The contents below are paid advertisements. Their appearance does not imply an endorsement by The Oil Drum.
“Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.”
—Claire Huchet Bishop
Search The Oil Drum with Google
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
- Enjoying Life Close to Home: Fun Streets
TOD:Europe
- Russia: There Is Life After Peak Oil
- Should EROEI be the most important criterion our society uses to decide how it meets its energy needs?
- Oilwatch Monthly - August 2008
TOD:Canada
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
- Weekend Energy Listening: Wind Power with Paul Gipe
TOD:ANZ
Peak Oil Primers
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- Ecological Economics
- David Strahan
- Econbrowser
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- Environmental Economics
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Organizations
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
As to the frailty of todays housing.
I built my own loghouse of roughly 4500 sq ft (under roof). I had also helped some spec. builders in the past and helped others make additons(garages,etc) to their houses. I finished basements in my own homes.
I did plumbing,dirwork,poured foundations,did all the electrical work,and so on and on....
So when my son purchased a rather new 2 story McMansion after helping him look at newer homes for a very long time...I was very dismayed over the absolutely shoddy building practices and the materials used.
Houses built in the years prior to the mid 80s were usually of pretty decent construction...Today there is no plywood used in the framing and little used elsewhere...its all chipboard(OSB by name). With this flimsy sheating a layer of Tyvex housewrap is thrown on and and rest of the walls are incredibly cheap and junky 2x4s. Everything is built and then 'hidden' behind a facade. Many of the crawl spaces have drainage problems and contain large amounts of moisture. The duct work is abysmal as is the shoddeniness of everything else. Roof included.
Yes they will fall apart rapidly. The concrete buckles. The lawn is subsoil. The fasteners are air driven and do not perform well. You see no screw fasteners in these houses.
The wifes seem to be the ones deciding on what to buy and all they see is vistages of drywall and cheap cookie cutter finish products. No real quality but with the laminate flooring , which is really a picture of wood or stone printed on a very small substrate of plastic..they think they have captured the essence of real quality. They are completely wrong and no nothing of construction.
Its just 'uuuuooooooo don't those cabinets look good? and that metal prefab fireplace?' ..which can't and couldn't burn real wood..they are only appropiate for propane fed phony gas logs.
Yes it will disappear fast. And it deserves to.
airdale
Agreed. My wife tells me the quickest way to gauge the quality of a house is to look at the amount of overhang on the eaves. Builders wishing to cut corners invariably build eaves with the most modest amount of overhang.
You, my good man, need to sit and watch TLC's Flip This House so you get up to speed on how its supposed to be done :-) I don't do TV but mom watches this show religiously. It doesn't strike her as the least bit ironic to sit in a WWI vintage brick prairie foursquare that might sell for 10% of the price of one of the "flipped" homes and watch that show, but it makes me smile every time I hear the announcer's prattle when I pass by the sewing room.
A period staying with my parents recently got me hooked on this show - it is a train wreck...
the first few episodes were improbably successful... but recently more and more are just shocking - watching these idiots lose their shirts on flips that will NEVER HAPPEN...
--
All these memories will be lost in time
like tears in rain
Dear Airdale,
How right you are! My father would have loved your loghouse. A really well-built loghouse can last for centuries. You've made a wise choice.
I too have done a lot of the building stuff you mentioned. I've now got the tools and ability to build a house if I had too.
Most new houses seem to sell because the kitchen and the bathroom look nice. This apparently appeals to women. One is often given the advice to bake some fresh bread when a potential buyer is coming to look the place over, or install a large, flat-screen television, or a very fancy refridgerator in the kitchen, that people would 'aspire' to own. Selling property is often about selling a perception or an idea.
It's a shame we don't produce and value quality as much as we used to. Of course this would slow things down too much, but maybe we need to slow things down a bit?
I bought a second-hand McIntosh 275 valve amplifier which is almost thirty years old. It's really, really, heavy. It's American quality and engineering. The circuit design is fifty years old at least and the sound is absolutely fabulous. Most people are simply awstruck when they hear the music it makes. It blows most modern amps away.
