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Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

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Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#21

Post by yurishimo »

smeej wrote: post #12

The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration. I mostly used it for turning volume down in waiting rooms or at bars, but a bar was also where I figured out most of their TVs tend to be set to the same con…

I would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#22

Post by bschwindHN »

That reminds me of my Xbox One. I could reliably turn it on by starting some heavy wifi traffic on my phone, typically by opening a YouTube video. The console lets you turn it on with the wireless controller, so I assume the wifi traffic was somehow recreating that signal.

I never solved it though, I moved and never really set up the Xbox again.

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#24

Post by mfkp »

smeej wrote: post #12

The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration. I mostly used it for turning volume down in waiting rooms or at bars, but a bar was also where I figured out most of their TVs tend to be set to the same con…

Just got a new OnePlus 15 last month and it has an IR blaster built in. Works great

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#25

Post by Joel_Mckay »

jofla_net wrote: post #15

I had a very similar story related to this as well. For the longest time I always assumed RF remotes were the ancient ones, as growing up, we had an old large Magnavox console tv, with just such a remote. As time progressed we went to IR, which was, as I'll explain below, a welcome relief! The tv was positioned in a basement room, just under my bedroom. Every few months I would be rustled from my sleep, at 4AM, to co…

RF chokes on the cables are sometimes necessary. The clip-on ones work well, and are cheap. Part of being a Ham is mitigating EMI your broadcasting may cause.

As a side note, intentionally jamming or interfering with other peoples signals can carry up to a $1m fine and several years in prison. =3

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#26

Post by ajb »

unglaublich wrote: post #11

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.

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!

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#28

Post by miduil »

What a story. Be friendly to your neighbors, otherwise they might turn off your TV!

When I was living in Berlin, the entire apartment complex had a WhatsApp group and people would (of course it's Berlin) party a lot. People would ask each other to turn down the volume, which worked for the most part - at least for severe partying. Best messages were like "you've been partying all night, it's 2pm, I need some silence to have a meeting.

Back then I was dreaming of some shared application, people could put on their phone or laptop and then the collective could decide or at least hint through that software that the volume was up too high.

Re: Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

#30

Post by udkl »

unglaublich wrote: post #11

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.

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
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