sound4.txt See the whole Newsonic Story at: http://planetparticles.com/newsonic.htm DRUMBALLIA Rythms that soften the world. Clear light surrounds the sounds the sounds surround clear light in more than a universe, heard in rythms that are the fundamental fabrics of Creation. THREE WAY MONO-IN-STEREO ASSEMBLY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update August 26, 1992, 10:30 PM. It looks like a current round of experiments may be coming to a conclusion. I have a sound that I like, and a means of getting it with no muss or puzzling or long wastes of time to set it up. At the moment the large upstairs room in the new digs on the far east side of town (Orleans) is being used as a work room, a small time sound studio. Up there at the moment is a setup using four speakers to make one demonstration, and a single speaker to make another. This computer at which I am typing is downstairs in the dining room off the kitchen, my new environment for the computer. Here is the rundown. The front plates of the Fisher 8400 Getto Blaster's speakers have been taken off the boxes, so that now the two speaker enclosures per se are two hollow empty shells sitting on the floor in the hallway with screws rolling around in each of them. It turns out that the whole of the sound part of each enclosure comes off as a self contained unit, a faceplate which includes the grills and wires, with the three speakers per enclosure all wired in by one set of leads, with the 1 inch tweeter having a resister wired in its circuit, and the leads continuing from it to the tiny 1/2 inch tweeter (a metal wafer exciter). I unsoldered the leads to the two smallest tweeters, so that now only the one 4 1/4 inch main tweeter of each faceplate is working, made by Sony, used in the Fisher 8400 Getto Blaster. What is in use now are the two faceplates, about 1 1/2 inches thick, with what was a moulded plastic built-in airflow tube now sticking out about 5 inches from one corner of each faceplate. The idea of opening the enclosures occurred because in first setting up in the upstairs room, one of the enclosures took a tumble and hit the floor bouncing on the carpet, the second time for this box, the first time was a few months earlier, the thing konking against the hardwork floor in the low rental condo when the experimental array consisting of both boxes strapped together end to end and hanging suspended in air by twine from a raised flimsy homemade mike stand took a nosedive when someone's foot caught some speaker leads in walking through the room. These things happen. As a result, when I was repositioning the tumbled speaker box in the upstairs room in the new digs, I felt a slight cool blast of air on my hand, and in double checking, saw that there was a small slit opened up in the top of the box where the two parts of the box join together. I checked this air slit out by covering it with tape, and deemed that the sound was better with the air slit exposed. So an idea immediately in mind was to make a slit in the other box. The problem was that these enclosures were screwed together from the back with bore holes about six inches deep to get to the screws, needing a trip to the Canadian Tire Store to get a long shafted philips head screw driver to get the enclosures apart. Once the backs were off and the faceplates carted upstairs to be hooked up, the sound test took only about 1/10th of a second. There was no question that the speakers sounded better with the small cavernous shell backs off, when used in the sonic resonating environment of my tests. In describing the situation in more detail, the whole front end of each enclosure came off as a self contained piece with three tweeters screwed and wired in place with the grills in front. There was nothing in the back, the rest of the enclosure was simply a big empty shell. And so what I now have are two front pieces which I have come to call 'faceplates'. Tests in the use of these are as follows: I first tried them laying upright facing the ceiling each on a round stand which originally came into the picture eight years ago as rolls of copper wire of 18 and 16 quage. These empty coils actually work really well as temporary stands. Then after a couple of hours I tried standing each faceplate vertically upright on the table, in different rotations, i.e. three of the four edges of each faceplate could support itself standing upright. In one test the notorious turbo roar tape, (an el cheapo GOLDEN FILM THEMES 2 with famous movie themes including James Bond theme songs and Jesus Christ Superstar), came back into life for the first time in several months, with enouph raw distortion to cause the Right hand faceplate standing upright on edge to rotate slowly and eerily by nearly a complete circle. Not very good for sure. The only thing slowing down the speed of the rotation were the speaker leads, these were getting dragged up onto the table as the faceplate slowly rotated. I should mention that at this point, everything being done is in 100% Mono. Eventually after several hours I learned that the faceplates performed better with their faces to the wall, with the backs facing out so you can see the tweeters and wires etc. At the same time I made suspenders from pieces of a long thin round stake (the kind used for plant stakes in the garden), each piece about 15 inches long and pencil thick, stuck vertically into holes in the empty copper coil stands (these look like the large round solid wood cable coils used by telephone companies and rustic or new ager types sometimes use for coffee tables, except the one's I'm using from copper wire are miniature, about 6 inches across and standing 4 inches high and can be got at any company that re-winds electric motors). With the thin sticks jambed vertically in place I have simply hung each speaker faceplate from a corner of its shell, so that it hangs dangling loosely in the air. In this latest round of tests one of the variables I finally came to believe is that the best all around fidelity comes from having things loose, rather that pinned down or weighted or gripped solidly. Solid gripping can impart a more solid sound to things, but the loose airy spacy more authentic echoing quality in the reproduction is dampened if there is any grip or solidness so that things sound compressed in comparision, even though you might not know the compression is there until you can actually hear the difference, and it is a substantial quality to pay attention too. All enclosed speakers no matter the make or price, have that compression, for example. So, to continue the description. THE NEW EQUALATERAL TRIANGLE ----------------------------------------------------------------- The two suspended faceplates are on a long table, sitting about 6 feet 4 inches apart, and about 27 inches out from the wall. Both are turned (their backside face showing) to focus toward the APEX point of an EQUALATERAL triangle. The triangle aspect is a major ingredient which came into the picture most suddenly via a late night encounter with an image of an equalateral triangular configuration projected into my consciousness, just before I fell asleep. The next day the equalateral configuration was tried with instant obvious improved results, a big kick in sonics coming into the picture in a groundswell the instant I was finally able to ease an open air speaker into the exact position comprising the true apex of the equalateral triangle. At this moment there is a modified configuration, as follows: A large 12 inch woofer is sitting on the floor on front of the apex, in the open air, tilted at roughly a 30 degree angle facing straight ahead to the wall, and about two feet behind it is another speaker, also tilted by 30 degrees and facing frontward to the wall, sitting on the floor. This fourth is a very cheap car stereo speaker, oval shaped, about 5 inches by 8 inches, with paper cone so fragile it can be damaged by a fingernail. Both are sitting there as temporary non-passive radiators kicking the sound stream, and both have a major influence on bass notes. That is, both are wired in hooked up to the Left hand channel, as is the Right hand faceplate speaker, in other words the entire system at this moment is running in 100% Mono off the Left hand channel. The oval speaker in particular can be a good indicator of how much bass is being incurred into the resonating structures of the sound stream due to the fact that the whole of this oval speaker vibrates mightily as if a mechanically driven machine, when held in the hand, and so can be used to tell you that 50 to 100 cycle bass sonics are there with great force even with the 12 inch woofer shut off so that the entire sound stream is being generated by just two 4 1/2 inch tweeters of the faceplates plus the oval car stereo speaker, all resonating in the open air without enclosures. A second oval car stereo speaker, very expensive this one which someone gave me nearly a year ago, with chrome faceplate guards and three very high tech looking tweeters inside, performs when hooked up as an open air resonator, exactly as you would expect, worthlessly, an almost mind numbing highly amplified shrieking, with utterly no bass, no sonics whatever, just high pitched raw horking noise dominating the whole sound stream. This is a speaker which looks good but sounds awful. But I can image it going by in cars with tatooed cocain dealers the car itself a mobile rock concert which can be heard pumping with ground shaking bass thuds for up to half a mile away, the driver's silly grin due to the fact that the brains are fried beyond bliss and are functioning on naked ego. The oval car stereo speaker which works so well on the other hand, looks awful, really awful, like I say, the paper cone material is almost as flimsy as toilet paper, but it sure works in a very satisfying way in open air resonances through the full sound range down to the bottom-most bass notes. It resonates so powerfully in bass vibrations you can't quell its mechanical motion by holding it as tight as possible in your hand, your hand vibratates with great vigor, ergo. But only when it is focused precisely in the right direction, and at the right 30 degree angle in the sound stream, otherwise it does not work very well (the bass vibes are very weak for instance when pointed straight ahead or straight up). I have made a point of discussing this at length because so much is being told simply by the fact that it resonates so strongly in the open air, when focused correctly into the sound stream, even when sitting on the floor. There are many principles at work in this. So now the sound stream itself in the upstairs room is verrrry interesting. How it came about is worth telling a story. Three days before, a provincial goverment mininstry computer supervisor came by to see our new anti-virus software with its creative user interface called 'Virus Alert', etc. And while here at the house I hurried him upstairs for a MONO in STEREO demonstration, featuring the Glen Millar pirate factory tape. In case I never mentioned it, this tape is so bad that some of its 8 cuts were actually lifted from scratchy old 78's and you can hear the pops and crackles worn by needle as plain as day, got it for a couple of bucks duly packaged as an offical typical cassette tape from the discount bin of a record store chain. Anyway, I had fussed and fumed with a quick series of tests that very day when first setting up upstairs in the big room. There was only one getto blaster box working, this was the full enclosure box at this time, the Left hand channel. The Right hand box was sitting idle. I had not yet removed the shells to create faceplates. The 12 inch woofer and oval car stereo speaker had not yet been tried. This so far was strictly the Fisher 8400 getto blaster by itself, and room sonics. Also, the idea of the equalateral triangle in the matrix had not yet made its way foward into light in my mind. I had tuned the room with several single snowflakes and a few sonic manners in the devices called flow channels and a couple of super giant snowflakes also. Only the Left hand speaker box was hooked up to be working. At this point this was the best yet demo of Mono in Stereo featuring the Glen Miller tape, with the computer supervisor from the Provincial Ministry listening. Then I switched to a movie theme tape, and to hammer the point home, (proclaiming 'to make it clear that this demo is in 100% mono'), as I put on the legit stereo tape, then reached down and clipped together the speaker leads for the other box, proclaiming 'THIS! is what the system sounds like in FULL STEREO!'