There really is no other word for it: I am rejoicing at the absence of noise!! Seriously! My ‘home’ MacPro (home being where I spend a lot of time making & listening to music, writing, noodling, existentializing etc etc) has slowly been getting louder and louder. I had started to despise the noise it made – the fans would rev & slowly get louder and louder, until I’d have to stop whatever I was doing & just turn it off…. My instincts suspected it was the video card… and finally today I crumbled & pulled the whole thing out from under the desk, prized it open, unscrewed the mounting bolts & pulled the video card out…
I waved the card around a bit & the fan didn’t seem particularly rattly, but then I rotated the card so I could actually see the fan intake area… OMG! It was like a felt mass had accumulated, covering 70% of the air intake area for the fan! At first I thought ‘is it meant to be like this? Is this actually the filter?’ A little screwdriver soon agreed with me: No and NO! I cleaned all the dust out & exhaled through the intake until clean air blew effortlessly through the fan… I reseated the card, put the lid back on, plugged all those ridiculous cables back in, hit the GO button & waited…
It isn’t a recent MacPro by any means, its been in two different buildings one of which was particularly dusty… But by comparison now its almost silent!!! And now I wish I’d taken a photo of that dust/planar furrball AND recorded the noise of those fans… But it was truly a lesson in cumulative noise: at what point does ‘noise’ become so irritating that you have to act? Today was that day!
I know most facilities have a machine room & cable their tech – but do you/most people put up with the ambient sound of their computers? Also: are MacBook Airs actually silent?
Hi Tim,
I have made a cupboard in my studio using the alcove beside the chimney breast and then building it out with a double wall of studding and plaster board and I used a 1/2 hour fire door. However you do then need to arrange to extract the hot air but because you are extracting the air it tends to take the sound with it, so all in all it works well but I di include it in the original design and it also incluses a bass trap in the corner too.
Mac book Air’s are silent……. until you load up a bunch of DSP plugins at which point the fans start screaming…
I run ableton on mine but if there is much going on in the mix it gets well loud.
Unfortunately my computer makes the same annoying fan noise. My HDD also powers up and down continuously (still looking for the source of the problem).
Unfortunately my computer is quite loud no matter how many “quiet” fans I install. I clean it out once a month to stop the dust causing more noise, I tend to “block it out” when working, which isn’t the best solution. But until I can afford a better solution I’m stuck with it!
A very entertaining tale. “plugged all those ridiculous cables back in” – ha ha ha! Sounds familiar.
It must be an awesome relief to be back to quietness. I think it’s not only the irritation-action threshold of noise that’s really interesting, but also how unwittingly accustomed you can become to noise like this if it increases gradually enough (like over months). A friend once said it sounded like a helicopter from his end on Skype – it was my old Powerbook’s fans. I had noticed this from time to time of course (like during recordings), but sort of forgotten somehow that things could be any different!
I had a machine room a few years ago and it made a huge difference in my ability to work long hours with minimal fatigue. I’m currently building a small studio and plan to include a well isolated, ventilated cabinet for the computer. At least no more video machines; they were the worst!
I too got sick of the noise of my machine, though it was clean. I simply bought a half size server rack with a perforated metal construction, installed all the computer and rack gear into it and ran extension cables thru the wall. All drives are outside the room but the rack can be wheeled elsewhere quite easily. It’s soooo nice to have no drives, no Mac Pro, no interfaces…. nothing at all. The only sounds I hear now are the birds outside, the kettle boiling next door…. dishes being washed…. my colleagues playing ping pong…………….
In this context, the video’s title left me laughing.