681–690 of 723 posts
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100% this. YouTube's fantastic for real reviews.
Video is terrible as a medium though. Can't skim, can't grep, not trivial to index. I hate that more and more content is moving to video (or podcast) format.
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We're talking about 0.3 micron measurements because the input value for his numbers is the efficiency of the filters in removing 0.3 micron particles (99.5 vs 99.95). The author claimed the difference between the purified air, as a percentage of total air volume, was small. He used percentages expressed as a decimal to make that difference look small (0.9005 vs 0.90005). But a clever observer would translate those nu…
Multiplying .9005 and .90005 by 10000 does not actually cause a 10x difference to appear. No, really, try it! If your goal is to play with numbers, you could raise them both to a large power. You would discover that the ratio between them increases exponentially, but this would pale in comparison to the fact that both results would exponentially approach zero much faster than the ratio would increase.
Meaning that the first filter left 5 particles vs the second filter leaving .5 particles.
A 10x difference.
The goal isn't to "play with numbers" but to understand why/if the relative effectiveness of a filter results in a substantive difference in air quality.
The data shows it does.
One thing that irks that shit out of me in reviews -- not normalizing or banding for cost. Measuring performance without taking into account cost is meaningless. Hat tip to (old) Tom's Hardware for being the first site I knew that did this well, with their cpu / gpu hierarchy, which attempted to rank the last 2 generations or so of product against each other. It boiled it down to two columns (Intel, AMD), with gaps w…
I don’t think I agree. The world gets really confusing when you take costs into account. Try buying a phone charger. The $5 one might be overflowing with 5 star reviews saying how great it is for the price, but it’s just crap. Likewise the $100 one that’s amazing but some 3 star reviews for “too expensive”.
The true answer is often "The old version was just as good or better, don't upgrade."
But nobody gets a continual churn of review clicks and affiliate purchase cuts off of that.
Ignoring it with "price is hard" is disingenuous on the part of review sites. Notably, this was initially one of Wirecutter's key draws: presenting winners in a price-segmented manner.
The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else? They've seem to have all been killed off. When I'm researching some category of product, I feel lucky if I find any professional reviews written by people who have actually touched the thing they're reviewing. I know we've all had the e…
It will be interesting if LMG can pull off what Linus is aiming for with the massive investment in a laboratory environment. There are huge parts of the tech market where the most critical reviewing you can find is anecdotal accounts of if the reviewer liked a product or not (or the more clinical reviews are drowned out by the anecdotal noise).
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Nope. Head-fi is audiowoo fairy land. Members generally loathe scientific testing and subjective, unsubstantiated claims are regularly made. There's even a cable forum, that, last time I went there, banned double-blind testing completely.
I don't like head-fi either, but scientific testing/measurements are (mostly) worthless. Really, the only useful test is an in-home trial in my view. If you like it, buy it. If not, don't. Here's a good video detailing some of why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa1y9JRip68
Head-fi is full of woo that thinks that you need a four digit power cable, and a rare wood volume knob.
Some of the videos from High End - audio show in Berlin right now are just mind blowing.
$12,000 power cables. Speakers that are $345,000 - each. Preamps that are the size of 4U rack servers. "This device streams from Tidal and Qobuz to your system. It's $39,000."
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>HEPA is not right for a purifier that sits in a room Why not? I don't know anything about HEPA, or quality, air flow, etc.
The article explains it well: Here’s a thought experiment: Take a 1000 cubic feet room and a purifier that processes 100 cubic feet of air per minute. (I follow Wirecutter in using vulgar imperial units.) Assume pessimistically that all particles are the worst-case size. If you run that purifier with an E12 filter, the fraction of particles that will remain after one minute is .1 × (1-.995) + .9 = 0.9005. That’s beca…
(0.9005 × .1) × (1-.995) + (0.9005 × .9)
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I think the main problem is probably finding any mainstream consumer TVs that are non-smart. I have looked and beyond some obscure brands or short of incredibly expensive commercial models there are barely any options.
Any TV is stupid if you don’t connect it to the Internet.
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Multiplying .9005 and .90005 by 10000 does not actually cause a 10x difference to appear. No, really, try it! If your goal is to play with numbers, you could raise them both to a large power. You would discover that the ratio between them increases exponentially, but this would pale in comparison to the fact that both results would exponentially approach zero much faster than the ratio would increase.
10000 x .9005 is 9,005. 10000 x .90005 is 9,000.5. Meaning that the first filter left 5 particles vs the second filter leaving .5 particles. A 10x difference. The goal isn't to "play with numbers" but to understand why/if the relative effectiveness of a filter results in a substantive difference in air quality. The data shows it does.
As noted in the article, the Wirecutter does not explain its methodology or give particularly complete data, and what explanations they do give about filtration make no sense.
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I don't like head-fi either, but scientific testing/measurements are (mostly) worthless. Really, the only useful test is an in-home trial in my view. If you like it, buy it. If not, don't. Here's a good video detailing some of why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa1y9JRip68
Sure. Ultimately what works best in your listening environment is what works best. But that's the result, not the means to the end. Head-fi is full of woo that thinks that you need a four digit power cable, and a rare wood volume knob. Some of the videos from High End - audio show in Berlin right now are just mind blowing. $12,000 power cables. Speakers that are $345,000 - each. Preamps that are the size of 4U rack s…
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The article explains it well: Here’s a thought experiment: Take a 1000 cubic feet room and a purifier that processes 100 cubic feet of air per minute. (I follow Wirecutter in using vulgar imperial units.) Assume pessimistically that all particles are the worst-case size. If you run that purifier with an E12 filter, the fraction of particles that will remain after one minute is .1 × (1-.995) + .9 = 0.9005. That’s beca…
I really don't like this math, no one actually stops at that point, you take the output, la, "0.9005" and re-run it (0.9005 × .1) × (1-.995) + (0.9005 × .9) and again, and again, etc, point being that over time it does cycle the entire room, due to entropy, and then suddenly the differences start to stack up a bit, not a lot, but when one filter is letting 10x the particles through vs the other filter, it'll show
It doesn't show: the difference is too small to notice at every stage: https://www.jefftk.com/remaining-particles-by-minute-995-vs-...
Even comparing 95% vs 99.95% it's barely noticeable: https://www.jefftk.com/remaining-particles-by-minute-95-vs-9...
Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wVIdWR0lWgZRt4gbnVaH...
