Rudeboy

Pure ED propaganda. Weaving delusional, self serving narratives of martyrdom is a long way from being brutally honest. A stronger case could be made that he is a compulsive liar. Time and time again, Ben Milne has been proven to be dishonest, even when it would not hurt him at all to be straight. I have given him the benefit of the doubt for years, but he has made it absolutely clear that he is a morally corrupt little prick. People only assume he is being honest because the stuff he comes up with is so pathetic it is hard to believe it fabrication he thinks makes him look good. I'm not suggesting people shouldn't buy his stuff if they want. Just stop believing he is an honest person, just because he says he is.

Can't hurt to try it that way. Very good chance it will be enough heat.

You can warm it gently with a heat gun or hair dryer - just enough to soften it, do not melt it. Should peel off pretty easily then. Sometimes you need to slide a putty knife under it to lift it off. Turpentine, mineral spirits or Goo Gone will remove the residue. Then you need to clean up the oily residue those products can leave with some denatured alcohol or acetone (I prefer the alcohol).

Best plan then is to figure out how much RAAMmat and Ensolite you can buy for $300. You will want about as many square feet of foam as you do mat, plus enough adhesive the hold it in place on the vertical surfaces. $300 will be enough to make a significant improvement, but you could spend $500 or more on a vehicle of that size if you wanted to go crazy with it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a significant change in the bass". It will reduce energy lost through panel flex and resonance and will clean up the sound by reducing the harmonics you hear from the resonance It will also reduce the energy available to excite rattles, but it is always better to find the source of your rattles and treat them before apply sound deadener. Silicone caulk, foam tape, expanding foam and scraps of closed cell foam are great for this. Tighten everything that can be tightened and isolate the rest. If you are going to buy just enough to cover every square inch in a single layer, don't apply it that way. That's probably a decent quantity, but apply it in multiple layers toward the centers of panels and leave the edges alone. The closer you get to a bend or reinforcement, the less you need to use. Don't just apply it randomly. Tap on the panels and treat the areas that are the most resonant.

Brown residue means it was the asphalt version. They've improved it so it falls off cleanly now

Don't they do it on part by part basis? I can tell you that transmission loss testing using ASTM E756@ 200 Hz is what has been used by after-market sound deadener manufacturers. This started with Dynamac Control and I have been told by more than one source that their numbers were achieved by non-standard methods. I believe the results reported by competitors have been "invented" using DC's as a starting point. Tom Lewis at Damping Technologies suggested Oberst bar testing when we were discussing this same topic, but said the results really couldn't be made meaningful for this application. His basic point was that using twice as much of any product would roughly double the effectiveness and controlling for variations in thickness and density would be more trouble than the results would be worth. This led to my conclusion that: Adhesive quality is important Foil thickness is important Mass is important and that has been generally good enough except for those who have just wanted to cast doubt for their own reasons. Something else to consider is the variability of these products, even samples taken from the same batch and within inches of each other. When weighing and measuring, I take 4-6 pieces from as far away from each other as possible and average. The variations are large. Finding a representative sample will be important. I'm not trying to discourage this effort at all - I support it enthusiastically and am following your progress closely.

Sweet, why bother testing on sheet metal blanks when you can use Mercedes? I'd be thrilled to see something come of this.

I've been down this road a few times before, but always pursuing DIY solutions. The lesson I've taken from my efforts and previous attempts to expand on them is that overreaching will kill the effort. I think the goal should be to settle on a narrowly defined target. It might just supply a little more insight, but each step is better than what came before - nothing. It isn't possible to be completely comprehensive with a budget of $0. As long as the results are valid above the data noise the limitations impose, we will have accomplished something worthwhile. Something to consider when designing the experiment is that scientists will not be the primary consumers of the results. If the reasons why the approach taken applies to automotive sound deadening can't be easily explained, it probably isn't worth doing. I still have to explain why I'm not trying to demonstrate what happens if you park your car in an oven. In the first version I dropped samples in an acetone bath. The ways in which the products reacted made it instantly clear if we were dealing with asphalt or butyl. I removed that test because I couldn't overcome the - I'll never submerge myself in acetone arguments. That said, I'm bringing something similar back for the next version, but only because I have had two years to figure out how to present it. All I'm saying is that using a hammer to excite the sample is guaranteed to lead to a thunderous dismissal of anything that results from the project - I'd never hit my car with a hammer, this guy is full of crap. For whatever reason, many people either can not or do not want to look beyond the exactly literal. Let me know when and if your circumstances allow anything to come of this and if I can help in any way.