So maybe we haven't really been 'progressing' as much as we thought. Maybe we've been buying quantity and not quality and wasting vast ammounts of energy and other resources in the process.
Peak amplifier?
Amplifiers that would turn up to eleven, obviously. I saw a made for T.V. movie about this particular resource some years ago :-)
What you're remembering is the movie This is Spinal Tap.
Here's a feed of the famous clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d54UU-fPIsY
Amplifiers Schmamplifiers ..... I have some personal-life sorting out to do, but one thing I may end up doing is making bits and pieces for, maybe even the whole things, involving musical instruments. Strictly acoustic.
Amplification is very very young, and according to the Olduvai Theory won't be a part of our lives for much longer. In fact guitars and violins etc may well be back to gut strings not all that far in the future.
As a professional musician(classical guitarist)
my mind wanders to this thought occasionaly.
So I always have at least a couple years worth of
modern nylon strings at hand.
It is not just houses or hi-fi equipment -- EVERYTHING is cheap junk these days. "Value Engineering", it's called.
One really has to look hard to find well-made stuff. It does exist, but it takes a lot of effort to find it. Good starting tip: skip Sprawl-Mart.
It isn't just your McIntosh amp or old houses - for lots of things, well-maintained used goods will often be the better buy compared to brand-new value engineered crap.
One thing I admire greatly about traditional (pre-industrial) Japanese culture, or the Shakers for that matter, is the antithesis of our "clutter-junk" culture. Have just a few, supurbly crafted things, and keep them out of the way when not in use.
I always regretted getting rid of my old SAE amp. While not a tube amp, it was stone reliable and American made. Its' replacement, a Sanyo freon cooled unit, died after five years.
I'm sure some EE guys will jump on and explain all the ways why ICs are so much of an improvement on the old vacuum tubes. I have absolutely no doubt that they are a great improvement for the manufacturers.
The thing is, though, is that you could actually REPAIR the old vacuum tube equipment. If you were handy with a soldering gun and knew a little bit about basic electronics, you could even order a kit and build it yourself (which even I have done). Anything you build yourself you should be able to repair yourself (which even I have done), and keep running for as long as spare parts are available (a lifetime, if you stockpile them).
Now, if an electronic device goes on the blink, it usually goes in the trash and a replacement is bought. It is getting increasingly difficult to find anyone that can repair anything anymore -- especially for less than the cost of buying a brand new replacement.
"Progress"
Nothing to repairing electronic stuff designed to be repaired. Much of the consumer stuff is specifically designed with encapsulated components so that it can not be repaired and whole modules have to be replaced, and this leads to total replacement.
so in other words, what we are doing is taking concentrated resources and dispersing them. mostly in the landfill. not unrelated to the discussion about phosphate on here a few days ago.
I bought a second-hand McIntosh 275 valve amplifier which is almost thirty years old. It's really, really, heavy
Amp Archecture.
The heavyness is the amp. The Mac passed the signal thru the amp ONCE to get it's power, modern (TEAC and since) pump the signal thru multiple times to get the same power out of it. Feedback . Macs Were WAY better. Does it have tubes?
The british refer to vacumn tubes as valves.
Tubes I have read seem to produce more fidelity..which was once what everyone was looking for.
I also heard or read that vinyl records produce more authentic fidelity than CDs or mag tape or whatever else(Ipods?)..and I have a huge number of Bluegrass records and well ..all that I ever brought thru the years..and do have several turntables.
Its supposed to reproduce the various instruments frequencies better.
So perhaps the past was better in many products and cheap dumbed down manufactured products are not that good.
I used to work on a lot of discrete board products. Yet I do like the ability to have a complete morse code keyer on a chip..and just build the rest myself, like I did. A Curtis chip it was.
I do also like the huge number of functions on my Kenwood hf rig..vs the old Yaseu FT101 I used to have way back where you had to manually load the finals then resonate the load to the output..so on.
Yet the Kenwood weighs a ton..and its of very good quality..yet its mhhh maybe 10 to 15 years since they came out with this model.
airdale
Ahh the good ole analog vs digital debate....
