Ask Adam Savage: The Worst Sound from MythBusters
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ธ.ค. 2022
- What was the worst sound Adam heard during MythBusters? With the seemingly overnight success of MythBusters, what quality of life changes did Adam experience? In this livestream excerpt, Adam answers questions from Tested members Michael Schnell and shadowfax1007, whom we thank for their support! Join this channel to support Tested and get access to perks, like asking Adam questions: / @tested
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New backup alarms uses a stylized white noise, its short range, easier on ears, used in high traffic areas.
those high tone alarms are so piercing that if they echo, there is no way of knowing where the source is.
the noise generators are EASILY 1000x better.
@@digimbyte We have a mix of both at my job. The new ones are so, so much nicer. I struggle to locate sounds even in the best conditions, but the new alarms are pretty easy to find.
Damn, that backing up alarm noise...
I totally hate them. And for someone working in construction, they hear it every time and instead of being a heads up it just going to be a background noise that adds to fatigue.
I was once working in an office that was set up near industrial park and we had a crushed stone/sand/dirt material storage facility nearby. I am so happy I did not have to work there more than several weeks. I thought I'd turn nuts.
Adam, can you make a video talking about how we achieved 50% energy from fusion?
Yessss I work outdoors driving forklifts outside, it’s atrocious!!!!
My favorite “Adam has been recognized” moment happened when you were in a hardware store and someone said to you, “are you blowing something up?” And you said “nope, we’re dropping an elevator”. 😂
when did Adam tell that story?
@@gingerscholar152 I'm guessing this person witnessed this exchange
@@scottbertalan425 it was in the elevator of death episode. They were at a rigging supply store and one of the employees yelled out, “what are you blowing up this time?” And Adam’s response was, “Nah, we’re dropping an elevator this time.” The employee went, “Are you really?” Adam responded, “yeah.”
My favorite one is where two teenagers came up to him, called him Alan, and said he should test the myth if you can smoke too much weed
Honestly that's really cool though.
My coworker met David Lee Roth when he was like 10? At a Van Halen concert in the bathroom, like he turned around after pissing in the trough they had and he was like "you're David Lee Roth!" And he said he like border line screamed "WHATS UP LITTLE DUDE!" and high fived him.
Says it's one of the better celebrity interactions he had. Although an awkward place to meet the lead singer of Van Halen
8:39 "By the way it is your legal right to discuss your salary with your co-workers in America"
As a former HR professional, THANK YOU
I can't tell you how many managers I had to explain that to over the years
That alarm is something I call the "smoke detector paradox" based on a story I heard that some smoke detectors are intentionally made less sensitive than they could be. This is because the result of a smoke detector going off at every little hint of smoke isn't people going "Wow, I'm so glad it's this effective", it results in people ripping it down so they can make quesadillas in peace...and then having no smoke detector at all.
It crops up in dev work from time to time. For example, a logger that tracks every last thing that's happening, but then people would just disable it because of the file size or the inability to glean useful information quickly.
Or the old windows vista security thing where it blacked out the screen to ask if you *really* wanted to do something. People weren't glad for the extra security, they were pissed at the increased friction and searched in droves how to disable it.
Make things good enough to fulfill the task at hand and not a step farther.
That's why rather then smoke detectors, heat detectors are much better. If it gets over 350°, there's a good chance your house is on fire. You won't reach that cooking or lighting a woodstove. Not on the ceiling or upper wall. Unfortunately they don't make em small and cheap enough for them to be able to replace smoke detectors. I have lost count of how many smoke/odor investigations I've ran because of cooking or woodstoves. The only ones with heat detectors are commercial properties, that use it for setting off the sprinkler system. It's literally just a small glass bulb (or heat disk, depending on how modern) that ruptures and allows the sprinklers to flow
@@buckberthod5007 Those are fine, except in cases where the occupant is in the room, asleep, where the fire starts (a studio apt). At 350° room temp, they're long dead before the alarm. That's why those are for sprinkler systems and not for alerting people.
The point is, you need the right fire alarm for your use case.
Def ripped the one out of my ceiling.
My uncle lives in an apartment where the alarms go off if a person is cooking bacon or smokes a cigarette. What's worse, there are a lot of elderly people there who chain smoke, and although they're told to smoke outside of the apartment building, folks on the upper floors don't want to go out into the rain to smoke every time they get a craving. Every week, at least once, some old person lights up at 2AM, the smoke alarms go off, and the policy is that EVERYONE must vacate until the fire department arrives. So every few days, he loses an hour of sleep, all because folks are addicted to nicotine so badly, they can't wait until sunrise to smoke, and the smoke detectors are super sensitive. It's a joke with him, if he goes a whole week without his sleep getting disturbed, he says "someone must've cut the alarm wires!"