I have a lot a product samples on hand that I would be happy to share. I can also publish the results if you want, when the new version of SDS is ready, with full attribution. Would you standardize the samples on area or mass? Imagine two products, one twice as heavy and twice as expensive as the other. It is possible that two layers of the thinner less expensive material would be more effective than a single layer of the other stuff. How might this be accounted for. It would be very interesting to be to include liquids as well. I'd be thrilled to do anything I can to help from providing samples, to helping prepare them to publishing the whole thing. Whatever I can do. People want to believe that because I haven't been able to provide this data means I don't want to. The more we know, the better. This is the sort of information the manufacturers/sellers don't even have for their own products.

I appreciate the gentle wording, but I would not be offended no matter how harsh you were I've never pretended to be doing anything more than trying to stop the sellers of these products from telling outright lies - the frequency of which seems to have only been reduced slightly since I began. I do think the consumer's familiarity with the factors that distinguish good from bad has increased, so that's a good thing. All I'm doing is baking sound deadeners in my kitchen oven and hanging some barbell plates from them. All disclaimers aside, if I had started this to discredit somebody else, I'd hope I would get the reaction such an effort deserves. I'm pretty well convinced that the effectiveness of any of these products is going to vary with 1) mass, 2) thickness and rigidity of foil and 3) quality of the adhesive. Since the first two are easily measured and the last can be gotten at indirectly, I think most of us can now make pretty informed choices. As much as I'd love to include Oberst Bar results, at $600/sample tested, I can guarantee that isn't going to happen - let's see, $600 x 25 - sweetie, I have an idea. Yeah, right. I've tried to keep a cool head about all of this - with mixed results. I think I have done pretty well at not holding the attacks of the ED cultists against the company itself. I've made a point of mentioning the quality and value of the eNetic 1/0 power wire. I've tried to avoid attributing motives to their many misstatements and false claims they make for their various sound deadeners. So first I get attacked by regal1975 and other cult members for harboring "unfounded hatred" toward ED because I dared to be critical of a few of the installments in their Our Audio Life "reality" TV show. Then SDS got attacked, first by regal1975 and now famously by Ben Milne, whom I now feel comfortable referring to as "the cry baby". If calling a spade a spade is going to be redefined as "blatant hate", then so be it. He has decided that being my enemy was a good business move. There are probably plenty of grounds for calling SDS out, but he chose to be completely dishonest instead. As far as I can tell, not one of his charges is valid. As in the videos, he is betting on using a very unattractive public image to advance his case???? When 3 reports of eDead failure appeared in less than 2 weeks, I thought it was worth exploring now instead of waiting for the always slipping deadline for the new version of SDS. I feel a lot less compelled to try to be even handed with these guys. I am pleased that my use of the term "cult" seems to be spreading So yeah, I am completely unprepared to undertake the efficacy testing that regal1975 and CryBaby are insisting is critical. It just seems to me that before they start trying to measure what happens when you put a piece of sound deadener on a bass drum, it might be a good idea to put those big brains into finding a way to make their product stick. That's what cracks me up. Plenty of people have asked me to do damping tests and I end up pretty much where I started - if it doesn't stay where you put it, nothing else matters. I'm pleased that most people are looking at this idiocy and concluding that Don, doing this on the side as a hobby might just have less reason to skew results than, oh, I don't know, people selling sound deadeners. Jeez.

It's good. The only other products I know of with a 4mil foil are Dynamat Xtreme and Cascade VB-Max. ED UE claims 5 mils, IIRC, but it isn't all foil, it's like 1 mil foil with 4 mils of plastic. I know it's shocking that they would get a spec "wrong" The thicker and stiffer the foil, the better it works, both as a vibration damper and as a barrier. It will cut the hell out of your hands, but you know you've done your best when you shed actual blood to get better sound. Worth the sacrifice.