. The fello yelped at the sudden jump in sound volume and the way it most instantly filled the greater room, etc., etc., etc. To make a long story short, away the fello went uttering things like 'amazing', etc. And for 55 minutes (it was pushing 10 PM.) I did things like walk around, and make coffee, and plunk in front of the TV, mulling, wondering what it was that was bothering me so persistently about that 100% stereo comparision. And then suddenly I had it, I saw as if in a motion picture replay my hands reaching down, and clipping into the ciruit (using alligator clips) the Right hand speaker into the circuit, and realized that at that moment I had actually clipped the RIGHT hand speaker LEADS to the leads of the LEFT hand speaker box, instead of the Right hand speaker leads. Why the mistake occurred is because I had started to play with the Sony 1 inch wafer-thin tweeter, plus other little hand held tweeters, none of which led to anything at all, but which had resulted in a collection of wires clumped together on the floor hooked together with alligator clips, instead of simple single leads coming from the getto blaster. And there I saw my mistake in hookup in minds eye while plunked in front of the TV, mulling the situation. I saw the Right hand speaker leads get clipped to the leads of the Left hand speaker, and an enormous jump in the sonic sounds in the room instantly resulting. Oh ho. Oh ho. Yes. Mmmhmm. Oh ho. Oh yes for sure. Immediately I went upstairs and tried it out. Sure enough the big kick (bigger than anything I had ever heard before in the Mono experiments) had come from the two speaker boxes (Left and Right) working off the same set of leads (Left hand only), from the getto blaster. It was a 100% mono sound source. An odd thing was learned right away. When coupled together the two speakers could start to roar in a steady noise rasping away at the 60 cycle rate of the wall socket but the roar would fade and by co-incidence at the moment I had made the mistaken hookup the two speakers were working together at such an absolutely critical point of mutual focus that there was no roar, but the moment I touched one of the enclosure boxes, in came the 60 cycle roar and an hour long saga trying to deal with it. Eventually I got it so that the roar was gone when the speakers were working playing music and would come back in during a few seconds of pause between passages in the music. But with very deft room tuning I got things stablized so that the roar didn't occur, or rather hardly did. But I got used to it realizing it was not going to blow the speakers apart even though the loud roar when it came in was at a constant volume despite any volume at which the speakers themselves were playing. And then two more steps occured. The roar completely vanished when I shut OFF the Dynamic Bass Expander. And the Surround Sound turned really shitty when turned ON when two speakers where playing together over one channel in MONO to produce a MONO in STEREO effect according to the way I had things set up in the room. Later that evening I patched in a third speaker (the 12 inch woofer) for the first time to see what might happen and heard some improvement in the whole sonic range of the sound stream, expecially the bass, not so much a big boost in volume but rather a jump in quality, by placing it some distance away from the table, sitting on the floor facing straight up, because there it definately kick assed the bass range. And then in fooling around, coupled in the cheap oval car speaker with it sitting further back on the floor leaning against the leg of a long table which runs along the other wall. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. August 26, 1992, 10:30 PM. At this point it was the best yet MONO in STEREO, even had back after only a bit of fiddling the famous pulsing breathing HANG of the Glen Miller orchestra, which I had last heard in late March and early April after hours of fiddling to get the HANG into the sound stream, only back then, the fidelity of the music was a howling mess, so to speak, and much of the alluded stereophonics was gained by baffling all of the cupboard doors in the kitchen sometimes, whereas now, there was much better fidelity, and not a single baffle anywhere in the setup. Furthermore, this time the HANG couldn't be more %100 pure Mono because all of the sound was being generated from the Left channel only, whereas months before it was coming from both channels, although that shouldn't really make a difference. What was so different now is that the HANG was being rejuvinated into the sound stream by hyping up the strong bass resonances stereophonically WITHOUT the use of the Dynamic Bass Expander of the getto blaster. See. Progress. But this turned out to be only the start of things. It was that night, in going to sleep, that I saw the image of an equalateral triangle array project into my consciousness, so of course tried it the very first thing the next day, and it worked. With a long tape measure I measured the distance between the two speaker enclosures, (the two getto blaster boxes at this point sitting on two of the copper wire coil cores for stands), and carefully measured the distance out to the apex of an equalateral triangle and lacking anything else I could use for a stand sat the 12 inch woofer on the top of a simple household step ladder, the kind you use in the kitchen and which as three steps. Instantly there was much more music in the room, heard swelling into sonic view at the precise moment the 12 inch woofer was finally placed into the correct triangular apex, after much adjusting and re-measuring with the tape measure to find the exact apex, with, now, for the very first time, obvious wide spread East/West separation in the music which I could now suddenly easily get into the Mono sourced sound stream simply by standing between the two speakers on the table and playing around with a snowflake flow tube behind each speaker until I could hear separate sounds coming independantly from each speaker to my left and right, this EASE coming into effect AFTER getting the third sound source resonator (the 12 inch open air woofer) into the apex position of the equalateral triangle. And then finding that the aforementioned 8 by 5 inch oval car stereo speaker also added ingredients worth paying attention to into the sound stream, when hooked in as an open air resonator, even when lying on the floor. I was able to proceed very quickly through a number of quick tests to find more optimal locations for sonic tuning devices in the room, in fact sweeping away and putting into a box the half dozen or so single sonic snowflakes, and retiring three of the snowflake flow channel devices, leaving a rather simplified but geometrically articulate array doing a much bigger job with far more easily controllable results. The main thing is that for the first time I can get wide spread East/West separation into a Mono sound stream with hardly any fuss, whereas before, it took very tedious listening and up to three hours or more of fussing and fuming to get more than a modicum of East/West separation, which was always unstable, could disappear within moments. But not now. When East/West separation is there it stays put in the sound image, and is ovbiously there. As you can now tell, quite a few experiments were tried in the long stretch of days between the last update of July 30, 1992, and this one. FULL RIGHT ANGLE PROJECTIONS OF A SONIC IMAGE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. August 26, 1992, 10:30 PM. Which brings us to today. And to where I first mentioned at the start of this Update that two demonstrations are now in place in the upstairs room. They are as follows: We come back to the little 1 1/2 inch Sony square wafer-thin tweeter made of thin transparent plastic mylar which I have discussed at length in many previous experiments through last winter up to the end of April, and further above in these updates. As of yesterday afternoon it was officially retired, but not for long. Whereas in previous experiments, with very tedious fiddling and nicky dork dexterities it was possible to use the wafer to induce more sonic presence into Mono in Stereo tests, now it was clear that the little thing was a distinct spoiler no matter how I used it, in light of the new setup with the equalateral triangle configuration, and four speakers all hooked up in series to the Left hand channel of the getto blaster. And then yesterday and last night I had 24 hours to myself, with twin brother gone out of town on our software business, so took the opportunity to go on a round-the-clock marathon starting from twelve noon till 6:30 AM the next day (this morning), non-stop, the first time in over four months that I had opportunity for a marathon with everything I needed to work with right at hand and not in storage. Out of this marathon session came the two hanging open air getto blaster speakers, the boxes discarded, the faceplates dangling from pieces of thin and springy wooden garden stakes bent slightly under the weight of the faceplates dangled from them, the faceplates focused to the apex of the equalateral triangle. An ornimental mobile about 6 inches across consisting of three hexagram rings which open up into a mobile with a snowflake-like fourth piece in the middle, stamped from a sheet of holographic shimmering cardboard and sold for $7.00 in the local supermall as a supposed christmas orniment, is more than enough to demonstrate my earlier remarks from a month or so ago that a simple hexagram based mobile should be more than enough to sonically boost any room or sound source. Sure enough, this crude mobile very handily boosts the overall pure high fidelity of the sound stream when placed in a suitable hot spot. The mobile is currently mounted on a home made extendable microphone stand, with stiff copper wire wrapped around the top of the stand's shaft and an alligator clip shafted onto the top of the wire so that it is holding the mobile in an upright position and the whole thing is raised so that the mobile is up in the air to about shoulder height at 4 1/2 feet and at the moment is sitting back about 4 feet behind the apex of the equalateral triangle which itself is a configuration about 6 feet to a side. The reason why the mobile is sitting back there is because in this position it is also interacting with three sonic devices at the back of the room on a temporary small table consisting of a fragment piece of mahogany panelling supported by two tomato boxes from the local supermarket to create a small table, with the three devices set in a straight line along an axis pointing straight through the apex of the triangle to the center between the two dangling faceplates up front on the big table. The three devices in a straight line at the back of the room are a flow tube, two paper Stars of David held upright by alligator clips in an electronnic stand (the kind you get at Radio Shack which has two adjustable alligator clips on a bar), and behind that the 'ferris wheel', (which consists of six giant snowflakes arrayed around a hexagonal wire frame with thin jewellry grade brass wire wrapped around the outer circumpherence through the centers of the snowflakes so that there are six wires strung around in hexagonal loops, creating a device which in fact looks a lot like a ferris wheel. At this point the 'ferris wheel' has been found to work better when focused face-on rather than edge-on, toward the direction of the sound source. It turns out, as mentioned in prior Updates, that this device (called 'the ferris wheel') when properly placed in a hot spot (node) in a room, enhances the air frame, or open air quality of the sound stream. To finish off the current array upstairs in the room, two of the flow tubes are positioned behind each of the dangling faceplates, positioned more to run in a straight line targeting the flow tube, the faceplate, and the raised mobile on a stand, but also twist tuned to end up turned to focus more directly to the apex of the equalateral triangle (closest point), in experimental variations. A remark my brother made the day before yesterday, to the effect that getting ANY bass response from an essentially open air configuration with (at that time) only the oval cheap car radio speaker