Gee thanks, now I want a quesadilla.
It truly amazes me how often employers believe they can tell you not to talk about your rate of pay. I had a manager chew me out about discussing pay, and I wasn’t even the one that had been discussing pay rate. Always pays to know what rights you have as a worker.
It is not against the law in the US to discuss pay. It is a myth that companies will propagate to discourage it. 1962 Fair wage disclosure act protects your right to discuss your wage. Equal pay for equal work should be the law. Look up Price's law where he discusses that 10% of the people do 90% of the work, there is a lot of truth to it.
I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for an employer to prohibit you from discussing your salary with others, although it might depend on the state.
Well companies are fucking scumbags and managers aren't your friends.
It doesn't matter, if they'd fired the "correct" person it would still have been against the law. @@CrazyRalph3
@CrazyRalph3 No, all you had to do was call the labor board in your state and they would have represented you for free.. It's against the law to fire someone for discussing their pay in most states..
My "recognizing Adam" moment was while shopping at The Container Store in SF. He seemed to be with his family, so I thought it kinder to not play the fanboy and bother him.
Many years ago, I was working on a (period, 1800s) movie in the foothills west of St George Utah. The first day of filming, we kept having to pause because of a back-up alarm on construction equipment WAY down in the valley below us. Occasionally, it would interrupt takes and really cheese us off. At the time, both my brothers were working construction in the area, and that first night I had dinner with one of them. I mentioned that we kept having this issue, and I guessed it was coming from the new Kayenta subdivision being built. My brother said, "Yeah, that would be your brother Steve. He's running the forklift delivering materials." The next day, we didn't have the problem at all. Steve just disconnected the alarm, because no one was paying attention to it anyway. Or as he said, "If they're too stupid to get in the way of a smelly, noisy, slow-moving forklift, they deserve to get run over."
I’m sure the info is out there, but I wonder if backup alarms have been shown to have any efficacy at all? Every piece of large equipment I’ve ever operated has blind spots everywhere, including the front. If the beeping really helped that much, it should be going ANY time the machine is moving. If they don’t help, why have them?
Funny, I feel like I should be copying and pasting my comment. Tom Scott did a video on back up alarms in the UK and most construction sites are requiring a white noise back up alarm as the annoying loud high-pitched screaming things are non-directional, which means you can’t tell from which direction you’re about to get run over. Where as the white noise alarms Are directional and your mind Can hear a difference and determine a direction. They’re also not as annoying and blend in with the background better.
@@imark7777777 I think some companies in the US are starting to do this too, rivians new Amazon delivery van has the white noise alarm
I worked on one next door to a construction site. We blew an air horn at the start of each take and a double blast after the take letting the construction workers know when they had to be quiet. Studio had to pay the contractor for the inconvenience.
@@CrazyRalph3 Actually, he was working alone. IT WAS A JOKE, RALPH.
For what it's worth, I'll tell you my favorite sound from Mythbusters. When you blew up the cement mixer, that explosion had a very specific sound quality I have never heard before or since. It was, to me, a sort of rending, ripping noise. It was like a new hole was being torn in the fabric of that time and space. That was an amazing explosion in no small part because of the unique sound it made.
I know exactly what sound you mean, and I also absolutely fell in love with it!
Yeah, I can still hear it in my head on demand. A sort of reality-breaking BVDDDDOOOOooooooo. It makes me wonder how much it sounded like that, and how much was the microphones just not being able to cope.
@@IstasPumaNevada I'd like to think that everyone there heard it like we did. That said, you have a valid point, it could have been an artifact produced by overwhelmed recording equipment.
Although this is perhaps a slightly different thing, I have to say my favorite moment _involving_ sound was Jamie trying to "sneak" through a ventilation shaft using magnets.
@@bastarddoggy I have to agree in principle, though I would point out there was a sound in the final season that gave it a run for its money.
I always appreciated that for the most part Mythbusters would use sound effects instead of an awful bleep sound to censor swearing and ingredients for making explosives.
