Audio Fanatics Are Also Coffee Fanatics

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By Brenda Brown

Through a recent thread on the Email Discussion Group, we realized that “coffee” is extremely important among our members. Pat Brown started the thread by using the “cup of coffee” as a measure of time. He lamented that an posting error fix to the Web-based User Forum required “Two cups of coffee.” Well, that got things started…

Below you will find the colorful comments from our coffee fanatics that will bring laughter to your day. We ended the article with the “Coffee Geek” winner.

I now know why I hear Pat laughing in his office for no apparent reason, and why he has coffee stains on his computer monitor. bb

    • Comment from Brad Walker

I propose that “One Cup” should be referenced to the volume of PB’s personal coffee cup (much like the “meter” scratched into the floor of Sorensen’s favorite church in France).

We can then use the decibel to measure the preferred cup size of other folk, i.e., Jens’ cup size is +3 dB PBC, whereas a Rayburn cup would be +10 dB PBC.

Of course, mitigating factors would be where the measurement took place – we now know that hemlock forests and grass skew the measurement more than pavement or glass. This could lead to higher caffeine intake than anticipated, resulting in Dave Rat-like musings.

Caffeine/water ratio needs to be considered, too – clearly Guatemalan espresso beans will produce a greater dynamic range than your ordinary reference Folgers…so how much caffeine crest factor do we need to plan for? It seems entirely possible to have a cup that’s -3 dB PBC, but produces a + 12 dB crest factor over Folgers…

Brad “often goes into caffeine clipping” Walker

    • Jens Skov Comment:

so how much caffeine crest factor do we need to plan for? It seems entirely possible to have a cup that’s -3 dB PBC, but produces a + 12 dB crest factor over Folgers…

Can’t stop laughing. Maybe I’m just too tired….

I’m wondering what effects caffeine distortion has. Is it an digital-like clipping or more like the effect of an overdriven tube?
.. and maybe we should take up interface matching again.

    • Pat Brown Comment:

Folgers as a reference? All dB ratings for “real” coffee would be positive numbers. When you order “American coffee” in other countries, they water it down until you can read the date on a penny at the bottom of the cup. My first clue that there was something wrong with our coffee was at early SAC seminars. The European guys would show up the second day with their own jar of instant coffee that they used to try to make ours palatable.

Like dBm and dBW, we should dB-Amer and dB-Euro for coffee. The 30 dB differential is about right.

    • Jim Sorensen Comment:

What about those of us who add cream or sugar? Is that equalization? Is it
augmentation? We augment an antenna pattern when we make it cover stuff
that otherwise falls through the cracks without changing the essential
nature of the pattern or its shape.

I note with interest that you can add a good bit of sugar before you change
the volume of the fluid in the cup…because the molecules sort of
intertwine when the sugar dissolves…but you can’t do that with cream
because of the incompressibility of most liquids. Cream doesn’t dissolve in
the coffee, it mixes with the coffee but sugar dissolves in the
coffee…different process entirely because there are bonding states
changed. Thus, we can state with reasonable certainty that adding sugar is
a “super-positioning” argument whereas adding cream is not.

Of course that’s not equalization so maybe the addition of cream or sugar is
an augmentation. Or is it an amendment?

    • Dick Trump Comment:

“Of course that’s not equalization so maybe the addition of cream or sugar is an augmentation. Or is it an amendment?”

Either one is distortion, pure and simple.

    • Jim Sorensen Comment:

I just noticed that someone is proposing Folger’s as a reference! Absurd!

Folger’s is a mountain grown coffee produced by Juan Valdez (of Alaskan
oil-spill fame) to be sure but it’s also apparently filtered through a large
organic filter…

…called a donkey.

Give me Dunkin’ Donuts any day!

Suzy Thrasher (Bill Thrasher’s wife) is the Coffee Geek Winner.

Suzy buys Brazilian green coffee beans in bulk. She roast her own coffee every 10 days. She considers any coffee that is older than the 10 days from roasting to be stale. The below photos shows Suzy roasting beans to make that “perfect” cup of coffee. This will even impress our members from across the big pond.