National Boards

Lisa is prepping for her National Board Certification.  Here is pretty much how her winter break has been spent...

2009 and the lovely weather continues

Just when we thought the snow was gone, here it comes again.  This is what we woke up to this morning.  

Hopefully, this will be melted by midday.  It does remind me of being in high school in Montana when it used to snow like this...in May!

Building sound attenuating panels

Going back to my previous post on the home theater room, I had mentioned about the sound panels.  In doing research, I found that the most cost-effective solution was to build my own panels from compressed fiberglass insulation.

The panels need a couple of characteristics.  First of all, it has to be compressed fiberglass.  This is not typical fiberglass rolls that are just smooshed

 together.  It is a different product.  That being said, it is difficult to find.  Most local home and hardware stores don't carry it.  Secondly, the panel has to be covered with some sort of fabric to prevent stray (and itchy) fiberglass fibers from running free into the room.  The fabric has to be sonically translucent.  That is, it can't reflect the high frequency sounds because that would be just be like doing nothing.  You need to let the sounds penetrate the panel so they can be absorbed.

So, where to get the material?  After much research, I found an insulation supplier (Paragon Pacific) near Southcenter mall who sold the stuff.  This place is a warehouse, so it was a bit odd to only buy six panels, but they were very accommodating.  I have purchased from them several times now.  Their cost was about $13 for a 4'x2'x2" thick panel of the 3 lbs/cu ft variety.  The package looks like this:

My first attempt at a fabric to cover the panel was to use speaker fabric that I picked up at the fabric store.  Essentially, cut the speaker fabric to the right size then fold it around the panel and glue it with spray adhesive.  The look was OK, but not all that great.  The next challenge was to figure out how to mount them on the ceiling.  I tried several methods, but eventually I went with industrial strength velcro...which worked great...for about two months when the adhesive gave up.  By the way, for the wall panels, I decided to mount the fiberglass panels to a backer board, then mount the backer board to the wall.  This works, but it makes them a little heavy.

The solution to all of this was to buy manufactured bags from a company called

Ready Acoustics.  They can provide completely assembled panels or just sell you the bags and then you put the insulation in the bags.  I chose to order the high frequency bags and use my already purchased insulation.  The bags are of a very high quality and you can pick out of a variety of colors.  They also come with several built-in straps for hanging.  While they are not cheap ($30 per bag), it is worth it in the long run.

Note that I still had to use the speaker fabric method for the non-standard size panels.  I have smaller 4'x1' panels behind each of the front speakers and some 2'x2' panels behind the main seating area.

December 2008...

Hmmmm.... It looks like I have gone an entire year without really anything posted.  Quite LAME!

I guess I need to make a 2009 resolution to keep this up-to-date.

So, what's the deal with acoustic treatment anyway?

Regardless of how good your speakers might be, it will still not give you the best sound unless you acoustically treat the room. My speakers are what I consider a modest setup of Monitor Audio Bronze for the front L/R/C and surround speakers with some leftover Klipsch surrounds for the rear and a small little Velodyne sub. This coupled with a nice Denon 3805 receiver provides wonderful sound.... however....once I started treating the room for first reflection absorption then some added diffusion, the change in sound was amazing.

Like most houses, the room was mostly just hard (acoustically speaking) surfaces of painted wall board. The first task was to take care of first reflections. Essentially, figure out where the first sound reflection point for each speaker is (as it relates to each listener) and treat that with some absorption.

You can find these reflection points using the mirror method or by geometry (equal angles and all that) or use a CAD program. Here is one page that shows some methods. I used a free CAD program from Google called Sketch Up.

The floor was taken care of with carpet. I added three acoustic panels on the ceiling and then placed two panels directly behind the main listening area. I then added panels on the left side wall and Lisa bought and mounted a heavy duty home theater curtain which she smartly purchased at Fred Meyer.

Next was diffusion. Because the seating area is against one wall, the wall needed some diffusion to add depth, acoustically speaking. That was easy to just add a couple of bookcases. The differing dimensions of the books scatter the sound adding remarkable depth to the sound.

The net result is this:






Next post I will tell how I made the panels.

Bobcats vs Beavers - ack!

Last night was one of those rare times when my two former universities (Montana State and Oregon State) played each other. In this case it was basketball at Corvallis.

Close game, but MSU won out in the end. I think the Beaver faithful are just a bit disappointed to lose to a Big Sky team just before the start of league play.

Reflections on 2007

I think 2007 has been a bit of an unusual year.

It started out with one of my employees passing away at work. One of the toughest things I ever had to do was call his wife to discuss what benefits she could expect to receive. This was made particularly difficult because I had never met her. Because I work in a secure area of a military base, family members cannot come into our work area.

To make sure I got to know other spouses, Lisa and I hosted a dinner party of the remaining supervisors and their wives. Now that I know them all, I certainly hope I don't have to make another call like that again.

Spring breaks (Lisa's and David's) came and went without us doing anything. Typically, we use that time to get away, but this year we just stayed home. The only time off of a week or more this year was our trip to Oregon. Lisa has lots of photos on her blog.

After we returned, Corey and Becky finished at Pullman and came to live with us for about a month. Having David, Loren, Corey, and Becky all here at the same time was a little busy, but it didn't last long. David and Loren soon went back to school and Corey and Becky got their first apartment.
David started high school at Squalicum in Bellingham and ran cross country. I thought he did great and I expect he will continue doing that throughout his four years there. I knew he would be a good runner when he pretty easily beat me at the Sound to Narrows 5K this year - he hadn't been training and he was only 13.

I am particularly proud of how he is doing with his grades. He is squeaking by with a 3.8 GPA!

This year became the year of new cars. Lisa learned the art of car negotiation - that is, play one dealer against another and don't take any crap from them. She ended up with an outstanding deal on a 2007 Honda CR-V (silver). Corey found that Honda will extend good lease terms to recent college grads, so he picked up a 2007 Honda accord (silver) on a lease. Becky traded her car in on a brand new 2007 Mazda 3 (red). My 2003 Passat was getting near 100,000 miles, so I stepped up and traded it in for a new BMW 328 (Platinum Bronze). I'm sure our neighbors must think we are nuts.

We decided to take our annual trek to Las Vegas to run the half marathon in early December. For once, I was actually pretty well positioned with my training to run well. I was expecting to run about a 1:35 half....but, alas, just before Thanksgiving, I came down with a pretty severe intestinal virus that completely wiped me out. We made the trip down and Lisa ran, but I couldn't.

I think my body is telling me that maybe I should not be a runner. I suffered a torn calf muscle (soleus - very odd tear) in July and actually had to go to physical therapy. My sister-in-law, Heidi, happens to work at Apple PT and got me in quick. Toward the end of the year, I was also nursing a stress fracture in my foot. Hopefully, this year will be a little less injury prone.

Time to start thinking about 2008!