“You don’t wanna mix blur with blur”
Many parts of the world have switched the reverse alarm sound from being a tone to a sort of broad band pink noise - turns out it is much easier to detect in the local vicinity and carries less. Many emergency vehicles globally now contain some form of white noise in their sirens for this reason.
and also super easy to tell what direction it's coming from vs the beep that feels like it comes from every direction
The first place I heard these was London - where they were required for urban projects.
I am a semi truck driver, and I wear ear plugs all the time because forklifts backing out of the trailer can cause damage to the 1000Hz frequency in your hearing.
@@paulgrieger8182 Yeah, we have had 5 receivers and 3 shippers quit because of hearing damage and the corp doing nothing to address it, other than to ban earplugs (Ironically for safety reasons), because the reach truck and electric pallet jack reverse alarms were 3x the threshold volume (Turned up by corporate to be louder after an accident involving a DEAF employee). They turned them down after 9 months, but the horn can still be heard in the next store over, and the alarm is only 1.5x as loud as it started.
If your ears aren't bleeding it isn't loud enough.
That's REALLY interesting. I hope that becomes a thing in the US too.
Fun fact, in UK, they discovered that if the alarm is a repeating beep, people quickly learn to block them out and ignore them, which negates the point of them. So ours are now expected to make kind of a hissing white noise crackle. People immediately turn to look because it sounds like "Hey, your reversing beeper sounds busted huh huh" which does the job AND doesn't have to be hugely loud.
all you have to do is make them sound like a rattlesnake here. Lol
Or they beep and go “This vehicle is reversing”
I’ve had it where I’ve been on my motorbike behind a lorry and when he put his indicators on it just kept repeating “This vehicle is turning left”
It's also pretty hard to locate the beep-beep sound compared to a white-noise hissing.
The Amazon trucks in the US make that same noise.
Is that why the Amazon trucks in America sound like a broken gargling speaker when they back up?
Not just your legal right, but PLEASE talk to your coworkers about their pay. It is the only way to know if you get rewarded for hard work, loyalty, or if those "promotions" are even worth it to stay that long
Guy I worked with was straight-up fired instantly for buying lunch for some others to celebrate getting a raise. He didn't even specify how much it was nor what from nor what to. Just that there had been one. Busybody business manager told the boss duo and boom, gone. This was mid-'90s.
Well, not always. What if you know that you are making a lot more (because you are literally worth it)? It won't end well.
In my company, we pay everyone in a certain job the same, exactly the same. If someone isn't up to snuff, they get to find work elsewhere. If someone is brilliant, they are offered a better position, if available.
@@TheGreatAtario And that was illegal then, too. Companies bank on workers not knowing their rights and not fighting back when those rights are violated.
I actually had a customer chime in when me and my coworkers were discussing pay rates. Found out I was getting underpaid and I spoke to my boss. Got it fixed. So next time I saw that customer I thanked him for saying something and paid for his coffee.
I learned that bosses only pay as much as you think you are worth at 19 years old. I asked how much my 18 year old co worker was getting paid, he told me 2 dollars more an hour than me for the same job. It turns out all he had to do was say that the starting pay was too low for him and the boss negotiated with him.
My husband is currently trying to renegotiate a pathetic "raise" the employees got. What he's learning is that the lower managers tend to be the worst, but since he has direct access to the CEO (he's the in-house tech and fixes the guy's computer) he's far more understanding than the department head or managers. So never be afraid to go over their helmet.
I remember watching Mythbusters as a child. Crazy to think the show started in 2003 and here we are at 2023, 20 years later. I count Mythbusters as a big reason I became a machinist. Seeing Adam and Jamie and the crew take raw materials and just make a trebuchet or device to launch a object at a specific speed always fascinated me. So many great memories.
Adam, we weren’t watching because there wasn’t enough channels. We made a point of keeping ourselves available to watch you every week! ❤️
Although this is perhaps a slightly different thing, I have to say my favorite moment involving sound was Jamie trying to "sneak" through a ventilation shaft using magnets.
‘The god of thunder is trying to break into our building!’ 😂😂😂
The first THUNK after they countdown to start will forever be one of the most hilarious moments in the shows history for me.
Do you remember what episode that was?
@@Her_Imperious_Condescension I believe it was Crimes & Myth-demeanors 2
Thank you for stating talking about pay is a legal right. So many employees are not aware and its a great help to hear it from respected people. Unions often have to re-educate co-workers about their rights and I firmly believe having unions helps the workers get treated better and paid better. Corporations are happy paying people poverty wages in too many fields.
