Edead v1 failures

[ANeonRider 3]

http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum/showthread.php?t=18126

[vladd 26]

Ben's post from the linked icix thread is beautiful.

[///M5 2,833]

laughable either way. One of these days I suppose I should do a showdown, but damn would it take a lot of time to set it up.

[ANeonRider 3]

But you have all the equipment... and can actually test vibration reduction.

[///M5 2,833]

Setting up a fair test isnt' trivial and is beyond anyone associated with Isux and even Don. Getting repeatable sheet metal samples as well as repeatable wide band acoustic energy is far from simple. Any small minute difference and it would be an unfair test. I have run into this before in measuring different sheet metal samples.

Their process is flawed. Measuring acoustic response from a constrained dampening layer is not accurate, measuring physical damping would be. You are right on the equipment, I can measure phased response to 0.1picometers with a spatial resolution of microns if necessary this test is a cake walk in comparison from that aspect.

[Acidburn 10]

I think you all know how I feel about eDead.

[mrogowski 6]

How do you feel about eDead?

[Acidburn 10]

How do you feel about eDead?

It sucks, big time. Since the first summer after installing it in my doors and trunk, pieces have been falling off. The pieces that fall off in the trunk are no big deal, I just toss 'em. In the doors, however, when the pieces fall, they get stuck in the window mechanisms and clog it all up. This has happened a few times.

[mrogowski 6]

Ah. Curious, how has eD responded to this problem? Did they send you some replacements?

[ANeonRider 3]

LOL. Eduh doesn't back their products after they've taken your money.

[Acidburn 10]

Ah. Curious, how has eD responded to this problem? Did they send you some replacements?

Haven't even bothered to contact them. I know they won't do a thing.

[Aaron Clinton 2,372]

An eD product fail? No you can't be serious.

[Supa_c 1]

How do you feel about eDead?

It sucks, big time. Since the first summer after installing it in my doors and trunk, pieces have been falling off. The pieces that fall off in the trunk are no big deal, I just toss 'em. In the doors, however, when the pieces fall, they get stuck in the window mechanisms and clog it all up. This has happened a few times.

Ugh, I remember us trying to pull that crap off your window.

[Acidburn 10]

How do you feel about eDead?

It sucks, big time. Since the first summer after installing it in my doors and trunk, pieces have been falling off. The pieces that fall off in the trunk are no big deal, I just toss 'em. In the doors, however, when the pieces fall, they get stuck in the window mechanisms and clog it all up. This has happened a few times.

Ugh, I remember us trying to pull that crap off your window.

Yeah dude, and just a couple months later, I pulled a softball sized chunk out of my door

[Rudeboy 152]

Setting up a fair test isnt' trivial and is beyond anyone associated with Isux and even Don. Getting repeatable sheet metal samples as well as repeatable wide band acoustic energy is far from simple. Any small minute difference and it would be an unfair test. I have run into this before in measuring different sheet metal samples.

Their process is flawed. Measuring acoustic response from a constrained dampening layer is not accurate, measuring physical damping would be. You are right on the equipment, I can measure phased response to 0.1picometers with a spatial resolution of microns if necessary this test is a cake walk in comparison from that aspect.

Setting up a fair test isnt' trivial and is beyond anyone associated with Isux and even Don.

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.

[///M5 2,833]

I definitely wasn't trying to attack you, as not everyone in the world has access to a $350k scanning laser vibrometer. I happen to and thought once and for all we could actually compare the effectiveness of how the different materials work. In fact, I'd like to thank you for what you have done as by far it is the most useful piece of help for the enthusiast on the web when it comes to deadening. Regrettably while I can definitely test the damping characteristics, I can't test the adhesion. Leaving that out of the equation wouldn't be fair. I'd actually like to see some of the more standard humidity & temperature cycling tests the big 3 use on other parts but that would require a lab that I don't have at my disposal.

[Rudeboy 152]

I definitely wasn't trying to attack you, as not everyone in the world has access to a $350k scanning laser vibrometer. I happen to and thought once and for all we could actually compare the effectiveness of how the different materials work. In fact, I'd like to thank you for what you have done as by far it is the most useful piece of help for the enthusiast on the web when it comes to deadening. Regrettably while I can definitely test the damping characteristics, I can't test the adhesion. Leaving that out of the equation wouldn't be fair. I'd actually like to see some of the more standard humidity & temperature cycling tests the big 3 use on other parts but that would require a lab that I don't have at my disposal.

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.

[///M5 2,833]

Your questions are good. I think the real answer is all of the above, but it makes it one step harder. Mass, area, thickness, geographical application, and cost are all variables that you could compare between. For me though the most important would be cost perhaps with some application thrown in.

The harder portion of the setup is to insure that the excitation and response measurements are fair. Even getting consistent metal pieces that have the same modal and bending response isn't trivial. Once that portion is conquered the next is to insure that we equally excite every sample. There are three main ways to excite the sample: acoustic excitation, using a shaker, and striking it with a modal hammer. To do this acoustically I would really like to have a reverb chamber with equal sound levels throughout accross a certain frequency band and a window that the sample sits in. The downfall of acoustic excitation is that we can't measure the input force, this we can get around by using a shaker or modal hammer as it is possible to connect a force transducer to the tip of either device. It then becomes possible to calculate response out versus force in at all frequencies and give us the real affect of the dampening layers.

