First of all, it may sound like I’m complaining about the location of my workstation. Jackie and I share a room about 30 feet long and 20 feet wide. Jackie is easily more than 10 feet away. My workstation is by the door so I am constantly interrupted by people coming and out of the room, but I don’t complain for the following reason:

Quite frankly, sys admins in prepress are super lucky when it comes to office space. I know that in downtown Vancouver, white collar staff are rammed two or three into a small office maybe one quarter of the size of the room shared by Jackie and myself. Even worse, there are idiots who walk around espousing the idea of an “open-environment” offices, meaning 4 or 6 people are packed onto a long lunchtable with nothing more than laptops and a smile. I have seen these beastly flesh warehouses with my own eyes, horrific examples of human degradation where you couldn’t scratch your nose or your butt without at least 3 eyewitnesses present.

But I digress. On to the matter at hand. We do have to share the room with a fair amount of computer gear and prepress equipment, the largest of the latter being the magnificent Lotem Quantum 800 II. A beautiful machine, when combined with the Prinergy workflow systems, absolutely ensures many hours of leisure and surfing the web for many a Prinergy operator.

Just kidding about the last sentence. Actually us technicians in prepress work very hard indeed. I’m actually sweating right.

But the Lotem does have one tiny problem. When it makes plates, it sounds like a jet airliner. And it’s almost as loud. This is not entirely a bad thing, because it does allow me to cut short many a phone call with vendors trying to peddle useless crap, but a quieter prepress room would be a double-plus bonus.

So I have been poking around soundproofing.org and you can get these panels that are made of vinyl that are apparently almost as dense as lead. And you can put them on walls or floors and it really helps to deal with the sound.

But now I am wondering, there are umpteeth Lotem owners out there and do you guys have any good noise-suppression techniques for dealing with the Lotem?