People will spend inordinate (or, at least, barely ordinate) amounts of money on sound systems for their car or home. Amplifiers hand-crafted with valves filled with Swedish vacuum; speakers hewn from West Samoan baobab wood; gold-plated connectors hand-polished by Balinese metallurgists... the list is unendless.

But, however good the system, you are still left with a vast gap between the speakers and your ears - even with headphones, the gap is appreciable. This gap is filled with mundane, ordinary air which has in no way been engineered with sound transmission in mind. The humidity, temperature and pressure of the air are matters of mere chance - hardly adequate for the true enthusiast.

MaxCo. seeks to fill a much-needed gap in the market, by offering avid sound enthusiasts a bespoke air-tailoring service. Our sound engineers (and a couple of unsound ones to make the tea) will carefully analyse the properties of your listening environment, taking into account things like the shape of the room, the placement of sound-reflecting or sound-absorbing material, and so forth.

We will then hermetically seal the room, installing an attractive and inconspicuous air-lock/decompression chamber in place of the existing door, and fit the necessary gas-handling hardware.

Once installed, the system will regulate both the pressure and gas composition within the room (keeping it always within breathable limits) to ensure the optimal listening experience.

For a typical room with fitted carpets and the usual quantity of soft furnishings, the ideal listening experience is to be had at an ambient pressure of about 120psi, in a gas mixture of 6% oxygen, 94% SF6. For larger rooms, slightly lower pressure and a gas mix involving helium is often preferable.

For the music lover on the go, we can also provide deluxe headphones, discreetly connected to a cylinder of the appropriate gas, with tiny jets to keep the airspace between the headphones and your ears optimally filled.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 24 2017

Nice.
-- pocmloc, Jan 24 2017


^ well now that's just cilia.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jan 24 2017


Waxing philosophical, are we?
-- normzone, Jan 24 2017


I had to take a moment and check that we're viable as a creature at 120psi. We are! Well done us. Has anyone tried a marathon at 120psi and say 18% O2? When I am finally allowed the $200 million per annum funding I deserve, I will furnish the world with this important information. Have you considered the advantages of a high pressure environment for the DNP fat farm? Instead of water jacketed humans you could simply enclose them in a high pressure gas, density, and therefore heat transfer will increase if you chill the the environment.

As for the idea, well, as an audiophile myself, I refuse to listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan unless the temperature and humidity are correct, and when i say correct, the humidity MUST derive from the Mississippi. This is obviously inconvenient. Not always however. As a student in Liverpool, I found myself easily, and occasionally inevitably, listening to the Beatles in the appropriate environment of the low-cost underground Scouse drinking pit.

For the discerning audiophile, I should point out that I own a cylinder of air which is, at least in part, THE VERY SAME AIR used in the original performance of Mozart's many utterances. I am bound by honour to accept a minimum of $100k. Or 5 for $300k.

Also, Shirley liquid would provide better acoustics? Compressibility is an issue for audiophiles and P38 pilots alike.
-- bs0u0155, Jan 24 2017


//liquid would provide better acoustics?// We did try that. We found that (a) the listeners could only take about 80 seconds of Oasis before coming up for air* and (b) inadvertent mal-adjustment of the treble control sheared their DNA.

*as compared to a median of 102 seconds in air itself.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 24 2017


Ah, there's your problem. You used Oasis. You should have used Air Supply.
-- normzone, Jan 24 2017


I wonder how liquid mercury would go as a sound conductor.

Maybe we're going about it all wrong. Is there anything that's a superfluid at survivable pressure/temperature? I'm thinking the low viscosity might in some way reduce attenuation?
-- Custardguts, Jan 24 2017


You haven't heard anything until you've heard the Chipmunks in the original helium. And you might not ever again, after.
-- RayfordSteele, Jan 24 2017



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