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Posted by firefoxd 5 days ago

Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down(idiallo.com)
837 points | 367 commentspage 4
readthenotes1 5 days ago|
If you can hear your neighbor exclaim not too loudly, the problem is not with the neighbor but with the lack of sound isolation in the building.

Of course, that is not the landlord's problem: (

sejje 5 days ago|
And--not defending the loud guy--but my dad is a loud guy. He's in his eighties and he can't hear shit. He watches the news at a horrendous level, sometimes the TV buzzes.

Not everyone is just an asshole.

That being said, my dad might just leave it turned up, too. He lives in his home alone, though, so I'm not sure.

wiseowise 5 days ago||
This is the reason why I will never, EVER live in an apartment.
waffletower 4 days ago||
I believe there are victims on both sides here when people "choose" (quotes to indicate -- "where you live isn't entirely under your control") to live in dense developments. I own subwoofers, which is a big motivation to have land and air between my walls and my neighbors. Modern constructed homes are also well sound insulated.
unglaublich 5 days ago||
My, that sums up apartment living quite well. I'm all for densifying popular urban areas, but man, add some fucking sound isolation cheap landlords.
ajb 5 days ago||
Right, so the problem here, apart from people not giving a shit, is that no-one has designed a 'spirit level for soundproofing' - a tool that can be used during the job by the builder and by the supervisor to check on it. What you have is equipment that can be used after "second fix", at which point no-one wants to rip the plaster off to fix anything, so it becomes a box ticking exercise.

There are two kinds of issue: a solid transmission path that shouldn't exist ('bridge'), and a gap or void that shouldn't exist. What we need is something like a time domain reflectometer but for sound conduction, so you can detect gaps and bridges after screwing on the drywall but before skimming over it, and before the doors have been put in - ie, while there's still a massive audio path a few meters away. Ideally, even if the next panel hasn't been screwed on. If you had that, then if it detects something then all you have to do is unscrew a panel to fix it, which is something that people might actually do.

Anyone who has enough audio engineering skills, feel free to build this!

lostdog 5 days ago|||
And get it into a modern certification. Want LEEDS? Get the sound measurement people out.
clates 4 days ago||
When people complain about housing prices being too high, this is what I usually point them to. There are _a lot_ of boxes to tick, some of those boxes are critical, some are not so much. Some are severely punished, some are not so much. Some have extremely high costs and are a PITA, some not so much.
FiatLuxDave 5 days ago|||
This is a really good idea. Somebody build this!
pwg 5 days ago|||
The landlord is often not the same as the developer or construction company, and sound isolation works best when built in while the building is being constructed. Attempting to retrofit later is often less than satisfactory. So it is often not the landlord's fault, it was the developer or construction company that cut corners and used the thinnest, least sound isolating materials they could to keep their costs down.
2ICofafireteam 5 days ago||
Something I've seen with renovations is construction companies not understanding how to attenuate sound, and not bothering to learn or, even better, consult someone who knows.

Well meaning PMs read up on products and throw them at the problem and it's treated as a great success because there are no hard targets, just a general desire to reduce noise, and that happened.

phantom784 5 days ago|||
Noise from neighbors is the biggest thing that drove me to move to a single-family home.
evgpbfhnr 5 days ago|||
Ironically it was quiet enough in our previous apartment, but moving to a house we now have the neighbor using their awfully loud snow-spitting machine before 6AM after snowy nights... (And it snows a lot)
sejje 5 days ago|||
Last city I lived in had an ordinance preventing this before 8am.

A company I worked for had to abide by it, we'd be on-site at the customer address and start work promptly at 8.

fuzzfactor 5 days ago|||
It can be pretty rough before 6 with people revving up their twin diesels just so they can get started early.

Obviously that's why not that many people live in a yachting community, and those that do, hate it there ;)

ben-schaaf 5 days ago|||
Noise is one of the things that improved moving to an apartment for me. We've got bylaws about noise with quiet periods, bans on bothersome noise, a smoking ban and a (loud) pet ban. We also have better windows that block noise, and decent noise insulation in the floors despite the hard flooring.

Compared to suburbia where neighbours started mowing at 7am, loud parties went late into the night and dogs barked all day, it's oddly quiet.

arjie 5 days ago|||
A lot of apartment construction must be either poorly converted or poorly constructed. I've lived in multi-unit buildings in a few places and sound isolation is pretty good. In London, I met a family at the lift and the mother apologized for how loud her children had been that weekend. My bedroom was against their living room. I honestly hadn't heard a peep.

Then here in San Francisco my particular unit is next to the garbage chute and I haven't ever heard someone putting their garbage down it. My wife and I run the 3D printer through the night and our neighbor hasn't said anything yet. It's about 57 dB from 1 m away so that's why I suppose. We do rarely hear their kids when they wail, as kids do, but not otherwise.

One of the things I do when we consider a place to live in, though, is that I play music at max volume on my wife's phone and then check from various parts of the home. I also talk to yell till my wife notices on the other side of bedroom doors and so on. To be honest, many places can be built to be quite quiet. My daughter sleeps above the work / office and it's about 29 dB right now with the printer running.

Naturally if one cannot sleep at 29 dB our home wouldn't work or you'd have to turn off the printer overnight, but overall it seems fine for me.

2ICofafireteam 5 days ago|||
Where I am in British Columbia, there are sound isolation requirements in the building code so the landlords can't be cheap...but it doesn't help with older or non-permitted work.
brigade 5 days ago||
A quick google suggests that British Columbia's building code only requires STC 50 which is "you can hear but not understand a neighbor's loud conversation" levels of isolation. Though maybe your city has stricter requirements?

