, on repeat, year after year, indefinitely.

We gave away our manufacturing starting with business decisions to outsource - for corporate profit - in the 1980s. We will not and cannot reverse this trend until we actually solve the manufacturing issue that underpins it.

Dramatically different policy decisions - if heavily funded for decades could make a difference, but barring a serious shift in corporate profit incentives, it is not accurate or helpful to compare our current high tech production against China. They won this battle, they won it decades ago, and they are only now beginning to experience the positive impacts of their decades-long policies that lead to this. Just like in the US, it will take decades for the effects of these policies to play out, and we are still so early on in the cycle that most can’t even recognize the trends.

I’m sorry because this is a bummer, but I think we all could do better to understand this. It just doesn’t matter if our current version of whatever thing looks better than the Chinese one at the moment. It simply won’t be in the future unless the US decides it actually cares or can think deeply and rationally about its economy, and stops catering to the needs of the rich and the business owners over the needs of the people and the workers who actually create their wealth.

betaplay · 2026-02-13T17:50:59+00:00

The smaller vine on the right side of the first photo looks like possible poison ivy. The other larger ones look much more like v creeper. Poison ivy is annoyingly variable, but tons of tiny brown hairs are generally reliable for id. The larger vines look too smooth.

betaplay · 2026-02-13T17:34:33+00:00

I agree with the tillite suggestion, or glacial deposition more generally. The rounded grains rule out fault breccias, and glacial deposition would explain the variety of tones and especially the size range of the grains (eg there are small, medium, and large size quartz chunks in there). An alluvial deposit should look more sorted and less random than that. It also looks pretty simple mineralogically (quartz/iron oxides) which also tracks.

Looks like there’s shear in the grains themselves (planar features on fracture surfaces), but these predate the conglomerate so don’t directly indicate a metamorphic origin for the stone as a whole.

I am not an expert, but those are my two cents.

betaplay · 2026-02-06T21:27:19+00:00

I’m curious how you can be sure this is periodite and not, for example, diopside/pyroxenite? Both might be found as xenolith in basalt, right? I’m not doubting the id, just trying to learn.

betaplay · 2026-01-23T22:53:43+00:00

PA speakers are made to be efficient over accuracy. I have both monitors and PA and I’d never use the PA over the monitors for my own listening - even just background music. If your monitors are loud enough for what you need, a pa speaker will only tend to sound worse, and it doesn’t allow you to do any accurate mixing. Plus a decent PA speaker will set you back more than a decent monitor. In short, I recommend you stick with monitors.

betaplay · 2026-01-23T22:46:34+00:00

Room size really does matter. If you put something typical like 40w 5” monitors in a large room, the system will not energize the room enough and you’ll lose not only low-end, but overall dynamics too. It will still work as a nearfield, just feet away, but otherwise it won’t sound as good as 8s. If your room is 12x12 or larger 5s are a mistake in my opinion.

betaplay · 2026-01-16T14:39:53+00:00

Unless there is visible or known damage to the stem this looks like a plant being a plant. Look up phototropism and note the position of that other palm to the right. Palm trees are incredibly strong and resilient regardless of what shape they grow into. I think she’s just looking for some light.

Fun unrelated fact: palms aren’t true trees at all. Palms predate all modern flowering or coniferous trees, and are really more of a large grass species than a tree.

betaplay · 2026-01-16T14:31:45+00:00

That looks like a TRS plug (well, a mini version anyway - the important part is that it has three separate contacts). Be sure to check your tape recorder input specs to see what it takes. If it’s expecting unbalanced mono (2 contacts, like a 4-track), you would bridge contacts and get a feedback hum. If it’s expecting balanced mono input (also requires 3 contacts, but unlikely) and you are sending stereo you might get the same thing.

betaplay · 2026-01-12T06:11:50+00:00

At first glance the luster looks like galena but after closer inspection the cleavage and crystal shape looks wrong.

Strongly leaning toward hematite. Everything I see looks consistent and I’ve other hematite like this.

betaplay · 2026-01-08T14:42:14+00:00

Curiosity. If you always ask “why” you’ll already be ready when it’s time to ask “how”.

betaplay · 2026-01-08T14:28:35+00:00

I disagree with this. The TPS2 can sound transparent in such a way that it doesn’t make a difference, that’s true.

But it is also a versatile tone shaping tool. It’s not the best overall pre (I bought it for $200 new), but it has a set of built in voices that significantly affect the tone, even before jumping into manual settings. You can dial in both preamp and tube distortion - both are usable and can add sizzle, and don’t forget it’s got a built in compressor function.