patched in as a bass booster for the two getto blaster speaker boxes with all three sound sources coupled in series off the Left hand speaker lead from the getto blaster, was an interesting effect due to the fact of the industry's tendency to think in terms of bigger, or more powerful, drivers in much more high tech modern enclosure devices with electronnic engineering to get more bass, whereas I was getting much more bass simply by hooking up this simple oval car radio speaker into a MONO setup and placing it at the apex of an equalateral triangle. With this in mind I started thinking of the 1 1/2 inch wafer-thin tweeter now lying discarded in a tray of clutter somewhere in the upstairs room. At this point it was about 2 AM last night. I found the wafer and started to play around with it. By six AM I was starting to think I may as well go the distance and stay up till seven AM to catch the morning news at 7 AM on hurricane Andrew bearing in on the Louisianna coast. But by 6:30 AM I was done in and had finished setting up a demo which has so far had the following effect: but first, a last minute update on the array as it currently exists in the room. The 1 1/2 inch wafer tweeter is being held vertically upright in the air by an alligator clip shafted on the end of a piece of stiff copper wire which is being held by a small vice sitting on top of the 3-step kitchen utility ladder and centered right at the apex of the equalateral triangle relative to the two faceplates which are now dangling in free spring-like suspension from the 15 inch thin round garden stakes, the backsides of the faceplates facing out and focused to the apex of the equalateral triangle. The 12 inch woofer is sitting on the floor in front of the ladder, tilted forward at rouphly 30 degrees and set to face straight ahead to focus midway between the two dangling faceplates. At about the same distance behind the stepladder and also on the floor is the cheap oval car stereo speaker, also tilted up at a 30 degree angle and also facing forward. The consul for the getto blaster itself is between the dangling faceplates, in the middle of the table and sitting back against the wall on a small shelf. And on top of it, sitting on top of the cover for the CD player, is a flow tube placed lengthwise running parallel in a line between the two dangling faceplates. Centered on the table in front of the consul is a hexagram and Star Of David figure which was the original paper template used to form the hexagonal frame for the 'ferris wheel', and which was then cut out with an Exacto knife to yield a hexagram prototype for a mobile. An intrinsic Star of David was cut from the center portion and is one of the paper Stars being used (as already described) on the makeshift table at the back of the room. And so, I crashed, at 6:30 AM, couldn't hang tough for another half hour to hear the morning news about the hurricane. I woke at eleven-thirty AM with the phone ringing. It was a telephone lineman cluing up to come in in a half hour to hook up a business phone, now that we have progressed past the cornflake sandwiches no-budget stage in our antivirus software business. In came the lineman at noon, did the thing, drilling the appropriate hole in the baseboard for a telephone extension line, etc., then mentioned that he had done three years in electronics and sound featuring quite a bit of research in using devices to locate 'nodes' ie. hot spots in a room, and trying to single down sound to one point in a room, and trying to single down sound to a single frequency, just about the entire opposite directions of my entire sound tests. But that is beside the point. The point is that up the stairs went we me saying that despite the weak weedy sound he would hear he would have to appreciate the kind of experiment he would be hearing, and that the sound source was a pirate factory version of Glen Miller circa 1938-42 with some of the cuts literally lifted from scratchy old 78's. With these restrictions in mind, the intent of the test was for him to tell where the sound source in the room was coming from. First stage of the demo was for him to stand at the doorway listening. After about half a minute he said it seems to be coming from over there, pointing to the 'left' to a faceplate dangling from its stake on the table. I said okay, go further into the room. Again he stopped and listened for about a minute and then said something to the effect that obviously it was coming from over 'there' pointing in the oposite direction to the rear wall at the back of the room, and over to the far corner. Ahah thought I, the demo is working, right on schedule. What in fact could be heard was explicit pure and perfect LATERAL sound projection, in the first instance (at the door) the sound seeming to come from roughly the dangling speaker to the left against the North wall, and then a few steps further into the room sound could also be heard coming from entirely the opposite direction also, from the area back against the wall to the South, with also sound seeming to come from the far rear corner. This explicitely demonstrates long distance sonic projections, in this case to more than one giant sound image area at the same time, the two main images separated wide apart by nearly 20 feet, with nothing in between. Then he walked into the room first over to the dangling faceplates then over toward the south end of the room and finally sniffed his way gradually back to end up standing right over the little 1 1/2 inch wafer sitting upright in an alligator clip on top of the ladder. And looking right down at it finally he said, well, this must be it. So then I let on the secret that yes that tiny little thing was producing everything he could hear, and to make the point, went over and clipped in the Left hand dangling faceplate. There was an enormous jump in the sound volume and a big range appeared, including strong base and stereo presence. Then I clipped in the Right hand dangling faceplate, and the sound volume more than doubled, and then the 12 inch woofer on the floor, and finally the oval car speaker also on the floor. Whereupon the room was of course now filled with a very loud body of sound comprising the Glen Miller orchestra resonating away, all 100% mono in sound source since the tape was mono as was the single channel input via wires hooked in series for all of the speakers from only the left channel of the getto blaster. Whereupon the fello commented to the effect that it was a very impressive stereo demonstration, to which I asked was he satisfied that it was in fact stereo and yes, there was no question about the fact that it was stereo. The fact that it was not a modern stereo band playing Glen Miller music was not in his mind. He was firmly assertive that it was stereo. So I filled him in on the secret of the second part of the demo, that it was in fact 100% MONO, making the point by going over and holding up the right hand speaker leads from the consul and then dropping them again to let them hang over the edge of the table, the useless exposed ends of the leads with bare wires trailing onto the carpet floor. In the meantime my twin brother had just arrived home from the overnight business trip, so after an hour had passed, with he and the telelphone lineman first discussing the last of the telephone business who then departed, and my brother completing his collection of phone messages and calls, I coaxed him upstairs to run the same demo as which had just been done an hour earlier with the telephone lineman. My twin brother handled it a slightly different way. Pausing at the door, he first muttered that it was actually not a very impressive sound demonstration per se in that the sound was very thin and weedy. But said I, wait till you find out what is actually going on. He then sniffed his way slowly into the room, looking to the left, to the right, back to the front of the room, to the rear of the room, came to a stop in the vacinity of the apex of the equalateral triangle, and after about 30 seconds of careful listening announced in a loud voice that obviously 'THIS' is one of them (pointing to the oval car radio speaker on the floor, and then pointing to the 12 inch woofer said 'this too I guess', still sniffing around carefully. I said no the entirety is coming from the little 1 1/2 inch wafer. It was sticking up in the air in the little vice on top of the ladder, right under his nose and he couldn't tell. The first pursuent remark of my brother was that the thing was producing at least three times its range and volume. Actually it was a lot more than three times, because held in the air entirely on its own in a normal room the thing produces only a pissing weak hiss, with the mechanics of any music's structure just barely discernable as tiny ticks, at a barely discernable volume even with the gain cranked up high. In the demo up in the room at this moment you can hear everything in the music, including the words of a vocalist, and drum set cymbols, and in certain places in the room you can hear the bass patterns at work even though they are so weak as to be at times sublimal and of course at this point there is no possibility of bottom bass with the thin little wafer working just by itself. The thing is it took nearly three hours (from the moment I got the idea for a demo) to overcome a problem that almost crippled the whole idea. And that was that sitting upright working on its own the little wafer cracked and popped in total fracturing instead of responding to strong sound strikes in any music when playing at any volume loud enough to cause sonic projection to take place in the room. It was finally found that not on the floor was a partial answer, the thing mounted upright in the vice was origanlly set on the floor behind the kitchen ladder. The next solution in getting stability into its sound stream was to set the thing on top of the ladder, and then fuss and fume with the thin speaker lead wires from it attached to alligator clips from the main speaker leads until they ended up spread as wide apart as possible coming off the 1 inch wafer and dangling over the sides of the vice and the ladder, and that all wires lying around the room (or dangling) needed very discrete adjustments (in fact just a nudge with the big toe usually sufficed) to get rid of more of the pops and fracturing, and at times constant rattling, sounding like it had been blown. And finally some very discrete adjustments of the various sonic devices in the room eventually stablized the wafer's open air resonances to such an extent that it fooled the telephone lineman at first, who finally closed in on the sound source, (a fellow who had never played with open air resonating speakers before), and my brother (who has played with open air resonances before), such that (if not concidering the sonic projection aspects) the kind of sound my twin brother was hearing was just about exactly like what a 12 inch woofer would sound like attached to a stereo set and held up in the hand in the open air in a room, weak, weak, but definately discernable, which is why he assumed in thinking that I had at least two speakers going (the 12 inch woofer, and the oval car stereo speaker). The point being that the actual source of the sonics in the room was like silly putty. Even standing close to the wafer you could not tell if it was the source, because sonically the sound could shift position, for instance to the front, or back, or both sides of the room or into a corner, or all three at once, just by moving the body a bit. Which indicated to my twin brother the greater possibility of several sound stream generator sources, an easier to handle idea than the single little wafer doing ALL of the work, aided by my sonic devices acting as sonic projectors causing long distance resurrancings of the sound image. Like I said, at times two main similar sound images could be heard simultaneously but separated at both ends of the long part of the L-shaped room, a distance of almost 20 feet. After remarks quickly passed back and forth in typical twin brother language, I hooked up the four speakers as before when the lineman was listening, and let my brother hear the full stereophonic demo with the system as before playing in 100% Mono. This time there was no trouble in my twin brother's mind as to the fuller integrety of the sound quality, especially since he was well aware of the fierce fidelity problems with the Glen Miller