STC 50 is a common requirement in the US too.

2ICofafireteam 5 days ago||
Only 50? I think that's pretty good when considered on its own but STC doesn't look at the whole picture. STC ratings and requirements for discrete wall and floor assemblies are a thing but with suites/party walls apparent STC is what mattered whether it was the provincial code or local bylaws. ASTC is king.
udkl 5 days ago||
I don't know why we don't build with concrete like the rest of the world ... that should give us a higher noise isolation than wood
tpm 5 days ago|||
A bit higher possibly, but from firsthand experience let me tell you it's not enough by far. Effective noise isolation does not magically arise from used materials, it has to be planned and included in the building project. And it makes the building more expensive.
toast0 5 days ago||||
Majority construction anywhere is whatever can be built with the least cost.

In the US and Canada timber framing for buildings under about 6 feet is least cost. Other places without a lot of timber availability tend to build with other things.

mayoff 5 days ago||
I'm pretty sure you meant something other than "buildings under about 6 feet".
quickthrowman 5 days ago|||
I assume they meant “five-over-one”, five floors of stick built (framed with dimensional lumber, not timber) apartments on top of a concrete and steel first floor.

Timber framing is something else entirely, you can construct buildings taller than six stories with engineered wood products.

> The mid-rise buildings are normally constructed with four or five wood-frame stories above a concrete podium, usually for retail or resident amenity space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

rationalist 5 days ago|||
I think they meant what they wrote, they just forgot some punctuation.

'timber framing (for buildings) under about 6 feet'

pwg 5 days ago|||
Concrete is more expensive to build with than wood, and many "apartment buildings" are built with a target towards "minimum possible build cost".
trumbitta2 5 days ago||
I actually did this with my teenage neighbor. He was learning electric guitar at hours the building had rules against. Hours I was studying throughout because of said building rules.

Whenever he switched his amp on, his landline would ring. Whenever he loudly stomped toward the phone, his landline would stop ringing.

Took three afternoons, but he learned it.

ErroneousBosh 5 days ago||
A very long time ago, in the late 1990s, I worked for an early web design company and we had quite a nice little office in a shop unit, with computers, some plants, a couple of comfy sofas, but no television.

Then we got a commission to do some work for the local Sony dealer. We did some webby stuff for them, and they gave us some cameras and stereos to play with, and asked if we wanted a TV.

Yes, that'd be great actually, we were just discussing that.

So the guy gave us this lovely big 36" widescreen TV that was a customer return, but they didn't know what was wrong with it. It had been replaced under warranty at about a year old, and (judging by the service menu timers) had hardly even been used.

The first time everyone (even me, although I'm not really into football, it's part of community spirit) sat down to watch a football match together, the fault became apparent. Now I had heard someone say that the TV seemed to turn itself off right as the film was getting to the good bit, but I'd never seen that. But right here just as Hearts were about to take a shot at goal and knock St Mirren out of the cup, <PLINK> off it went. Turning it off and on again brought it back, until the next exciting moment and <PLINK> off it went.

Well this was just annoying, so with the time-honoured cry of "Hold my beer!" I got the tools out. Got the back off the TV, took a look around on the PCB for anything glaringly obvious and... and... annnnndd.....

... you know in books and magazine articles about soldering they show a diagram of a "dry joint" as being like a little volcano caldera of solder on the pad, and a little crusty ball of solder on the component leg with a perfect wee ring around it? Yup, on one leg of the line output transformer. That was it. A touch with the soldering iron, on all its pins, and tighten the little clamping screw that held it to the PCB once it was good and snug on the board, and that was it.

The TV lasted far longer than the web development company, and indeed it lasted longer than the company that came after it.

Oh, why did it only do it when the film got to the good bit, or when they were about to score a goal? Because it got louder, and the vibrations from the speaker wobbled the dry joint enough to break its contact, and the safety protection circuit kicked in and tripped the power supply.

galaxyLogic 5 days ago||
I use rain-sounds or white noise plus noise-cancelling headphones to drown out my neighbor's TV. It bugs me that I have to hear advertisements coming over the wall when I wake up. If I'm really pissed off I turn on some reggae music with good bass. It always calms me down.
bambax 5 days ago||
Excellent story!

There's an episode of Friends a little bit like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WYGdstEVJQ

wewewedxfgdf 5 days ago||
When remote controls first became a thing for televisions and VHS machines there was great fun to be had confusing family members, who were used to reaching for the TV and turning the channel selector or twisting the volume up and down.
steveBK123 5 days ago|
Great story and reminds me how good I have it in my current apartment re: noise.

In NYC it is really a roll of the dice, and it doesn't matter if you rent or own in a condo/coop. In some ways renting is probably better since you can simply leave at end of lease (or break lease) without incurring huge financial costs.

In 2 of the 4 apartments I've lived over 20 years I have had underemployed neighbors who threw parties and/or watched TV on maximum volume weekdays at 4am. Wish I knew about the TV-B-Gone back in the bad TV neighbors days.

In some ways I think we've all gone soft as a society and have "broken windows policing" type rules we are reluctant to enforce, which allows the inconsiderate to infringe with impunity. Apartment buildings usually have house rules but they are generally weak on enforcement. Both of my bad neighbor problems were large enough problems that half the building was up in arms and it still took years to resolve.

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