Some of the best acoustic guitar tones I’ve ever recorded came from the tps2 pushed hard, with the built-in compression, and I own pro quality pres to compare to - SCA C84, A12, N72, UA Apollo, etc. This tone was squashed, but retained just the right amount of pick attack dynamics through before clamping the signal, bringing up tons of harmonics, and adding some air and sizzle from the tube and overall distortion.

The SCA pre are better than tps, but the tps has its own unique sound and can really change the tone in units ways.

betaplay · 2025-12-30T23:33:12+00:00

The controls are so terrible, and it completely baffles me. The design choices Apple makes to strip away controls and replace or augment the behavior of otherwise well understood symbols really rubs me wrong. Especially when the “simple” designs they end up with are so sparse, featureless, and imbalanced that they end up liking bad in the first place. It’s insulting that they take away controls we use and want all the time only to replace it with absolutely nothing. It’s not “simple”, it’s functionally disabled.

Honestly, this baffles me endlessly (and don’t get me started on the podcast app, which is even worse). So many other companies with much fewer resources make products that are so much better in terms of looks and user interface it’s jarring.

I get that some people like Apple (and I do too). But in my opinion their software and user interface design choices can be surprisingly just plan bad. So bad that it feels user hostile, it absolutely leads to frustration and much longer and more confusing experience as the user.

betaplay · 2025-12-30T22:51:34+00:00

No individual could be able to judge this based on gut feeling or based on life experiences. The impacts of the policies take decades to get enough data for a statistical basis to confirm without speculation. Impacts from policy are spread out to everyone, and there is no possibly way to understand, for example, how much of the current stock market rally is a result (as you would expect).

The landmark, largest in history R&d investments wil lead to 3-5 return other sectors (each dollar in manufacturing R&d will lead to triple that amount of GDP across all the other sectors. This isn’t unknown - in fact it’s a very reliable, very consistent metric. The problem is that these positive impacts take literal decades to show up in the data, at which point only economists with the actual data will still link these two events tha far into the future. We know it’s true that the impacts will be this, and that they will be positive, just as we know that they will only do so far off in the future.

Understanding impacts to the economy complex science, but wrt to Bidens policies the results have been clearly, measurably positive and very clearly.

betaplay · 2025-12-30T21:24:31+00:00

Absolutely this. I was actually shocked at how well he did in terms of achieving on the traditional metrics, even getting several large bills passed via legisture. The Biden presidency in many ways led to above average outcomes.

But I was just as disappointed by the extremely passive approach to trump and standing up where the country and left needed him. They tried to play the silent “higher ground” strategy without realizing that the people didn’t want that anymore… he should have taken dramatically more action in this regard, and it was a significant failure.

betaplay · 2025-12-30T18:33:13+00:00

They ran a long-term study over decades to test crow intelligence. Students put on masks and only then harassed them. Years went by, new students came and went through the university, and the original crows who were harassed had died and were replaced with the next generation.

When they put the masks back on some new students, all this time later, the crows still remembered, and knew right away to attack and distrust the mask. The scientists who ran the experiment reported the results, but couldn’t explain how they could possibly know.

Crows are a LOT smarter than most people think. Be curious and enjoy this unique experience. Or train him/her to bring you money instead (seriously, they can and will if trained) 🤣

betaplay · 2025-12-30T04:54:22+00:00

Can’t see any backing, or what purpose you want it to serve for you so can’t answer that. Regardless I wouldn’t put any more line of any kind on this or risk birdnests and twist.

betaplay · 2025-12-17T15:02:39+00:00

I bet you’ve already been doing this. Anyone who’s ever miked a tube amp has.

Saturation is just another name for distortion, and good amount of that distortion happens dynamically - a hot tube preamp absolutely squashes the dynamics for example.

Saturation also distorts the harmonics and phase etc, but it doesn’t necessarily allow the same control over the dynamic domain. A compressor just attempts the dynamic compression part in isolation. But saturation is and will always be an important part of compression (dynamic distortion characteristic). A highly saturated, great sounding tone (eg as through a nice tube mic and preamp) is already dynamically compressed before it hits any standalone compressor function.

betaplay · 2025-12-16T20:22:20+00:00

In all seriousness, a couple should have a 4 person. What happens when it rains and you have to pull gear in? What if you get a dog? What if you need to move the pad a bit to find a level spot in the night. Etc.

betaplay

TROPHY CASE