They need to advertise gross pay vs net pay when you get hired, that pre-tax hourly rate is just as bad as a girl using all the snapchat filters for her Tinder profile
Used to supervise a warehouse. We got a new forklift (we only ever had/needed one at the facility). Within a week, the beeper magically "broke" and we never bothered to get it fixed.
Reminds me of somethin my dad would always say when getting in his truck. "You never hear someone run into an auto parts store and say 'Hey you got a replacement for that little bell that rings when the door is open?!' do ya?"
When I got my "new" forklift the backup alarm was about three feet behind my head. Long story short I fixed the volume problem. I put one strip of clear packing tape across the center of the loudspeaker. The strip was barely visible and Noone removed it. The alarm worked at about half volume so I guess it was still "legal ".
Man, 2003?!? Having been born in 99 I grew up with mythbusters! And to now I STILL rewatch the episodes/collections I have on DVD! Such an impact it had on my life and it still continues to have!
I was born in 88 so I was lucky enough to be Mythbusters target demographic, so I literally grew up along with them from day one, and I'm here to tell ya kid, I learned 99% of what I know from the Mythbusters. Enjoy it
@@cleverusername9369 oh believe me I enjoy it plenty! And they've helped me with science fares, history projects, and for winning cool points with my fiancees family by saying pretty cool and unique facts gleaned from mythbusters episodes! Almost 24 years old now and when I have kids down the road they're gonna watch it too!
Same here (also born in 99), I used to beg my mum to stay up to watch the new episodes and every Sunday morning the discovery channel would have the older episodes back to back and I’d watch them all. And I don’t know if this was just an English thing but…. Brainiac? With Richard Hammond, it was very similar to mythbusters but more aimed at kids whilst mythbusters target were adults
Not to mention it becomes so ubiquitous of a sound that the workers start to get used to it and eventually ignore it
backup alarms where recently changed here ( quebec canada) because night snow removal would blast these all night. the beep was changed to a sound similar to a wheel rubbing in a wheel well. definitively gets your attention, yet not annoying enough to wake you up
Thank you for being there to talk with folks about pay and benefits as they get into TV. I imagine for many it is hugely overwhelming to be sitting across the table from organizations with tons of lawyers and seasoned negotiators.
I am just picturing Adam and Paul Jr hanging out. It's weird, but it makes sense.
Adam- A white noise backup sound is used in some other countries, and supposedly studies have shown that they are more effective at close ranges, is produced at a lower db level, and the sound disappears into the acoustic background quicker as one travels from the danger zone.
Perhaps something to add to your soap box conversations.
My Favorite Sound from Mythbusters was the Concrete Truck Exploding.... I'm sure part of that was from the microphone clipping or distortion but I've loved that explosion sound ever since it aired and have wondered why no one has asked to use it in a film.
As someone who once lived near a construction site, for years, I can tell you that nearly 24/7 backup alarms is literally damaging. Even now, I need white noise and hearing protection to sleep well
Getting unexpectedly recognized can be both a pleasant and humbling. I was on one of the pilot episodes of Hardcore Pawn with my drum set; years later I'm greeted by a fan in a bar in central Michigan. While I was still building my airplane I was at OSH for the big AirVenture airshow a few years ago; walking through the homebuilt aircraft campground I was stopped by a fellow builder who watched the engine build documentary I produced for my TH-cam channel. It makes sense, but I never expected it.
Need a clip of that last part. So many more people need to hear that from some one like Adam. Always compare notes with your co-workers.
Indeed. It feels so weird to think about doing it, but it's a very good thing to do.
Those alarms on industrial equipment have actually been changed here in the UK to a white noise burst.
Apparently when you are surrounded by hard/reflective surfaces the high pitch alarm bounces around and is very difficult for the human ear to work out which direction the noise is coming from. Pretty sure there is a Tom Scott video about the rule changes in London building sites.
hilarious you mention this. We got new vans to splice in at ATT and these alarms were so loud we'd wince and turn our heads to stop the damage ........... we ended up taking vinyl tape and covering all but 10% of the alarm source and it helped so much
The back up alarm issue has actually already been fixed on newer machines. They now use a white noise that sounds like hissing. Much less likely to just block it out
I am 100% with Adam on the reverse beeper thing. Like, Why in the actual fook, do they have to be THAT loud?! Some of them can be heard from miles away! I just recently watched a video where reverse alarms/beepers were brought up. I made the following comment. (Copy-pasting so I don't have to type the whole thing again!)