Definitely very nice stuff - ideal if you want to just do a single layer. If you want to take some time with it and be precise, a good argument could be made that regular Damplifier is a better value. You will never use more than you need and 2 layers of Damplifier > 1 layer of Damplifier Pro - thicker and more foil. You really can't go wrong either way. Pro makes it really hard to use a lesser product after you use it.

Have they shipped it? If not, cancel the order. I wouldn't use it unless you need to make a temporary repair to a mobile home roof

That explains all of the delays for the past several years. They apparently have no shame at all. No phone + no e-mail = no shipping?

This has been going on for a long time and I'm hearing from more and more people each week having the same problem. Even when I ordered samples to test, nearly two years ago, it took months and MANY phone calls and e-mails before they shipped anything. Every time I called they told me it had been shipped the day before. They changed their eBay seller's account a few months ago because the negatives were building up. Funny thing is the promoters are now saying: Sure it takes a month or two to get, but it's worth the wait. It's flimsy asphalt flashing that I absolutely can not distinguish from Peel & Seal. Not worth a drive to Home Depot let alone a months long wait. Good luck getting the charge reversed. Hope it works out.

Top to bottom: RAAMmat. Dynamat Xtreme, Hushmat, Damplifier, Damplifier Pro, ED v1

I understand which tests can be done. What is missing is any way to pay for having them done, and more importantly, a way to use those test to provide useful comparative data. It isn't enough to say that a 1" X 4" strip of Dynamat Xtreme is 3% more effective than the same sized patch of RAAMmat or even one of the liquids. The DX will have more mass than the RAAMmat and is thicker and more expensive. How about two layers of RAAMmat to one of Dynamat? Now the cost is almost the same but the RAAMmat is thicker and heavier. The tests you describe work backward from what we are trying to determine, they are much better suited to determining which material will best solve a specific problem rather than providing a means of comparing products for general use. I'd be very interested if somebody can describe a methodology with results that would help when choosing between products, instead of just a litany of tests. For those that insist that mass loading is all that is going on, there isn't any need for tests beyond weighing in any case.

When will these be tested for effectiveness? Probably never. Standard tests are about $600 per sample and I can not figure out a way to even prepare specimens in a way that would be fair. How do you compare the effectiveness of a thicker mat to that of a thinner mat? Use the same area? Same mass? Who knows. It seems to me that the best we can do is extrapolate effectiveness from material properties. To a large extent, mass is a determining factor - if it doesn't melt or fall off, it will do some good. Beyond that, we know that butyl is viscoelastic. That adds effectiveness. We know that the thicker and stronger the foil, the more the product will stiffen the panel and the greater the viscoelastic effect will be. There really doesn't seem to be a generalized "all things being equal" testing structure that will let us compare to a standard ideal.

Not only that - using a heat gun to apply it damages the rubber used to stabilize the asphalt, making it much more likely to fail in the long run. Asphalt is a no win option, IMO.

They've moved on to butyl. RAAMmat has always been somewhat messier than some of the others. There was apparently a short run of RAAMmat that was messier than usual, but the new version is about the same as it has always been.

Ranking by quality, best first: Second Skin, Cascade Audio, Hushmat Dynamat Xtreme RAAMmat, B-Quiet Ultimate eDead The following are asphalt and I wouldn't even consider using them in a car: Dynamat Original Brown Bread FatMat B-Quiet Extreme

Cross off Brown Bread - asphalt and premium priced asphalt at that. I'd add Cascade VB-Max, Dynamat Xtreme and Hushmat.

Not surprised. Cascade stuff tends to be a little expensive, but if you can get a good deal on it, everything I have seen of their's has been top notch. I diidn't think that the cascade stuff was anymore expensive then most other stuff. http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cf...tnumber=268-258 You're right - my perception was based on their butyl mat.

Not surprised. Cascade stuff tends to be a little expensive, but if you can get a good deal on it, everything I have seen of their's has been top notch.