Termites prefer hard wood?

In the Oct 2008 edition of Hifi World, there was a mention of us as Noel Keywood visited our room during the recent KL International AV 2008 show.

Hey! It’s nice to see our mug shots there! I believe this lends this mag a bit more of a “GQ” appeal?

I thought of hanging around the newsstand and autographing buyers of the mag… Narcissus would have been proud!

Err, humbly allow me to point out 2 problems though.

Noel got our domain name wrong. It’s diyparadise.com, not diyparadise.com.my. When I first started the site, I never thought of restricting to a .my domain name. I was thinking who knows where will I be based in the future? Anyway, this is a minor gripe.

Noel remarked that he was worried whether termites will attack our speakers since we build with tropical hard wood here. He mentioned he saw some termite attacks at some hotel lobby in this country.

Hmm… Termites attacking our speakers? Being curious, I went all out to catch a few termites. Phew! Tok me some effort here! And finally caught some of these dirt burrowing insects. There was this piece of rotten wood on the ground and if you kick it, it’ll come apart due to the extreme efforts of these little gremlins.

I started my interview. There was a worker, a soldier and one fat looking ‘”queen” I believe.

I asked them, what’s their favourite food? Why, it’s wood of course!

Dang, have to be more specific. So given a choice of solid wood, fiberboard and chipboard, which would you prefer?

In order of preference, it’s chipboard and fiberboard first, then solid wood.

Huh? Why so? Why not go for solid wood first? Well, apparently solid wood is “denser”, “tougher to chew” while fiberboard and chipboard, being man made and processed, it’s a lot easier to their mandibles.

Among solid wood, then their preference is of course the softer variety, followed by the medium and they totally dislike hard wood.

Hey! So this means that our speakers, being constructed of a mixture of medium hard and hard wood will be a turn off to them!

And speakers constructed of fiberboard and chipboard are favourites of termites!

Which points to roughly 99.99% of speakers made in the world! Chances are the speakers that’s playing in your room now is most likely made of Medium Density Fiberboard (termite food!). Don’t let the veneer fool you ok? It’s still not solid wood.

Phew! Am I glad to hear that! So happily I released them termites.

If they said they prefer solid wood, I would most certainly squash them…

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