Mono tape otherwise, which were now not apparent, a whole range of inferior qualities in the music having been filtered out or cancelled by the sonically inducing environment of the room, etc., etc., with a wide spread East/West sound image obviously present, enough that for the first time my twin brother never remarked on any missing wide spread image in the stereo sound picture being created up there from 100% mono sources. Like I have been saying, given time, I think it is possible to reproduce the Glen Miller orchestra and other major earlier bands in full stereo presence as if performing live in a concert hall, the rejuvination of such orchestras originally recorded only in Mono, replayed anew taking place in a concert hall, using (fractal) sonic hexagonal geometric matrix techniques. In the last day, last night, at times, in hooking in the Right hand faceplate in full stereo to hear the difference, the ahem stereo would actually COLLAPSE into a more traditional sounding stereo sound system. In plain fact the MONO in STEREO sounded better. This was true in any of my tapes plus the AM or FM radio, at times any such source sounding better stereophonically via a 100% Mono sound source. Now this is getting interesting. One of the things is that I can now freely play with the transient cross harmonic reflections for sound sources originally recorded in full stereo, at times separating this part of the music into a separate background sound playing by itself completely out of synch with the main foreground sound authentically comprising for instance the Left hand channel. I can tell the difference, because the weaker sound cross-over from the authentic Right hand channel as picked up by the mikes of the other channel has a weak almost warbling tin-flute-like reedy sonics to it, until I play a bit with focusing and tuning a bit more and suddenly get the two sound streams to gell again and get better stereo from the 100% mono source, for instance entirely from the Left hand channel. In a last comment, is some philosophy to consider. For instance, what could I expect if I set up such a demo (as the one in the upstairs room), in, for instance, a court room, to claim principle. Well, perhaps, not very much, as pointed out by my twin brother, concidering the types who could be in a courtroom, judging. To their eyes and ears nothing special might be in fact ocurring. They could in fact easily think that the tiny 1 1/2 inch wafer tweeter resonating in such a sonically incredible way is not a miracle, to them it might just be another new high tech device designed to power a getto blaster at a rock concert, they would have no way of knowing. The only way they could know anything definative is by extensive forensic laboratory testing reports with this specialist and that famous authority saying yes and no, to my benefit, or detriment, depending entirely on their preconcieved beliefs, levels of inherent intelligence, and favor or disfavor toward bribes paid by the greatest convincing liers, which leaves me out of the arguement since I cannot, by fundamental most heart felt conscience, lie. You can see the picture of the courtroom circus, me giving the best demo ever yet achieved, and the authorities in the court not having the slightest idea of what has happened, and liers and specialists getting into the fray taking over the whole consiouness of the picture from that point onward and me being on the dangerous borderline of being branded a hysteric or paranoic or worse needing immediate pychiatric attention, until I can do what it takes to prove myself innocent, with my own battery of specialists and authorities producing the other side to the picture, yes, new theories in accoustics in this stuff for sure, certainly new concepts in stereophonic sound no one has ever thought of before. But what's the point of me going through all of that - a kind of meat grinder just to think about it. I have no intention of having to beat the drum vigorously in a court room to prove my right to creative intelligence. And figure that by the time it might ever come to a court case by rascally claim jumpers I will likely be well involved in some other new and different project. Such is life. Peace, Joy, and Happiness. In Divine Order. Greydon Moore Orleans, Ottawa, Ont. August 27, 1992. TWO QUICK EXPERIMENTS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update August 31, 1992 4:45 P.M. In the past three days a couple of things have happened worth nothing, oops, worth noting. The first is a temporary experiment lasting a couple of days that started off interesting but petered out because it would not proceed past a certain point, as follows: One of the odd ball objects lying around in one of the boxes of clutter from the old days (say 8 years ago) is an electrostatic tweeter. This is a small silverized plastic device weighing only a few ounces, with a horn shaped front. This so-called tweeter is about 3 inches across. I spotted it suddenly as if sitting out in the open, even though nested in a box of clutter on the floor of the upstairs room, It was suddenly noticed that this thing was SIX sided. Ohhh, interesting, thought I, picking it up for the first time, thinking. Its importance as a device is that the front though square has six sides going into the oriface of a horn, plus three support rods on the outside in the form of an equalateral array. Ergo, a six sided sonic device to play with. Substituting the electrostatic speaker for the 1 inch thin Sony wafer led to nothing, really. You couldn't hear anything from it until putting the ear real close then you could hear a faint hiss, is all. I tried it for a few hours on the floor behind the step ladder, including tilted upward to point to the underside of the 12 inch woofer sitting facing the ceiling, on top of the ladder. This electrostatic tweeter seemed to offer some juvination into the sound stream, even though its output per se was nothing but faint hiss, I assumed it must be re-enforcing some higher harmonics which were cascading downward to juvinate some lower bass harmonics as well. But could not get beyond a lot of extra high frequency stridency in the sound stream, too bad. I tried mounting it on a shaft, (a rod supported upright in a bigger vice sat on the floor), with stiff copper wire and an alligator clamp holding it so it could be tilted upward by about 30 degrees and be thrust up in the air underneath at the back of and just below the 12 inch woofer (which at this moment was sitting facing upright on the kitchen ladder), focused in a hot spot there, where its electrostatic performance seemed to improve marginally, seemingly by kicking subliminal high and low ranges in the resonances of the woofer, but once again, the improvements did not go beyond a certain point. And then finally, I simply dropped the electrostatic tweeter onto the cone of the 12 inch woofer and walked away and left it to do its thing there, facing forward, bouncing around on the woofer's cone, but not hard, since it was almost weightless. Now... the thing is that the big woofer is sturdy enough that you can put something on its cone and the something will merely bounce around in little hops without fracturing the sound. How about that! When first I dropped it onto the cone and walked away, after a moment it had bounced into a sort of oddball position on the cone giving forth with a sudden major fidelic kick to the sound steam, which immediately caught my attention, but the moment I started to fiddle with it, (trying different positions for the alligator clips for the speaker wires, then the polarity phasing of the wires, and different positions for it on the woofer's cone), nothing of any further importance happened except the big kick vanished and I never did get back that sudden momentary big kick. That was lost the moment I touched the alligator clips attatching the speaker leads to the electrostatic tweeter. Yet once again, something had occurred to draw my attention to a new insight, to wit, that an electrostatic tweeter bouncing around on the cone of a woofer could hit a hot spot in resonances such as to settle in and cause a big kick of major improvement in the sound stream, ergo, such science fiction mechanisms can work as a sonic device entirely as from another planet compared to traditional loud speaker theories of planet Earth. But yet the whole of the device's more interesting output could vanish by something as fragile as changing the way its speaker leads were clipped to the tweeter. In fact it soon came to pass that I could now officially hear rumble from time to time as the thing grumbled bouncing around on the woofer's cone. So finally, I gave up, put the thing back in the box it came from. End of experiment for the time being. But soon got into something else. Playing around with various tilts of the 12 inch woofer on top of the 3-step kitchen ladder, plus tiltings of the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter on the floor in front of, then behind the ladder, led to something new, albeit temporary, involving the Peer Gynt Suit, as follows: I had abandoned the Peer Gynt Suite after the winter, after all those months of trying to coax more fidelity out of it so that it could sail through the closing passage: 'In The Hall Of The Mountain King', without breaking up completely, and when once achieved, I shut the thing off so to speak, tossed the cassette tape back into the box of tapes and never tried it again. This, let me mention, was back in the days of full authentic stereo, and a challenge at that time was simply to make the getto blaster perform more fidelically, top to bottom so it could handle 'In The Hall Of The Mountain King'. Believe me to be sincere when I tell you that the tape is playing now and is far more fidelitic than it has ever been, and is just at this very moment sailing through the final passage: In The Hall Of The Mountain King, with such success that I can hear the floor over my head vibrating from the sonic booms. I happen to be downstairs in the dining room which has been consigned as my computer area and am sitting at the computer keyboard typing in these very comments. The point about the previous paragraph is that the system is running in 100% Mono, at this moment. AN HOUR LATER ----------------------------------------------------------------- But, this is not the end. As soon as another cassette tape was put on, the sound quality vanished. So, I still need to do work to try and figure out a way (or ways) to improve the sound stream, and to stablize the improvements. Because, nothing but noise when playing 'In The Hall Of The Mountain King' ensues now, a few minutes after typing the comments about the sonic booms overhead. Whatever I had done to momentarily stablize the sound stream enough to play that very rough touph symnphonic recording, has been dissolved. THE ELEPHANT AND THE BUTTERFLY WING ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 2, 1992 12:15 A.M. The September issue of Discover Magazine has a brief article on Page 13 entitled 'Of Elephants and Butterflies', concerning an aspect of the modern theory of Chaos, in which a small event can cause a big reaction, for instance (in theory), a beat of a butterfly's wing can have an effect on the weather, in theories of chaos. A beat of a butterfly's wing in Wisconsin can cause a storm in Florida, according to the theory. An example given in the article is of a metallic strand waving in the air under the impulse of a randomly changing magnetic field. A computer was engaged to study the blow by blow instants of the random magnetic field, and its effect on the chaotically flapping magnetic strand, such that eventually extremely small pulses imparted at certain instances in the random magnetic field by the computer could cause the magnetic strand to start oscillating in a stable predictable manner. How does such news effect 'newsound' sonic experiments? It seems that controlling chaos by very small pulses at the right moment, the 'Elephant and Butterfly' aspects of chaos, is very much in demonstration in the experiments as they now exist upstairs in the large room. It is becoming increasingly clear that although the big room upstairs is a good accoustic environment for sound experiments, and the new setup features an equalateral triangle as a fundamental array for the sound stream generators, the sound stream itself (the elephant, no matter how it is generated) is extremely fragile and