"I utterly HATE those loud beepers. I have been in situations where someone in a van is backing up, taking their sweet time, stop and adjust something or have to wait to back up etc.. and they just leave the damn thin in reverse while sitting there, beeping, LOUDLY, in the MORNING the entire time. I have violent thoughts... Some are so damn loud you can hear them for miles.
I used to drive a company truck for an electrical contractor. I delivered tools, paperwork, paychecks and supplies etc to the various job sites. Just a normal 2008 Chevy truck. Not a huge cargo van or anything with poor rearward visibility. A Normal. Truck. I had to leave home at 4:30 in the morning. It had a beeper. It was one of those super loud beepers too. The damn thing echoed off of houses, and even the hills. Even just ripping it from park to drive as fast as possible, it still managed to "BIP!" loud enough to echo. It was soooo damn loud! On the third day I came home to a pissed off neighbor for waking his entire household at 4:30 am because I had to back out of the driveway each morning. ..."
(Someone asked me why I didn't back into the driveway after work to avoid having to back out in the morning. The answer is that I could not leave supplies in the truck at night. (junkies steal anything) So I had to put it all in the shed and load it back up in the morning. Either I was going to back up to the shed, or away from it. So I had to use reverse in the morning, regardless. Back to the story...)
" ... The 3rd night/4th morning, that beeper "mysteriously" 🤔 went missing. Like, wires cut, super short. So short that they couldn't be spliced into. The beeper completely removed and gone. "Gosh Tim, (boss) I don't have any idea! Somebody must have came in the night and stole it! Damn junkies will steal anything! Huh? Noo.. I didn't take it out. Why would I do that?" 😇(😈)
I rip out, disable or otherwise silence any beepers, buzzers, dingers, dongers, boopers, bippers, clangers, clickers and clackers in every vehicle I own. If I have to remove the entire dash to get to it, and/or bypass something, it's going to be silenced!
I hate that shit. Even frikkin' turn signals now-a-days play clicky or "dink-donk!" noise through the speakers! NO! It's going, going, GONE! I'll re-wire the entire speaker system to bypass that garbage. So there was no way in hell that loud-ass beeper was surviving."
I agree about back up alarms. When I worked construction there were so many back up alarms that you essentially tune them out entirely and the very fact they exist make them less likely to be effective. I would have preferred if the driver simply honked the horn just like you do when turning a blind corner in a boom lift or forklift.
I love that you mention Monster Garage and the Tuttles, because that is when I really started watching all those shows (and later with Dirty Jobs) on Discovery. Thank you for the insight!
When I was a young kid growing up in the 70s, somewhere around 1970 or 71 there was a construction project going on a couple of miles away from our house. We lived out in the country but every night after my brother and I would go to bed we would hear this strange beeping far off in the distance that would come and go and last for hours through the night. We came up with all kinds of science fiction theories to explain the bizarre noise. We planned an expedition to go out and try and find the source. The mystery was solved when our father explained it was a new feature that heavy equipment now has to warn people when the machine is backing up.
I was only 5 of 6 years old but I immediately thought of how horrible it would b to have to work near that noise.
I need you to know that I worked at a zoo long ago, and an African grey parrot had learned to mimic the sound of the tractor backing up.
All.
Day.
Long.
In Australia they switch to something more akin to a buzzer sound for reversing alarms. Much quieter and harder to ignore
Now I wonder what the worst sounds on Goldbusters and Frankensensebusters were?
Shut up and take my like
I would've gone with Frankinbusters, myself, but I dig your holiday spirit
Yeah the title's been corrected, but I too thought it might have been a Christmas themed question Myrr Busters. LOL
Backup alarms can be a shh sound (air being released). It's an OSHA-approved alternative.
Loved Mythbusters as a kid (born 2002), I remember back in the day I'd come home from primary school, turn on the TV, and then Mythbusters would just be starting. Now I'm in my third year of a physics degree. So thanks for Mythbusters!
When loading in or tearing out a large event in our local convention center, we will frequently have 10 or more forklifts, 8 or 9 scissor lifts, and a dozen or more boom lifts all operating at once. All the various infernally loud beeping sources inside an echoing cavernous space …
We may or may not have employed some similar techniques to preserve our hearing and our sanity. Not to mention that the cacophony made it impossible to communicate with our ground support or hear anything else that was going on around us!
I work for an auto parts chain and our company minivans come with backup alarms. None has lasted more than a few weeks. All are quiet now.
