You know when you’re bored, and curiosity lands you up (or down) a rabbit hole of note. This is one of those times. Now that everyone has left after festive/family season, I thought I’d get back to chasing quiet again. Ambient noise. I realised one day, I have a lot of low hum equipment on, in this office of mine. So started the process of eliminating anything that made a noise.
PC fans, down to “silent in bios”.
Backup power removed from the room, cos Ecoflow uses the loudest bloody fans in the world.
Removed 2 servers.
I noticed the SFF computer, is a little louder than the work computer. That said, it’s not on during the day, anyway.
Scheduled dehumidifier to run when I’m not working.
Window closed. Though, I only really have to content with the occasional horny insect. This isn’t a city suburb, and the nearest neighbours are around 60m away. Everything else is an empty holiday house.
I’m chasing a sub 30dB measurement. I know what 28dB sounds like. It’s magical. It really does feel like I’m alone with only my thoughts, and focusing on a task comes shockingly easy. If I turn on the SFF pc, the sound level goes up to around 36dB. Perfectly acceptable, when you’re playing a game or watching a movie.
Anyhoo, interested to know if anyone else has touched on this new obsession of mine. Also, if you’re curious as to what your ambient noise is, there are plenty free sound measurement apps on android an iOS.
By far the easiest way to notice the amount of ambient noise is when loadshedding kicks in and everything just turns off, its that time between loadshedding hitting and everyone starting their gennys. It can actually be quite ominous with how quiet the world gets.
I know my room has quite some noise, since I have both my PC, my NAS, and my desk fan in here, on average I have about 55 db of noise with all those on. Turning off my fan makes the average about 42db, thing is, the noise never bothers me, as I sleep in the same room as my PC, so I have grown so accustomed to the noise that its weird to sleep with those devices off or to even lower the settings so they are quieter.
In the end I permanently have headphones on and I am watching/listening to something on my PC anyway, making any ambient noise basically nothing.
My sister has to have a fan on in her room in order to sleep, even in the frozen heart of winter she has it on and pointed away just for the white noise.
I always thought that a side effect of my instrument-induced slight hearing loss would be that background and ambient noise would bother me less. But it turns out that hearing loss just kills specific frequencies, leading to sounds being muffled, while some background noise being clear as day. I can hear machinery from the nearby plant better than my wife does, because it’s in the right frequency range for me. With a bit of an ear infection this week, this effect is amplified, so I’m hearing weird things that my wife can’t make out, while at the same time struggling to hear her talk or conversations on television.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand:
This is why my wife barred pet names for each other.
I’m in the process of installing LAN cable throughout my house so that I can move a slightly noisy server in my study to a small workshop next to the living room. I’d love to also move my desktop there and have a silent study, but I’ve got no idea how to do 1440p@144Hz and usb peripherals and HDMI 2nd monitor over 20 odd meters. Without robbing a bank, that is. I’ve never bother measuring the dB’s, because I know that that’s a whole new rabbit hole for me.
