Comment by tristor

Interesting, I read this series of posts and as someone who does not have a dog in this fight but does have a more than passing background in both audio engineering and datacenter engineering, the response Masley gives here to the very first criticism is fundamentally incorrect. I haven't read the rest of this, but his claim about sound intensity what it would imply about energy is on its face untrue.

When you take a measurement of a sound, you are measuring both its pressure and its intensity, that is what is implied by a measurement in decibels. The measurement is taken from the point of the measurement device/listener in relation to the source/generator. If the measured value is potentially harmful, there is no such implication about needing to redirect additional energy to make it harmful, it's already been measured as potentially harmful at the point of measurement.

It's basically nonsense. My most charitable interpretation of his very first responsive argument is he's saying that a datacenter would need to intentionally direct energy towards increasing the intensity of its sound output to make Jordan's original measurements meaningful. That's neither how measurement works, nor how sound works, nor even how datacenters work. Things like sound and heat are BYPRODUCTS and not the point of the datacenter, both have an intensity, and that intensity is measurable, and any energy which is expended towards that intensity is energy that was wasted away from doing computations.

I stopped reading after this. I don't know if Masley is out of his element or just practicing motivated reasoning and thinks his readers are stupid. Either way, his rebuttal already failed on the first point.