inherently unstable to outside influences (the single beat of a butterfly's wing). Tuning now is in two steps. The first is as always like before, where a tuning device is carefully moved and positioned and twist tuned by smaller and smaller iotas until better sonic qualities come into the sound stream, with a final element in tuning gained simply by tapping the device ever so lightly, about the same amount of tap you would give with a single wet finger to snuff out a candle flame. This light touch can make or break a greater quality in the resulting sound stream in terms of stereophonic power, volume, and overall high fidelity. You can hear the quality result from the tap, after two or three seconds of wait, until the sonic patterns gell. Significantly here, is that the greatest value in the bass tones and lower bass range can stablize into the sound stream after the merest minor of light touches. Light touches are true for any of the sonic devices, including the flow tubes, the ferris wheel, and the resonating open air tweeter speaker drivers themselves, and the 12 inch woofer. For instance, this afternoon a new milestone was hit. This was in being able to sensitize the sonic room environment to such a height that it (for the first time) was able to handle what is one of the heaviest hard hitting strikes of sound from any of the cassettes tapes I happen to have on hand for research. This is the famous 'turbo roar' tape mentioned many times before, with the James Bond theme 'Diamonds Are Forever' on this cassette tape of dubious quality called 'GOLDEN FILM THEMES 2'. The song starts up fairly low keyed with a female vocalist, and then the whole orchestra hits a powerful chord just before sailing into the main current of the music. This chord is so strong that the getto blaster system has never before been able to handle it, no matter how I have had the system set up or the room tuned by sonic devices. This chord has always generated a collapsed moment in sonic time. Today I got the chord, for the first time, in 100% Mono to boot. The room was tuned and all sonic devices sensitized by light tap touching as described above, and when the chord struck it spread out and resonated soaring forth through the room, hanging in the air, with echoes going outward in all directions. It was quite an effect, to say the least. Then the main part of the music came in with the dubious turbo roar bass, and the sound stream disintigrated into mostly static at loud volume. The importance however was that a new aspect of principle had just been demonstrated, that open air resonating sound sources in the manner of two tweeters on the getto blaster faceplates; (each officially just a little more than 4 inches in diameter) and an oval tweeter 8 by 5 inches in diameter, were capable (as butterfly wings) of effecting a giant chaotic system (the whole room and the house) so that harmony resulted rather than chaos, to wit that the loud sonorous boom of the CHORD was loud enough and pure enough to transport throughout the whole house. This chord included a bang ~HARD~ on a giant tympani miked real close to the tree, er, drum. I mean, this is James Bond stuff and that was a mighty chord, which the system handled, for the first time, confirming principle in a striking way, no pun intended. I was, ahem, pleased enough to shout out loud. "'Yeah!" A real loud unabashed shout, ahem. Mind you, it was that chord the system handled right at that moment, for immediately after came the 'famous' turbo roar on the bass and the system failed to handle it, when the turbo roar bass settled in the system unsettled out, the sound stream broke up into a fracturing rattling attempt at reproduction, the kind of rattling fracturing you get when pressing your finger on the domed small center voice coil cover of a big normal hi fi stereo speaker of an enclosure with the cover off. P.S. The chord was handled with just the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter wired in but without the woofer. More power in the chord was added into the chord with the added input of the woofer wired in, is all, in running through the CHORD again. ROOM RESONANCES CONTAIN THE ENTIRE KEY TO STEREO - THROUGH THE ECHOES ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 4, 1992 3:30 P.M. Okay. Today I am going to report one more Update, then post this description on the BBS computer Bulletin Boards as NEWSONIC.ZIP. Unless something else happens first worth making a report. But, onto the main business. Today I learned something new. Actually, it is something I have suspected before, but was never able to confirm in a definative way until this afternoon. The current setup in the upstairs room consists (as before) of the two 4 inch diameter tweeters still in the faceplates of the original getto blaster speaker boxes, suspended on short garden stakes hence resonating more freely in the open air. In the equalateral triangle apex position is the 12 inch woofer, sitting resonating in the open air, facing up toward the ceiling on top of the 3-step kitchen utility ladder. Directly underneath it so as to be also in the apex position, on the carpeted floor and tilted forward at roughly a 30 degree angle, is the 8 by 5 inch diameter oval tweeter, also resonating in the open air. 'In the open air' means that all sounds these four speakers can possibly generate are via resonances, after the fact, long distance from the generator sources themselves (the speakers), since there are no enclosures, no crossovers, no flat curves responses, no half-wave rebounds, no nothing but inter-harmonic resonances. Especially no equalizers. For twelve months now the four equalizer toggles of the getto blaster have been shoved full bore to the top so all four are operating wide open. The plain fact is that by even a slight diminishment of the highest frequencies equalizer, a drop is immediately heard in the lower frequency bass ranges along with a drop in the higher frequencies. In theory I am supposedly totally destroying the purpose of the equalizers by running all of them flat out, in theory creating a problem that is supposed to confuse the system to an impossible situation, according to audio-stereo buffs and assummed specialists who have sauntered upon my demos from time by time, and have even paused to show me how to set the equalizers properly by reaching forth to change them, only to fall silent as I reach forward shoving all of the equalizers back to the top, to get the sound back. The theory that regeneration of bass waves requires bigger woofers, bigger enclosures, cunningly designed boxes with tubes or other conductive resonators, carefully designed open ports, crafty control of the backwave responses, speaker capacitors, resisters, and/or electronic high tech inner circuits altering the output signals, is all blown to waste due to the fact that both the Surround Sound and the Dynamic Bass Expander contols of the Fisher 8400 model getto blaster are OFF, and I am getting real big bass soars from the three open air resonating tweeters and an open air woofer, an otherwise theoretically impossible setup. In keeping with the claim in the previous paragraph, the bass can be intuned or deteriorated by the merest tapping of one or another of the sonic devices in the room whose construction is of a six-sided fractal nature in the manner of a hexagram and/ or a Star of David. So stable vrs unstable fractal geometric harmonics is the key to bass range resonances, rather than long vrs short longitudinally propigating wavelengths, the bass waves being rejuvinated from hidden information in the higher sound wave harmonics of the source waves. There can be no other way but this, in the teaching setup currently in place in the upstairs room. By 'merest tapping' I mean just that!. Tapping it with my finger, you know, curved the way a human may tap a handheld pinball game trying to get a tiny metal bead into a slot, you know, you've seen humans tapping these games like they were Gods, tapping VERRRY slow, very easy. That's the way I tap, these days, I tap, and wait, and tap again, and wait a few seconds for the response to settle in. By waiting, I get a better, or worse, or REALLY good, response coming into the sound stream, after each tap. And occasionally I get a lucky strike, a huge swelling increase in the sonics, fidelity-wise and in power, of the bass range for instance, but also the high end, all from the lighest tap I can muster with a quiver-free finger on a sonic tuning device or a resonator in the room upstairs, getting it into some kind of pristine focus, a final 99.99% of focus, wherein its greater ability to function comes into the picture as active. This leads to several conjectures. But first, an update as to a major change made in the setup, with new sonic tuning devices, as of the last two days. HAND MADE PAPER MOBILES ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. September 4, 1992 3:30 P.M. For four and a half months I had been thinking of making a large six sided mobile to hang in different places around a room to hear how it might effect the sound, but kept thinking of how difficult making such a mobile would be, etc,. etc. Then day before yesterday I woke up with a new image in mind as to how easy it would be to make a six-sided mobile. I had an existing template of just under 9 inches in diameter, originally cut out last February. I used it as a template to draw six more images on sheets of stiff stamp album paper and cut each out with an Exacto knife. The first image took a little over an hour to template and cut out, the next two took about three quarters of an hour for the two, and the last three took just over a half hour. See, a learning curve at work. Then all I did was fold each cut-out image in half, then cut out a small flat hexagram from a piece of stiff restaurant menu cover material, (a thick plasticized gold sheen plastic textured paper) and cut three slots criss crossed into each hexagram, and shoved the angular corner of each folded image into an angular fold of the small hexagram, and presto, had two sturdy six sided mobiles made of paper and rouphly nine inches in diameter, ready to test, that I could immediately mount held upright on a pair of homemade microphone stands via alligator clips, the alligator clips held upright by stiff copper wire wrapped around the shaft of each mike stand. These two home-made mobiles have substantially changed the sonic characteristics of the experiment. It was certainly possible to lower the whole tonal range of the sound stream, and perceptibly improve the sound stream's overall fidelity, with these two new mobiles. But the second mobile when added in also made some major changes in how the sound stream could be understood, or interpreted. For instance, prior to the mobiles, it was often hard to tell if one or another open air tweeter was wired in synch or out of synch with the other open air tweeters. Now the change is heard in an instant. When wired in synch, the sound stream opens up into a large sonic presence with Airframe sonics, etc. And when wired out of synch, the whole sound stream squeezes up into a compressed hissy pissy sound with little or no bass. Prior to the two new mobiles, it was often hard to tell which wiring was in or out of synch, in that the quality of distortion or eerie odd sounds changed, but didn't necessarily disappear, or expand, just change. Now, there is an obvious something gained, or something lost, depending on how I hook up the mono wires to each tweeter. Such major effects the two mobiles have had allowed a significant change in the sonic experimental setup itself. Previously I had reported in 'Updates' on the use of ordinary pencils laid in the crossarms of flow tubes to help stablize the sonics rebounding in the room so that you didn't hear major changes Up and Down as you walked around. The pencils led to brass rods about a foot long each, hollow, bought for a dollar to 3 1/2 bucks in a hobby store depending on the diameter of the opening of the brass rod, it turning out that the biggest opening tried, a $3.40 version, had the best sonic results. Which led to the use of five cardboard tubes from rolls of paper towel, which seemed to work better than the brass rods, plus finally a handful of cardboard tubes from used rolls of toilet paper also sitting in various ways (some upright) in sonic hot spots in the room. When the second new six sided mobile was first set up, something suddenly