Monday Meanderings - 4.9.2018

The Austin Learning Ally studio closed its doors at the end of March. As I understand it, this was the last production studio to close and the Learning Ally organization is now a virtual community. All of the readers, checkers and the preponderance of staff members are working from home, connected online.

It was sort of a poignant moment when I finished up my last studio session; I've been showing up there a couple of times a week for more than 10 years, and on my first no-studio day, I felt slightly bereft. I had been leading a somewhat hybrid existence for a couple of months - working both from home and from the studio. Now it's all home studio.

And the home studio continues to be a work-in-progress. I have quieted the echo or "slap" in the room with foam panels, but the Eskimos living next door presented a bigger challenge. I'm sure they are Eskimos, because they run their air-conditioner 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I swear I head that A/C unit during our hard freeze in January! Just glad I'm not paying that electric bill.

The air-conditioner is located right outside my "studio" windows, of course, and the noise it makes is clearly discernible in my recordings. First I stuffed foam panels in the window spaces, and that helped, but not enough. Barb was strangely dead-set against my bricking  the windows, so, I took the scientific approach and began researching materials with the highest noise reduction coefficient that I could afford.

That material, it turns out, is "rockboard" - rigid panels made up of compressed rock wool insulation. I figured that I could make up some panels that were only semi-permanent and stuff them in the openings, so I ordered a big box of panel boards.

No home improvement project - or in my case - studio improvement project is without setbacks, and mine came when I opened the box of rockboard and was greeted with a big warning notice that rockboard was only slightly less dangerous than a runaway nuclear reactor, and that you should wear protective clothing, use a breathing apparatus, double wash your clothing afterwards and to be safe, burn them and junk your washing machine. Huh. You would think the company selling this stuff would have mentioned this.

So no raw, uncovered rockboard surfaces allowed, but unbleached muslin has a nice, tight weave and a few yards of that and a can of spray adhesive and all my panels are properly diapered and currently stuffed in the window openings.

Did it stop the A/C noise? Not completely, but I can live with what remains. Now if I can just get Barb to remain absolutely silent while I am recording.