I do know someone with a lab and potentially could have their company see it as a benefit to let me do the comparisons there; however, the cost and time involved if I had to rent the lab time would be really prohibitive. The modal hammer/shaker I have access to but would like to spend more time processing exactly how to do the tests before going down that road. I am also in a state of flux as my house is for sale and I know the W will freak if I attempt to start a project that leaves all sorts of things laying around in the house.

[Rudeboy 152]

Your questions are good. I think the real answer is all of the above, but it makes it one step harder. Mass, area, thickness, geographical application, and cost are all variables that you could compare between. For me though the most important would be cost perhaps with some application thrown in.

The harder portion of the setup is to insure that the excitation and response measurements are fair. Even getting consistent metal pieces that have the same modal and bending response isn't trivial. Once that portion is conquered the next is to insure that we equally excite every sample. There are three main ways to excite the sample: acoustic excitation, using a shaker, and striking it with a modal hammer. To do this acoustically I would really like to have a reverb chamber with equal sound levels throughout accross a certain frequency band and a window that the sample sits in. The downfall of acoustic excitation is that we can't measure the input force, this we can get around by using a shaker or modal hammer as it is possible to connect a force transducer to the tip of either device. It then becomes possible to calculate response out versus force in at all frequencies and give us the real affect of the dampening layers.

I do know someone with a lab and potentially could have their company see it as a benefit to let me do the comparisons there; however, the cost and time involved if I had to rent the lab time would be really prohibitive. The modal hammer/shaker I have access to but would like to spend more time processing exactly how to do the tests before going down that road. I am also in a state of flux as my house is for sale and I know the W will freak if I attempt to start a project that leaves all sorts of things laying around in the house.

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.

[Hobbes26 0]

Wow, didn't know someone that had access to a scanning vibrometer. That would definitely come in handy.

As for sheet metal consistency, I didn't realize that it would be off by that much - I was just assuming that it would be pretty consistent and all we'd have to standardize on is the dimensions and gauge. If we can measure it with and without the damping material added, would that be sufficient to determine the damping ability of the material?

The source could possibly be a loudspeaker with a certain bandwidth, sitting a distance away from the sample. I don't see why a reverberant room would help the measurement, since that would mean you're putting the sample in a diffuse field. Unless you're talking about measuring the TL of the sample, with the window. The impact hammer approach would be much better, though setting that up in a repeatable manner seems to be difficult.

Justification of the test and abstracting that to the real life situations shouldn't be necessary. Those who dismiss the tests without a valid concern shouldn't even be bothered with. You don't need to be a scientist to understand how a comparative test like this works, and how the results should be interpreted.

Don,

As far as the heat testing goes, perhaps an infrared thermometer would be useful?

Edited August 16, 2007 by Hobbes26

[///M5 2,833]

The manufacturers (and subsuppliers) do this test in the same setup they measure transmission loss. Doing a sound power measurement at the same time would be cool.

The impact hammer is easy as the vibrometer will trigger an fire the 'autohammer' with an impedance head on the tip, can even do some averaging that way as well. The only difficulty here is consistent boundary conditions when grabbing the sheet metal, really this is my primary concern in the "sheet" consistency. It isn't the easiest thing in the world to get into a near free-free condition and while using a clamping mechanism is fine it has to be repeatable not just in force but in how it affects the target. Obviously a baseline and post deadening scan would be in order for each sample, we can probably post process out the differences but the less you do is better for defending the test on the web.

[///M5 2,833]

By hammer, this is the sort of device I am referring to:

http://dytran.com/go.cfm/en-us/content/pro...R-5800B2/x?SID=

Autohammer:

http://www.altasol.com/products/AS-1220/AS-1220.html

and of course the vibrometer (actually application note of measuring car body panel vibration with Chrysler):

http://www.polytec.com/usa/_files/LM_AN_VI...05_01_PDF_E.pdf

[Rudeboy 152]

By hammer, this is the sort of device I am referring to:

http://dytran.com/go.cfm/en-us/content/pro...R-5800B2/x?SID=

Autohammer:

http://www.altasol.com/products/AS-1220/AS-1220.html

and of course the vibrometer (actually application note of measuring car body panel vibration with Chrysler):

http://www.polytec.com/usa/_files/LM_AN_VI...05_01_PDF_E.pdf

Sweet, why bother testing on sheet metal blanks when you can use Mercedes?

I'd be thrilled to see something come of this.

[Hobbes26 0]

The manufacturers (and subsuppliers) do this test in the same setup they measure transmission loss. Doing a sound power measurement at the same time would be cool.

?? damping and transmission loss in the same measurement setup? I'm not sure whether we want clamped edges...

Not sure what the sound power measurement would be used for... but it would be cool, lol. You have access to an intensity probe?

The impact hammer is easy as the vibrometer will trigger an fire the 'autohammer' with an impedance head on the tip, can even do some averaging that way as well. The only difficulty here is consistent boundary conditions when grabbing the sheet metal, really this is my primary concern in the "sheet" consistency. It isn't the easiest thing in the world to get into a near free-free condition and while using a clamping mechanism is fine it has to be repeatable not just in force but in how it affects the target. Obviously a baseline and post deadening scan would be in order for each sample, we can probably post process out the differences but the less you do is better for defending the test on the web.

The book i've been looking into suggests merely hanging the sheet metal by a string that is 'long enough' to not damp the sheet any and not allow vibrations to travel up it to the support. Of course, hanging it by a string would require drilling a hole in the panel.

What magnitude of differences in sheet metal are you talking about? Will it really be of that much difference to affect the measurements?

Edited August 18, 2007 by Hobbes26

[dopey 0]

Why not hang the pieces of sheet metal using the deadeners as adhesive?