On the backup alarm noise subject :) Absolutely! I find that annoying when when I assemble shows be in conventions/concerts/ whatever. We did the same thing as well. The white noise ones work better for several reasons. Less annoying #1 Also #2 knowing where it's coming from .
I'm guessing that the back up "beep" is beyond annoying when you're trying to shoot a TV show and have to reshoot scenes because someone was backing up a truck or forklift somewhere.
I’m very new to this Tested environment, but I just want to say how inspiring it is to listen to you. You are AMAZINGLY articulate, your answers are incredibly well spoken, and it is so refreshing to see how you pause to find the right words and they are always so profound. Thank you, and I’m hooked!
Myth: Successful show = life changing levels of money.
Adam Savage: Myth busted.
Keep up the great work, AST.
Oh man do I agree about the backup alarm. I used to work in a warehouse and the forklift operators would wrap layers of packing tape around the alarm to make it a reasonable level. The problem is they are not directional. Anybody over 100 ft away don't need to hear it.
I live in a somewhat quiet, rural area, but I have a chemical plant a half mile to the south and a lock & dam for the Ohio River a half mile to the north. I constantly hear back up alarms, train whistles, and the dam's signal whistle. The air whistle for the dam is probably the least annoying and somewhat endearing.
I can relate somewhat. I used to work at a grain silo on the docks that took grain in by road and exported via ship. The ship loader was a retrofitted dock crane that moved on rails. Loading required frequent movement and, as a large piece of machinery, movement had to be announced with an alarm. This was a two-tone siren that, while not piercing, was apparently loud enough to be heard a mile or two away. Eventually we replaced it with a more discreet, one-tone siren that was still effective but had much less range.
This was for the sake of anyone living nearby and also our own sanity…
As always, excellent questions and even better and uniquely entertaining answers!
I worked in a place that didn't do backup alarms but honk signals. Honk three times before you backup and twice for forward. It actually got to the point where I started doing it at the grocery store and people gave me weird looks.
Absolutely agree... I knew a guy that used to disable scissor lift noises for the exact same reason. Utterly maddening.
totally agree. having to deal with a work van that has one daily. so annoying.
Growing up on the edge of what was once rural wilderness outside of an *unfathomably* rapidly urbanizing city in Florida, the sound of a backup alarm still triggers a fight-or-flight like response in me at middle age. It meant that one of two things was happening: either some money hungry real estate developer had purchased a tract of wetland for cheap and hired a site work crew to bulldoze it flat, or that the already flattened wetland was being filled with truckload after truckload of soil, and leveled off to build another shopping mall, apartment complex, or housing development. Permanently scarred by that sound.
I feel seen by that. Backup alarms waking me up every morning for three weeks because of next door construction made me incredibly vindictive against that specific sound/ thankfully the machine they used that did that was only being used for a little while. Jeez.
As much as I love the stories and watching Adam make & problem solve, the nuggets of wisdom of navigating the creative space through the decades are incredibly valuable
As I am watching this, I can literally hear the back up beeping of the machines at the Lowes by my house. I understand his annoyance.
In Australia some trucks and stuff are starting to come out with what sounds like an angry Librarian shushing noisy students through a megaphone turned to 11. Far more effective because it's lower pitch its easier to tell direction and range than the high pitch beeps.
I love the he called the Jersey Shore Cast “Kids”. So good!
A lot of European trucks use a back up sound that is almost like a white noise, it’s not loud or annoying but it’s VERY noticeable
As a member of the Operating Engineers Union I would normally just disconnect one of the leads to the alarm.. LoL.. "Don't try this at home/work"
Yep, there's a reason they used 2nd and lower-end third octave fife and bugle calls in massed black powder military situations (speaking as a modern-day fife player). That and Crackety drums are about all you can still hear after a couple or few close-order volleys.
As a paramedic for the past 43 years, I have learned that a backup alarm serves only to enable me to see people walking/driving behind me with greater clarity.
As a delivery driver I've spent most of my 9-year career driving vans with those loud stereotypical backup beepers. I got used to it but also tried to be conscientious of residents when delivering early in the morning or in very quiet neighborhoods. It's easy enough to pop it in neutral with the hazard lights on if you're in an uphill driveway and you've already cleared yourself. My current work vehicle has no rear or side windows and no backup alarm, so all I can do is constantly check my blind spot mirrors, flick on the hazards and take it real slow. I enjoy the stealth mode until I encounter the odd driver who decides their forward progress is more important than a van backing up that can't see them.