seemed quite WRONG with the sound. It didn't take long to figure it out, I simply went around the room gathering up ALL of the cardboard tubes and tossed them in a box and moved the box out of the way into another room, taking them completely out of the picture. The same for any brass control rods lying around amiss, and pencils. And then I began to play with the experimental system anew, in terms of resulting sounds. First of all, gone was a tendency for the higher end to end up shrieking with spurious distortions, or to end up with strange sounding sour cross harmonic interferences. In terms of bass, any bass power over the past two weeks had been gained by a form of power amplicification, more sound, more roar, but no real genuine open air Airframe echos in and around the bass instruments or drums, but I was working on it. I in fact thought I had some Airframing in the bass from time to time, but in hindsight really didn't have anything substantial now that I can easily hear the difference. With the mobiles, bass range cross room echos leading to immediate perception of open air Stereophic sonics in the bass range came into the picture after about a day of fooling around. The reason for the delay was in having to learn how to listen for a new ingredient in the sound stream, not perceptable before. This new ingredient is really hard to get until it suddenly gells after repeated tuning and retuning, touch tapping and re-tapping, of the various sonic devices, until suddenly a suble muffle-like distortion disappears from the bass range and there it is, a loud and vibrating open air sonics strong enough to cause all objects in the room to start vibrating with real vigor. Which in its own right presents a new problem, in that the vigorous vibrating can cause responding objects to vibrate out of focus as if they had been lightly touch tapped with a bad rather than good resulting sonic response. However that is strictly technology which can be overcome by better more conducive sonic devices in the future. In the meantime there is still much to report, so I shall carry on. The aforementioned straight line array of sonic devices (reported in a previous 'Update' further above), has been expanded to include the two new six sided paper mobiles, a single giant snowflake, two different sized paper Stars of David, and the 'ferris wheel', all in a perfect straight line aligned straight to the center of the apex of the equalateral triangle, where at the moment is found the upward facing 12 inch woofer sitting on top of the kitchen utility ladder. The giant snowflake, the two upright Stars of David, and the 'Ferris wheel' are all twist turned to be facing the apex face-on. In other words their full cross sectional diameters are focused toward the apex. In brief, two points of the equalateral triangle form a side along the wall. The third point is out in the room, the 3-step kitchen utility step ladder, the apex. Mid point is in space between the ladder and the table at the wall on which sit the other two points (two hanging faceplates), the getter blaster consul, and a few sonic tuning devices. The flow tube is back toward the other side of the room, extending in a straight line out from the apex ie through point three, the end of the narrow plywood shelf on which are arrayed several sonic tuning devices including the 'ferris wheel', almost touches the rear wall. The 12 inch woofer most of the time is on the 3-step ladder as point three, and the 5 inch oval tweeter on the floor along the straight line between point three and the leading edge of the flow tube shelf. Right behind (beyond) the oval tweeter is the first standup mobile, and behind that the second, which is also sometimes behind the very far end of the flow tube shelf. The six sided mobile closest to the apex is raised higher in the air, at about face height (my face, I am about 5 feet 8 inches). The second is at roughly chest height to line up in focus roughly with the centers of the two upright Stars of David, and behind them to the center of the 'Ferris Wheel'. The six sided paper mobiles are focused so that one of the faces falls along the axis, so that when standing in front of the apex and looking along the axis I can see first the two paper-thin slices of the mobiles, (and vertically below the thin rods of the homemade mike stands), and behind them the cross sectional face of the giant snowflake, the center openings of the two paper Stars of David, and finally behind that the center opening of the 'Ferris wheel', all lined up in a precise straight line as a giant flow tube array. I hope this above description in the last two paragraphs gives you an adequate description, since it took some doing to eventually get EVERYTHING involved to line up in a perfectly straight line along a central axis, and took conciderable concideration in words chosen to descript the setup. Have you noticed the number of times I have mentioned PAPER? Paper works. It doesn't have to be wood, or plastic, or densly solid. An ordinary sheet of paper, cut to the right image, certainly works. In coming to the current setup, a number of different variables were tried in rapid succession. For instance: The two hanging faceplates were tried in different alignments, all relative to being focal points relative to the apex of the equalaterial triangle in which the apex officially consists of the center of the top of the kitchen utility ladder, (used for convienience for such, since at the moment I have nothing else around the house that can work better). I tried the faceplates focused straight toward the back wall, also straight toward each other, also reverse side out, then front side out, also spread wider apart and further back, also closer together and closer to the apex, and have finally settled on a spread of roughly 4 feet 10 inches between the faceplates, and the same distance to the apex of the equaleral triangle. (I suspect this is a constraint imposed by the size of the room. To wit; a bigger room may handle a wider spread with perhaps better results. I tend to suspect this, unproven until tested). Originally up until two days ago I seemed to be getting a better Mono in Stereo with the faceplates reversed (reverse side turned outward). But with the advent of the two six sided paper mobiles it was obvious that the best sound results with the fronts of the faceplates facing out in a normal manner, but turned to be in focus with the apex of the equalateral triangle. As for the flow tubes (two giant snowflakes or a giant snowflake and supergiant snowflake each mounted through the centerhole of a centeral snowflake), with each snowflake array per se sitting about 5 inches in the air and about 5 to seven inches apart on a horizontal support stand made of stiff copper wire), now with the two six sided paper mobiles added into the sound stream as conducers it does not seem to really matter precisely WHERE these flow tubes are situated. Formerly, it seemed that certain precise locations for them were essential, in particular one directly behind each of the suspended faceplates and turned to focus along a straight line to the apex of the equalateral triangle. Now, it seems, I can put them farther back against the wall, or right close in immediately behind a suspended faceplate, to the side of a faceplate, or away at a long distance some where else in the room. Any of these variables in location seems to have a marginal difference in the resulting sound stream with no location being specifically right on, with its effect there obvious and unquestionable. What does seem constant is that things seem to work best (sound best overall) with the flow tubes all tuned to focus along their long axis to the apex of the equalateral triangle, or also to an invisible mid point in the center of the equalateral triangle itself. I tried turning the flow tubes sideways so that the thin wedge resultant in the profile of each giant snowflake in a flow tube was focused as a side-by-side pair toward the apex or whatever, including focused laterally in straight line North/South or East/ West alignments in the room, and at times seemed to get a boost in overall volume and noise and a bigger seeming orchestra or band the result, but so far have found that the best overall fidelity, and point source sonic distinctions for instruments, and sonic dispersion for the whole of the sound, etc., comes from very discrete focusing of a flow tube along its length, pointed like an arrow toward a target, for instance to the apex of the equalaterial triangle. Which brings in the finality of this report and the reason for the Update. With the setup now sitting as just described in the preceeding paragraphs, fine tuning is now sufficient to allow a new round of tests whose results I shall report in a moment. A first comment though is that I seem to have come full circle now, back to a condition that was being reported off and on in experiments of last winter. And this is that the setup has now become very selective again as to its response to one tape vrs another, or even to one track vrs another on the same cassette tape. What I mean is that I can fuss and fine tune until I can hear Gene Krupa's drum solos in Sing Sing Sing rocking the floor (so to speak) on an el cheapo pirate factory Benny Goodman tape circa 1936 - 1940. And then put on a cassette tape of (for instance) George Girshwin's American In Paris, and hear nothing but muffle and totally mono symphonics. Until I fuss and fine tune again and again, until inexorably out comes some stereophonics, coaxed by little ifs and bits out of the sound stream into something major, including resonantly grunting bass fiddles, and typanis, sonorously resounding away in the background way off to the left, or the right, depending on the orchestra, all in mono, never forget this, unless I tell you otherwise. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. September 4, 1992 3:30 P.M. Which brings us right up to the moment of my last tests before writing this Upate. That was to take all three of my touph hardship case symphany orchestra tapes and work them through back and forth one after the other, listening to the sound stream and constantly adjusting the focusing of the various sonic devices. What has been learned is this. When the focusing settles in, you have something to talk about. Needless to say, those symphany orchestras are VERY POWERFUL MACHINES. Concider that they are contained of more than 100 instruments spread out in a sitting that fills a concert stage, and that they play at soft to loud volume, and when LOUD, it can include ALL of the instruments including a battery of grunting bass fiddles, ALL pouring forth at the same moment. Now I honestly can't say that I have ever heard that POWER ever reproduced in a stereo system, no matter its sophistication or cost. But I did hear glimpses of it today. It was at lower volume than (of course) the symphony playing in the flesh. But you have to understand that when resonances got so powerful that EVERY object in the room began to vibrate at rates that tingled the fingers, you know you are dealing with a potentially MIGHTY POWER of which just a glimpse of it was being heard, but it was already sounding MIGHTY, not ear deafening loud, but MIGHTY no less. What I mean by not 'ear deafening loud' is that when the fine tuning became just RIGHT, off and on, you could hear the presence of the mighty orchestra gell and take shape in the room. The tympanis, for instance, would immediately attract your attention way off to the back and off to the side, since you could FEEL vibrations coming directly from them. A battery of violas had the same effect, grabbing your attention because you could FEEL their sonic vibrations coming toward you, moved well over from the tympanis. And so on. Like I say, this is interesting, because the only source of the sound stream doing all of this mighty resulting work is the two four inch tweeters from the getto blaster hanging in faceplates, the 8 by 5 inch oval car speaker, and the 12 inch woofer, all resonating openingly and unabashedly in the open air, a supposed theoretically impossible situation. I can disconnect the woofer and still get the sonics of the orchestra, but not the MIGHT in the strength of the deepest vibrating bass notes, this seems to be directly the input of the woofer kick assing the sound stream by pure open air resonances. The point is that in careful listening, there turns out to be another ingredient in the sound when reproduced entirely from a 100% monoral source (all of the above in this Update has been described according to all four speakers being wired in series to the Left hand channel, the Right hand channel for full official stereo has not been hooked up in any test, even for a few seconds, for two days. