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The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

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Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#151

I was served the Dutch translation, and I must say I am impressed with the state of the art of this machine translation. While this still feels mechanically translated English, and accents are missing, it was very readable. I am used to having to translate each individual word to English and swap some verbs to end up with something readable -- with the regular paragraph of total gibberish in between. This reads like…

Valve uses human translators, not ML. So unless you're talking about your browser's auto-translation feature, you are, in fact, reading human-produced text.

Do they? I got the dutch version as well, and it's full of english sentences translated word-by-word.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't a vacuum between be better?

I'm also wonder what it is about argon gas that helps prevent sound transmission.

I'd speculate that with it's "full outer shell" of electrons the nucleus is more shielded and the repulsion of other Ar atoms is higher and so perhaps density is a little lower than might be expected?

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then you have the danger of implosion and shards of glass flying everywhere. That's a different kinda spectator sport.

Then how is argon better than nitrogen and oxygen?

Argon transmits sound much worse than air. I believe it's due to the fact that denser gases require more energy to compress and decompress, thus dampening sound vibrations.

Even more fancy windows use Krypton, since it has superior thermal and acoustic properties over Argon, but is about 60 times more expensive.

Xenon would also be a candidate, but it's about 10 times more expensive even than krypton, and also has the extreme downside of being an anesthetic when inhaled.

Edit: Sorry, I guess it has better thermal properties but worse acoustic ones. Helium or Hydrogen would be the ideal gasses for sound reduction.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about the story of this project suggests they are top-tier sound engineers, and when you don't really know what you're doing (said very respectfully) the proposition "we need to fill windows and this is what other people normally do when they fill windows" is a very positive data point. They didn't even start with museum-grade glass for optimal filming, which to a absolute layman like me seems like they just…

When they started doing these tournaments over a decade ago, esports LAN tournaments was barely an industry, and crowds were small. Also, MOBAs are unlike many other esport genres [1], in that the two teams have partial information about the state of the game, and illegally getting information a few seconds early can change the entire outcome of the game [2]. Meaning there was no one in the world who really knew how…

Starcraft has the same problem and also uses "soundproof" booths, fwiw. I believe the practice started under SC:BW

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't a vacuum between be better?

Argon is commonly used for double glazed windows so I would assume that the manufacturer has the experience to do that. Vacuum insulated panels exist but since that is for insulating properties I don't know if there would be any advantage for sound deadening.

Sounds cannot pass through a vacuum, as sound is fundamentally pressure waves that propagate through air. Someone also mentioned the thermal properties of the fill gas (argon being less conductive than air) and it’s also correlated, as temperature is simply a measure of the kinetic energy of molecules, so a higher mass molecule will require more energy to move, which applies to both thermal conductivity and sound transmission.

The more you reduce these problems down to their physical fundamentals, the more related they seem to become. It’s that elegance that got me hooked on electronics engineering—our experience of the universe is remarkable in how frequently a given phenomena can be described using little more than basic principles applied recursively.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#156
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term predates moba, it's early RTS, early MMO stuff, around late '90s, early 2000s.

My memory of this long ago is fuzzy, but I believe the word itself is originally from LA gang subculture and was spread more broadly via gangsta rap in the late '80s/early '90s or so (cf. the trend of people spelling certain words with "ck" changed to "cc", which was a feature of Crips tagging). The earliest documented use I could find referred to someone selling fake drugs, but I seem to recall that as it spread it…

Yeah it's just slang for some kind of nefarious action. It's in a lot of rap songs, west coast origin seems possible for sure but been around a long time. East coast version is juug.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#157
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think leave the audience participation in, let the chaos rain supreme!

Players have said in the past that it makes it impossible to do Roshan sneakily, since the crowd gives it away.

It especially screwed over pre-siren Roshans (which don't seem to be much of a thing anymore). But yeah, there's still a lot the sounds can give away, like a Roshan play, a sneaky smoke, enemy tormentor attempts, etc.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#158
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have considered 'gank' a fairly known/used term.

I hadn't encountered 'gank' before these comments. But I had to look up MOBA too :-) And I used to write multiplayer battle games for a living! And my favourite recent game was a MOBA without me knowing that was a term! Which goes to show, times change, words change, and it's easy to live outside gamer subculture, even while playing.

thats surprising, its such a ubiquitous word in multiplayer games. i think i first heard it used back in the early 2000s in wc3 or wow.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#159

Aging myself here... I played a ton of DOTA on the WarCraft3 engine... probably when I should have been studying for engineering finals. What amazed me about the game, and probably why it is so addictively fun to play is you always have two competing things gripping for your attention. On one hand, resource farming _demands_ incredible attention to detail (obtaining the last shot on creeps for a kill, ergo a gold rew…

They've added turbo mode recently which keeps most games between 15 and 30 minutes!

Since parent said they played DOTA on the WarCraft3 engine: Turbo mode is basically `-em` (easy mode) from Dota 1 with some quality of life improvements.

Re: The Sound Proof Booths of Silence

#160

I wonder if they have looked into air curtains. Commercial installations are at a point where you have this silent, completely invisible sheet of fast-moving air that provides some degree of noise isolation as well - maybe four walls of these + a floating ceiling is enough when coupled with the noise-cancelling headphones.

It's much much too loud for air curtains.
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