The problem with early CD's was the filtering and converters.
Plus records/tapes have that high fidelity...
hisssssssssssssssssssssss........and crackle/pop.
:)
I'm sorry, but Vacuum Tube amplifiers simply do not produce better 'fidelity' than modern amplifiers. In fact, the accuracy and range of a tube amplifier is significantly less than a comparable modern, transistor amplifier.
The only advantage that tube amplifiers have over modern amplifiers is that when they are overdriven they produce distortion that is 'warm' and 'pleasant'. The distortion produced by modern amplifiers is quite unpleasant by comparison.
All distortion is bad however. Distortion represents a failure of the system to accurately reproduce the sound that was recorded. The solution is not to switch to a different type of amp, but to get an amp that has enough power to create the desired volume without distorting.
Of course, few people seem to notice distortion anyway, so your mileage may vary, but I like my sound systems to produce sounds as close to the source material as possible, that way, if a particular CD sounds terrible, I can blame it on the band or on their sound engineer and not on an antiquated amplifier.
Also, regarding the weight of amplifiers, I have noticed that the weight of a given amplifier is not so much a function of the actual amplifiers contained within, or even of the heat-sinks attached to those amplifiers, but of the power supply (mainly the transformer) for the amp. If the power supply is on the left side of the case, the left side will weigh twice as much as the right.
However, Although the quality of the sound produced by the modern amplifier may be substantially better than the tube amplifier, I expect the tube amplifier would last a lot longer than its modern brother. The modern consumer equipment just isn't built with a long service life in mind.
I have gone though quite enough electronics to learn this lesson very well: The word consume isn't in the phrase 'consumer electronics' by accident.
Pickyreader said:
"but I like my sound systems to produce sounds as close to the source material as possible,"...plus a lot more..
BUT my contention as to the quality of vinyl holds some water as you can read by this link:
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm
Which explains that digital sampling leaves out some of the original while the grooves in vinyl contain all the original...granted that dust , etc may have a spoiling effect..note MAY....
As to vacumn tubes...I haven't tried to back up my claim but I suppose that some googles would be informative.
I am an acoustic instrument player,an electronics technician and a ham radio operator. Have been all these for mhhh...about 40 years. Not that this means much but I have seen and experienced the complete span,from vinyl to 8 trks to cds to dvds and so forth. Of course for the best in fidelity one must listen to real instruments played live.
However for me the next best is vinyl with a set of good speakers. Surely Ipods with tinny tiny speakers on headphones must be about as bad as it can get. Given that very expensive headphones might be better but you won't find them on Ipods nor much else today.
What is your background , if I may ask?
airdale-yes vacumn tubes are surely dead but ...
Realistically, this is an issue that has been absolutely beaten to death, although it usually receives poor coverage/understanding.
The link you provided was an excellent example. The author of that piece focused on a single issue and ignored the big contrasting points. Although vinyl records have better accuracy because they don't have to deal with Analog to Digital back to Analog conversion, this is an issue that has been largely fixed because the modern Digital to Analog converters are so good. Also, in order to hear the difference, you would need to have an obscenely expensive sound system to begin with, so this is an issue that is encountered by very few.
The point that the author ignored, is that Compact Discs have a much greater dynamic range than vinyl. This is the difference between the intensity of the greatest possible signal and total silence. For a vinyl record to have a similar range, it would probably need to be about a full inch thick.
The counterpoint to this however, is that modern sound engineers usually give up most of this range to make their albums sound 'louder'. They crank up the volume of the quiet parts so that their album will sound louder than others owned by the listener. This means that when the band wants to get louder, they don't have anywhere to go.
(Roger Waters used this to great effect on "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking": one has to keep the volume quite high to hear his whispered lyrics, so that when he starts shouting, it really blows your ears off. I don't believe that could be done with vinyl.)
This isn't really related to energy though, so we should take this discussion to email if you want to continue.
As for my background, as I am in my early twenties, so I have no background compared to you, but I did live sound reinforcement for concerts and theatre at a community theater operated by my high school, and have been studying Civil Engineering since then, now on the path to med. school.
My email address is listed on my user page.