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. September 4, 1992 3:30 P.M. I can at this point reproduce the symphonies in stereo using a monoral only setup. However the effect of percieving the MIGHT of the symphony orchestra, as well as its size, at this moment is gained via hooking up the woofer in open air resonances into the sound stream. This does not mean to say that the MIGHT cannot be gained without a sonically responsive woofer added in. All it means to say is that at this moment, with what I have at hand in order to work with in terms of sonic enhancing and rejuvinating resonating devices, I can't seem to get the MIGHT without the 12 inch woofer. The next experiment is to try two (or more) larger six sided mobiles and see what these might do. I suspect they will do quite well. But won't know until I actually get around to making them and to try them out. To do this I will have to take the template for the existing mobiles to a Xerox to get it blown up to about twice the size, and to find some stiffer form of paper, or paper cardboard, or paper thin but stiff plastic which will be strong enough to be able to hold the larger mobile in an upright position gripped on a mike stand with an alligator clip. I think this (the grip) is the way to go since I have more exact control as to exactly where the mobile is located, as opposed to merely hanging it from a string somewhere where it is sonically hot in a room. Hanging a mobile from a string in a sonic hot spot in a room is the final target for design of sonically enhancing six sided (or twelve sided) mobiles, but this will come after the fact of using such mobiles locked in rigorous locations to test their sonic activities. The mobiles I've been discussing are rather simple; a Star of David surrounded by a hexagram frame. The two I have at the moment were hand made (as decribed prior above) by cutting three faces using a template, folding each face in half, and assembling it into a six sided figure. These have a paper band about 1/2 inch across forming the hexagram outer ring, and the arms of the Stars of David are all paper bands about 1/4 of an inch across. An earlier much smaller hexagonal mobile described in one of the recent previous Updates (got from a local shopping center with hologram carboard its design and intended to be sold as a quote 'christmas tree orniment' by the salesgirl), seems to work in a unlikely new place. I have simply dropped it onto the woofer and let it bounce around in the bass strike resonances of the woofer. At times you can hear it rattle a bit, bouncing around on the cone, and it does definately bounce into and out of hot spot resonance positions, but in the overall, for the moment, it is adding an improved albiet subtle sonic 'airframe' ingredient into the sound stream, something that is immediately missed if you take it away (lift the mobile away from the woofer cone). And so, that is it. The gist of the short story being that the MIGHT described above as being inherent in the reproduction of a symphony orchestra is coming only from and entirely from harmonically focused room resonances and echoes, (re-enforcing 'sense' within the chaos), not a twit or tat of it coming from anything remotely resembling a speaker box or enclosure. In fact, I am inclined to think it would be impossible to get the MIGHT into a sound stream from any enclosure, or speaker box devices, and in fact it might not be possible to get the MIGHT from any reproduction system other that one performing in 100% Mono. Wait, let me go upstairs and check that last remark. I'll simply hook the thing up in stereo, and try it with, then without, the two external resonating speakers (the woofer and 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter) hooked in, and see if I can or cannot get the sense of MIGHT using full official stereo. Here goes. Be back in a few minutes. I am back from upstairs. Well, it is pointless discussing the symphany in pure official stereo mode, with both Left and Right hand channels hooked up, only the the two faceplate speakers working. It was distorted and high pitched, and no bass. End of a 10 second experiment. With the two external resonators (12 inch woofer and 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter) also hooked up to the Left hand channel while playing the system in full stereo, there was more sonics in the stereophonics, and bass, but it was mainly all assuming from a sound image area re: the wall behind the hanging faceplates. Plus a crisp compression or squeezed ingredient most noticable in the sound. But in disconnecting the Right hand channel and hooking the Right faceplate speaker to the Left hand leads, a change immediately takes place. Sonic presense spreads out and takes hold of the room. I can feel a glimpse of the MIGHT of the orchestra again, for it turns out that my perception of such SOUND is coming from all around me including behind me, as well as dominantly in front of me from the direction of the main giant sound image area. In some regard, I am standing inside the symphany orchestra - not far away in front of it in the listening audience seated and silent except for stiffled coughs from unhealthy audience members. So, it seems I was right, at least in the ambiguities of the experimental setup that I have on hand to play with in the upstairs room, that the MIGHT is a feature being generated only from a 100% Mono source at the moment, using generators that function entirely in the mode of open air resonanators which rather than pouring forth the sound, kick ass the sound stream echoing around in the room itself, to regenerate and rejuvinate original cross echo and cross harmonic reflections that comprised the original MIGHT of the orchestra before it was recorded to a media for later reproduction. Most importantly is the ambiant 'presence' of sound you can hear around you, beside you, and behind you, and mainly from up front, ambiant presences you simply cannot get with speaker boxes no matter how expensive the stereo set, presences you get in a concert hall or modern motion picture theatre showing a big budget thriller, but not there in the flat wall wide spread images produced by a big boxed pair of stereo speakers, including expensive studio monitors. At this moment, when hearing or sensing the MIGHT, I am in the position of the conductor (or more specifically the recording mike(s)), rather than in the position of a listener sitting a long distance back in a concert hall. The sonic rejuvination taking place upstairs in the room is hearing what the mike hears, rather than hearing what the stereo system is reproducing, or hearing what the sound engineers wanted you to hear when they mixed the tape. Now of course there are artificials in the sound stream, due to the mixing, and quality of recording devices including mikes and their placement and the media itself including the pirate factory quality of cassette tape mylar. But notwithstanding, there has been a major circumvention taking it well away from an inevitable final finished product, back toward a reproduction of the original product, in the form of the sonic experiments taking shape in the room upstairs. For instance, now I can hear MIGHT in a symphony orchestra, for the first time in my life outside of a concert hall. What I have in fact is unusually ambiant dispersion, something extremely hard to get in the design of ordinary stereo speakers for instance for the audiophile listener. This 'dispersion' fills out the whole of the environment with sound ambiance, but at the moment in its embodiement upstairs is still lacking the other main ingredient of a true stereo setup, and that is the distinct point source of all given instruments imaged most clearly within the background Left to Right spread of the dispersion. True enough I do have instruments sounding from the Left, with others sounding from the Right, but for the most part you have to kind of have to listen to determine exactly where precisely in the sound image that instrument is working. Certain instruments at this moment can be heard to be precisely located, but what you want ideally is to hear ALL instruments clearly and precisely located without effort. And this I do not yet have. In fact I might not be able to get it all the way correct, due to the fact of a mike placed too close to one or another instrument, that instrument hence dominating all nearby other sounds, and so on, in full stereo the problem of over anxious miking being solved by the mixing, etc., after the fact of the recording. These factors I do not know enough about yet, to comment on with definative confidence. In further keeping with thoughts for the future, the best thing to come up with next is an embodiment in genuine official stereo, where sonic tuning devices can be plopped in one or two hot spots in a room and result in immediate improvement in stereo imaging, dispersion, and/or fidelity of the existing sound system working in full stereo with for instance a pair of speaker enclosures comprising the sound generators as the source for the stereo sound stream. Not forgetting to mention the same (or similar such) devices plopped down in the room to get an immediate kick into the sound of a TV, or clock radio, or anything the purchaser wants to hear sound better, including of course the dynamite of eardrums and sanity, the getto blasters. Doing the things as described above in 100% Mono is interesting because it speaks upon principles of sonic propigation, projection, resonances, and reccurances, which are obviously at this moment not concidered as valid or possible in the theoretical scopes of existing teachings of sonics in the labs or universities or for the home stereo buff. I can see much more. HOW CAN AN ARCHANGEL APPEAR IN FRONT OF YOU TO GIVE YOU A MESSAGE ----------------------------------------------------------------------- For instance how can an archangle, ahem, I mean archangel, appear in front of you to give you a message? It has to be by a form of projection from a higher plane of vibratory existence to a lower plane (the third dimension), and as far as I can tell, the mechanisms for such projection occur in similar mechanisms as are found for sound. There is a proviso to this; a projection of an archangel would also embody resonance and recurrant higher absolute properties of light, some of whose mechanisms are similar to those of sound but in which, when motion is involved in the source of the projection, also involves attributes of relativity theory at the third dimensional level. But not for archangels ... no special relativity theory in the principles of this higher dimensional energies in light. Never the less... Oh, one little sidebar I can tell you, a mini short story revealing how much effect the two new hand-made paper mobiles have on the sound stream. When first setting them up, and removing all of the paper cardboard tubes, in playing around with the two open air resonators in the vacinity of the apex of the equalateral triangle, I thought I had finally blown the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter. I started with it sitting on top of the kitchen utility ladder, and the woofer on the floor behind the ladder. Then the positions of the two were reversed. Then finally the oval tweeter was on the floor directly under the ladder. Yet for over an hour, no matter what I did, the oval tweeter wouldn't perform. It would sit dormant, until I tapped its cone, then it would start to rattle and crackle producing no other sound, then quit again after a few seconds, whereupon I would tap its cone again and get some more feeble crackle and rattle for a few seconds. I thought for sure I had finally blown it. And was starting to think greviously of what I might do to get another one somewhere that might work as well, but for the heck of it left it hooked up as I continued to play around with other sonic devices working to get things tuned in a better way in the room now that I could hear more due to the input of the two new hexagram shaped paper mobiles. Then all of a sudden the oval speaker kicked in, entirely on its own, working