Having worked in environments where beeps are used for alarms announcing that something catastrophic and possibly resume generating is happening, I find beeping sounds very triggering.
I learned SO much from Mythbusters!!! Thank you! Though I can't believe it was 20 years ago!
Erma gerd! Myrthbusters!!!
real ones are here before they fix the typo
exactly. I couldn’t resist.
You misspelled the misspelling ;)
@@HelloThere... hahaha did I? Ah! It’s gone. They already fixed it! Haha
Not to be confused with the Christmas Special - Myrrhthbusters 😂
i'm with you on the backup horn i worked construction for 40yrs if your close enough to get run over why do you need a horn that you can hear from the next town over.
Hey mr savage just wanted to say your word means so much i just subbed to smartless without listening first and I don't think I've ever done that before! Thanks for the great channel
A few years ago the standard was changed and white noise back up alarms are now the new alarm they sound like an air leak pulse and are much less intrusive of a noise
White noise car backups are used in parts of Europe. They protect hearing while still being audible
Ah, Monster Garage, American Chopper and Mythbusters. Those shows were very good! Excellent entertainment and a huge deal of science and grease-monkey thrown in. 😄
Absolutely agree and relate with the hatred for the backing up alarm, I’ve been living next to a construction site for the past 4 years and boy does getting woken up by one of those get old.
Looking back, television in 2001-2005 had some incredible stuff. Mythbusters, adult swim, colbert report, daily show and chappelle show come to mind immediately but i know there was a lot more
Lots of those trucks I've worked around have a hidden switch to turn them off. For awhile there I would turn every single one I saw off.
The only time I had to deal with a back up beeper was when a forklift came in to my shop for repair and every time the back up alarm was disconnected. I could sympathize since the alarm was about a foot from the operator, so I went looking and found that theses alarms came in lower decibels and installed the lowest Db I could find.
I used to work as a supervisor in a factory, we luckily had equipment with very "nice" back up alarms. On the rare occasion that a piece of equipment came in with a deafening back up alarm; it would repeatedly get subtly disabled (which was obviously not allowed) until finally maintenance swapped out the alarm for something more rational.
Another interestingly related tidbit from that job was our horrendous salary discrepancies. All of the supervisors in my department had pay ranging from about $40,000 per year to $65,000 per year...for the exact same job. $25K is a pretty massive difference. The salaries were *not* based on skill and were not based on the area you supervised (as we were all routinely rotated to keep us familiar with all areas of the plant).
We had artificial "merit" raises every year. Our boss would give us all a review once a year. Then he'd turn them in so our raises could be calculated, he'd be told he wasn't allowed to give out reviews that good and had to drop everyone down to an average review so they wouldn't get as big of a raise. Then the head of the department would cherry pick a couple people to give outstanding reviews for the year (regardless of the review their direct supervisor gave them), and those people got the better raises. It was a pretty scummy company.
I agree COMPLETELY! I Loathe the sound of sonalerts and backup beepers!
Have you heard of the newest backup buzzers that use white noise, I've heard a couple in Toronto, but apparently they are very widely used in the UK and London.
As a forklift driver, I feel this. I drive in reverse as much, or maybe even more than I drive forward. You can't drive forward with a load on your forks that completely obscures your vision.
We have two sit-down lifts at my shop, and I always choose the older, more janky of the two because the backup alarm is quieter.
One of our standup lifts somehow lost its backup beep, but the other one changes volume based on some state I havent figured out yet. pulling back on the handle just right, I suppose. So it would emit that blaring beep, and I would jiggle the joystick, and it would get louder, and then I would jiggle it again, and then it would be a much more quiet tone. What I hated though is that the horn went out and it got replaced with something more electronic, and that annoys me more than the old style single tone horn.
My most hated sound while working is the massive vacuum droning all day long. It's 12 feet tall, takes 3 phaves 480volt AC power, and even with factory muffelers, you still need double ear pro when you're close to it. And then the hopper vibrator turns on and honestly, it gave me nightmares for a week, waking me up with a *BRRRRRRRRRRR*.
But the worst sound is the sound of silence, when it should not be present. A real heart stopper.
We have one particular electric forklift at work that has an alarm with very inconsistent volume. It's always loud, but seems to vary with battery load, so it will go from ear piercing to almost tolerable when turning, then back again
Back-up alarms to me aren't too bad. The thing I hate is the body-up alarm in our new dump truck at work. Imagine the back-up alarm but one continuous screech directly into your ear drums.
