HOA President's Living Room Rattle Cracked by a Teen and a Soundbar

Something Rattles at Number Eleven

Tamsin inspected the cabling at No. 11 before she touched the soundbar, as she does at every house. She gave it a grade she declined to share. Mags asked whether it was a letter or a number. Tamsin said it was a look.

The bar is long and low, 48.5 inches wide, and either sits under a television or hangs on a wall. The subwoofer is a separate box that talks to the bar wirelessly, so there is no cable to run across the carpet between them. Tamsin called this decent of it.

Then the living room began making a noise. On certain low notes, something rattled: a small, dry, rude sound. It stopped whenever Mags walked toward the bookshelf and resumed the moment she sat down, like a pupil who has heard the principal's shoes.

"This bar goes down to 20 hertz," Tamsin said, looking at the ceiling. "Bass finds whatever is loose, and it finds it fast. Whatever that is, it's about to get a lot easier to hear."

Mags said she had lived in the house for eleven years and had never been rattled in it. Tamsin said that was the problem with quiet.

The Caucus Objects to a Word

Word of the delivery reached the Cat-Owners' Caucus before Tamsin had finished unpacking.

The Cat-Owners' Caucus, whose members hold that sharing a home with a cat is the highest station a human life can reach, convened an emergency session in the Delacroix-Burke hallway to object to the word "subwoofer" on the grounds that it contains "woof," and every cat in attendance slept through the ruling.

Admiral Biscuit chaired from the arm of a chair, eyes shut, which the secretary recorded as presiding. The motion carried four to nothing, each cat abstaining by being unconscious. The Caucus proposed "sub-purr" as a replacement and asked that the minutes note the chair's silence as agreement. Tamsin said the box would keep the name printed on it. The Caucus declared this a compromise and adjourned, which it did by not waking up.

Bass finds whatever is loose, and it finds it fast.

Brenda Takes the Long Way

Tamsin wanted to run the bar's room calibration that evening. SpaceFit Sound Pro uses sensors built into the bar to listen to the room and adjust the sound to suit it, bass included, which saved her from carrying a tape measure around Mags's furniture.

Gus Ferreira said he could build that. Asked what, he said the room. Nobody had the heart to ask which one.

Then Brenda appeared. Brenda, the lane's domesticated bear, walked the full length of the curb and back without stopping, which the crowd at the mailboxes read as the sign of a long evening, and Mags moved the first screening to the next morning on the strength of it.

Doris remarked that the same walk had once come before a long evening and a casserole. Gus said the weather service had worse instruments. Nobody on the lane has ever asked Brenda for comment, on the grounds that she has never been wrong in public.

So the calibration ran in the quiet, and by morning the bar had made up its mind about the room.

The Culprit Sits on the Bookshelf

Mags put on a film. The bar has two up-firing channels, aimed at the ceiling, and it was running Dolby Atmos without an HDMI cable, which it can do. When it rained in the film, the rain came from above her head. When a character whispered, Mags heard the words.

"They said that?" she asked. Tamsin said yes, they usually do.

Then the rattle returned, bigger and ruder than before. Tamsin followed it to the bookshelf, lifted the Maple Lane Participation Trophy, and found a small metal lid, loose for years, buzzing against the rim. She wedged a folded index card under it. The room went quiet, except for the film.

Mags asked ORACLE to log the repair. ORACLE, asked only to log the repair, produced a nineteen-part formal report titled "Observations on the Index Card," with appendices, which established that index cards were invented by a Portuguese admiral in a bathtub. Doris, a retired reference librarian, read the first page and put it down with great care, the way one sets down something that might still go off.

What the Bar Won't Do

Tamsin then went through the limits, because she believes in the manual. Q-Symphony lets the bar team up with a compatible Samsung TV and up to five other Samsung audio devices. Mags's television is not that kind of television, so the feature stays on the shelf. The bar also runs on a cord and is not waterproof, so it belongs in the living room and not at the lake.

The bar has Alexa built in, plus Google Cast and AirPlay 2 for people who like to talk to their living rooms. Mags said the lane already had a colleague for that and she did not want to cause friction.

That night she watched an entire film with the captions off. Afterward she switched them back on, for company. At the quietest moment of the credits they read [silence], and Mags said it was the first line all week that the captions and her ears agreed on.