[fallinghawks]

That was fun, although several were not quite like the ones in my memory.

One of the sounds that I'd like to hear again is that little triple "dit" you would hear on a radio when a cell phone was nearby. I never knew exactly how it was made -- undoubtedly the network saying hello to the phone -- or what that sound was called.

[michael_h]

Like http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h1mlponX_jw ?

[fallinghawks]

That's the one, yes!

[HCIdivision17]

I am so happy to have someone else confirm this. For some reason people just didn't believe me that speakers fed back that way.

Other fun sounds are hearing your computer change the background hum/buzz of imperfectly grounded speakers. There was a very clear difference in the quality of the speaker's silence depending on if a GIF was animating, a web page loading, or some other computationally distinct event.

[train_robber]

This answers why - http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/32830/why-doe...

[fallinghawks]

Thanks! So this is why it doesn't happen with smartphones.

[rquantz]

It's partly because of that sound that musicians have to actually turn their phones off during recording. If you're too close to the board that clicking gets picked up.

[seandougall]

Not just the board -- mic cables running under chairs pick it up too, as do the tie lines under the floor if they're not properly shielded, which they're usually not in older studios.

The great thing about mic cables picking it up is that it's usually easy to narrow down who the offender was. :-)