We need to move to white noise for the backup warning like the EU. You can actually tell which direction it’s coming from and it doesn’t damage your ears.
Those reverse alarms cause more dangerous situations than they avoid. Literally hundreds of times I have noticed that it’s near impossible to tell if it’s just around the next shipping crate, or a whole yard away. In the UK, in some city locations, they have to use a combination of reverse beep and white noise. The idea being the beep gets people’s attention, and the white noise is much easier to determine direction.
Adam's mad scientist hair is absolutely fantastic!
Funny sounds nice sir very happy christmas adam sir and your family tested team.
It's Jamie cutting one. I love that backup alarms warn people a mile away.
places in europe and the uk are experimenting with better backup alarms. theres like a pulsing low town one they use in london iirc that is supposed to not carry, but actually be easier to hear when you're close to it. someone realised that if you have multiple trucks, the old alarms make it it impossible to tell where any of them are and actually made things more dangerous, so they designed these to be non-disruptive but also to be easy to pinpoint spatially
Those backup sounds in America I had the experience of last December - I'm from the UK and spent 5 weeks in NYC and walked a significant amount of Long Island. The first time a truck was backing up and that alarm went on I nearly had a heart attack because it was behind me and it was the first exposure to it. I was there visiting family and when I got back that day to thier home I spoke to my brother about it (also English, now living there) and he was like "yeah, that's what they do here".
In the UK they are MUCH quieter - enough for the nearby peasantry to GTFOTW, but otherwise can't be heard from reasonable distance - maybe 30metres plus with general traffic background sound.
The issue I faced with reverse alarms (backup alarms), some are so loud you cannot pinpoint how close they are or where they are. Especially if there is different volume levels all going at once.
Perhaps if they all had a set volume it would not be as bad. But I've worked on a site where the backup alarm of the forklifts were so loud you had to were hearing protection. But it made ironically enough the road trains back up alarm near impossible to hear. Watched so many people get tapped by them. Was always at a slow speed but still (road trains are lorries, or tractor trailers, with 3 or more trailers).
I worked at the plant where we got lifts that had new 'backup' alarms that always sounded, forward or backward.
It made the workplace more dangerous. You couldn't tell what direction it was coming from. So loud it drowned out all other sounds. The drivers stopped using their horns. There was an increase in near misses that I'm sure went unreported.
We weren't quite required to wear hearing protection based on the most recent sound test but these new alarms should have necessitated a new test.
I worked on a remote mine site and worked a latter shift the the other 90% of the 2000 or so persons, so every morning I had to try get the last 2 or so hours of sleep while a couple of hundred picke-up's and bus's parked up, though they tried to give us rooms far away from the parking lot sometime it was only 40m away.
So yes it is my most heated sound also.
If I recall, Kari, Grant, and Tori proved on the White Rabbit project that the alarm on that equipment is worse than like a lower frequency noise maker, or something like that. Less ear piercing noise and much easier to locate if you weren't facing the sound. I can't remember all the details but after I watched that episode those high pitched alarms seemed like something that has just been ingratiated by time and not really by what would be most effective.
I was waiting to board a plane in Auckland, traveling to Australia with my friends. We recognized you and Jamie in the airport. Probably 7 or 8 years ago.
Was watching a video recently on Rivian's new Delivery vans for Amazon and one of the things mentioned was that instead of the standard back up alarm it has one that is far more reminiscent of TV static in short burst and it's supposedly the new standard or preference of OSHA (idk how recent or how factual that last bit actually is). It's less annoying, easier for detecting the direction the sounds coming from and doesn't travel more than a reasonable distance needed to warn people of the vehicle.
Being unexpectedly senior these days, I remember the quiet world before the OSHA mandate in 1971.
I guess if the number of injuries actually decreased since then, there’s an argument for that obnoxious noise. But I’d be very interested in the numbers.
Thank you Adam. Much appreciated!
In Montreal, the sound of those machines has been re-engineered to only be noticeable / annoying when in the danger zone around the machine. Past 10 to 15 meters away you almost don't hear it.
In London, UK, it is unlawful to drive a vehicle into the city if it has a reversing beeper. The company can lose its fleet operator license if they do. These trucks have pink noise buzzers instead. Far less annoying and less damaging to hearing.
Normally back up alarms don't bother me. However, whichever brand of truck has the alarm that's more like a chirping sound really gets to me.