as handily as ever to kick the sound stream with strong resonances, and there was no trace of rattle or crackle whatever. Apparently I had done something to dissolve a hidden form of chaos that was interfering with both the woofer's resonances, and the oval tweeter in particular. This time there was a new difference, however. In days past you could see their cones move when sonically responding. But as of now the oval tweeter's cone is so locked solidly in impact vibrations, to all extents and purposes it is immobile, not moving at all, until you touch the cone and can feel how powerfully it is vibrating. You can't even feel it operating when held in the hand, unlike two weeks or so ago when it vibrated so strongly when held in the hand that it could almost seem to torque, when brought into focus in a way that amplified the bass sonics. The same is now true for the woofer. You cannot see in anyway that its cone is active. Not even by putting your ear right to it can you hear anything significant coming from it. Even dust and lint settled to its cone is not bouncing around anymore. Only by touching the cone can you tell if it is working or not. Or by disconnecting it, then the ingredient it is imputting vanishes at once and you know for a fact that it was working with great input, even though you cannot hear anything whatever with your ear cocked right to the face of the woofer. At this point, with the current setup in the room upstairs, the setup is so fragile that occasionally I can hear the oval tweeter rattle for a few seconds as some hidden chaos temporarily enters or leaves the sound stream as I tap and adjust different tuning devices. But it doesn't worry me. It only serves to confirm the notion of the Elephant And Butterfly's Wings in modern day theories of chaos, where theoretically a commotion as small as the beat of a butterfly's wings can have a rippling effect, spreading out to effect something as major as the weather system itself. I can see this concept at work as plain as day in the sonic environment of the room upstairs. Particularly when it come to making the merest of slightest taps on an object, and hear a huge ingredient in the bass ranges of sound suddenly start to demuffle and come swelling out into the room, causing objects to start vibrating with a power of their own. Then with another mere tap to the aforesaid sonic device, that bass power abrupty diminishes or fades again, at times into only a weak almost unhearable muffle denoting where there are supposed to be bass notes. End of mini story. The three symphany tapes in question used for the above described experiments revealing the existence of MIGHT, are: Grieg - PEER GYNT SUITES, Opus 46, Opus 55, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Jonel Perlea conductor. Cassette tape by Allegrettto ACS 8030. George Gershwin - AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, American Radio Symphony Orchestra, M. Brown, conductor. Cassette tape by Allegretto ACS 8034. Rimskey-Korsakov - SCHEHERAZADE, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Jonel Perlea conductor. Cassette tape by Allegretto ACS 8003. POWER IS MIGHTY WHEN IT CAN MOVE MOUNTAINS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 7, 1992, 1:30 A.M. Only a few moments were spent in tests today. Specifically, a quick demo was made to a visitor demonstrating MIGHT in a symphony orchestra, with the 100% four speaker Mono setup, vrs ordinary normal two-speaker two-channel stereo, then the 100% four speaker Mono setup again. When hooking back up to 100% Mono to conclude the demo, some time was spent trying to discourage a rather unsettling high pitched distortion from the sound stream, which had actually been in there when the system was first turned on to start the demo, until after a few feeble moments had passed and the visitor decided it was time to leave. I kept muttering about how something must have gotten into the system overnight because I couldn't seem to get rid of the high pitched strange stuff, and had no really good bass to boast about. To no avail I fussed and fumed with sonic tuning devices, knowing this demo had not been a good one. Out by the car as the visitor was leaving, he mentioned something about perhaps the speakers not being wired up the right way. A light dawned, because in fact the wiring was not one of the things I had thought to check when trying to diddle and dork my way through attempts to get rid of the strange noise, even though the MIGHT was there to hear in the symphony and the presence of the orchestra nonetheless, not great might mind you, but enough MIGHT in the Mono sound stream to reveal such might's existence to the visitor. So upstairs raced I to double check the wires. Sure enough. The two remote speakers (12 inch woofer and 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter), were wired in reverse, the reverse seeming to have been the way things ended up hooked together sometime late yesterday evening just about the time I shut everything off to call it a day. With proper phase back in the hookup, plenty more in the way of MIGHT was soon back into the soundstream, new levels of the stuff in fact, more than enough to turn me on into trying a number of variables in the placings of some of the sonic devices. Two changes resulted right away; one of the paper mobiles on the home-made mike stand was moved into position to the exact center point of the equalateral triangle; and all of the flow tubes were twist tuned to be focused directly toward the triangle's center. Some more MIGHT began to be glimpsed in the background of the music. There, a larger and larger image of the orchestra was beginning to make sense (take shape), in fleeting glimpses and facets, stablizing then dissolving in the sound stream. There and then not there, like I was getting about half of it at any one time, for a few seconds getting THIS, a few seconds later getting THAT, in the orchestra, the rest of it not got producing distortions and muffles throughout the sound range and image picture. Nevertheless these partial glimpses got to be surprisingly revealing, it was more than I had ever been expecting in recreating a sound image with what I had to play with upstairs. In fact it almost got to be awesome. First of all the volume suddenly began to swell by noticable degrees even though the volume knob was never touched, until I eventually had to turn the gain down in two stages by 15%, and it was still louder than when I'd started. But there was more happening. I began to hear some awesome potentials in POWER in the mighty scene starting to take place in the backgrounds of the sound image, bearing in mind that we are talking symphony orchestra with over 100 instruments all horking away in loud play in crescendos in for instance SCHEHERAZADE by Rimskey-Korsakov. What I had was POWER that was about half there. The music was fracturing and flipping in and out, first you could hear a mighty tympany, then just muffled distortion, then a few bangs of tympany again. It came and went. The same for all parts of the orchestra throughout the sound range, including batteries of bass fiddles, and violas all working together in glimpses, then gone, as they kept flipping in and out of the sound image in fragments. Yet in these glimpses you could easily begin to sense the 'real time' existence of the MIGHTY MACHINE called the symphony orchestra. The point is in being able to hear glimpses of this mighty device in the first place. That alone demonstrated that the information is in the sound stream, even though ALL of the bass, and ALL of the stereoscopic imaging, is being generated by positive cross harmonic re-enforcements cascading downward from the higher frequencies being produced into the open air by the resonators (tweeters and open air woofer) to generate the sound stream. And then on went George Girshwin's 'American In Paris'. This took more work, because the dynamics of this recording seem to be poor to begin with, the tape always comes on weak sounding when first I play it in sound tests. But notwithstanding, this time when I put it on it was pretty good, quite strong, right from the start. There was lots of touching and tapping, and very light tapping, of the flow tubes and resonator speakers and every so often a lucky strike brought in MORE and gradually the POWER increased. Let me tell you about this. The POWER got so great, in fits and starts and few second glimpses in and around the loud racket, that nonetheless a crescendo passage was hit by the orchestra so mighty that the Right hand faceplate suddenly took off abruptly and sailed right through the air, off the TABLE, landing on the floor with a CRASH and a tangle of speaker wires pulled from the tabletop, followed by utter complete silence. (Fortunately the floor is covered with beige carpet). Thus ended today's experiments, with a totally unexpected demonstration of potential POWER. The Right hand faceplate is still lying on the floor in the upstairs room. I feel simply just like leaving it there till tomorrow when the buzz hits again and I will head up the stairs and see if I can tease or coax more stability out of that POWER. I'm not sure. I may need to start thinking of some better technology to do this. The point is, I now know, that POWER IS THERE!. Well there are other reasons besides temporary laziness. A French translation version of our Virus Alert anti-virus package is now underway and in fact the 'visitor' mentioned immediately above actually came over with French Translated versions of some of the program's drivers for me to look over. And in the meantime it turns out something I did with a bit of help from friends last winter to be able to simultaneously Scan and Clean virus using McAfee's SCAN anti-virus software may have some small time market potential sold as a support utility for users of SCAN, since no one in the world apparently has been able to work around the problem of how to SCAN and CLEAN virus simultaneously using the McAfee stuff, except I did it in an attempt to improve our store sales of a menu driven adapt of McAfee's SCAN (called SCAN/START) sold at shareware prices before the advent of our VIRUS ALERT package. The visitor is encouraging me to get the thing out (the automatic scanner and cleaner for SCAN) since no one else has one, so this is taking some work by me to redo the thing to run as a stand alone utility. In today's hack session I got it swung around so that pressing one key engages a sequence of events where (for instance) a virus infected disk is scanned, any virus encountered is cleaned, the disk scanned again, and when no virus is found, it ends at a prompt flashing away saying 'NO VIRUS FOUND', all engaged with the press of one key. It takes the right frame of mind, and the right rational circuits at work in the brain pan, to plow around in fishy codes to get such things to work right, particularly since I am using syntax techniques developed from ordinary batch files and a special compiler to create this stuff and batch files can be notoriously kinky, as everyone in DOS knows. Today I was lucky, several hours were spent and I must say the time passed without making a single mistake in altering numerous code structures. Such luck is not always to be expected, in the computer universe. And then I went upstairs and discovered POWER. And started tooling around with it to such an extent that suddenly one of the open air resonating tweeter speakers (consider the physics for heaven's sake) suddenly took off and sailed throuhg the air off the table, bringing the play to a halt with abruptly nothing but echos of CRASH fading along with the echos of the music. So, let's see what happens tomorrow. I already have a few ideas playing around in the subliminals in the background of the mind which might work to help stablize the POWER in a sympony orchestra when played through a mono stereoscopic system, such as is seemingly being evolved in inexorable steps in the room upstairs. P.S. Today, before the system blew apart, before I started tapping into some of the heavy duty POWER that sonic projection techniques now suddenly are offering, I double checked the 8 by 5 inch oval speaker to see if it was still functioning under the agility of 'impact vibrations' or was that a fool's notion that I had come to accept the day before, since the last time I saw any impact vibrations at work (no visible motion whatsoever in the cone of a speaker) was last spring. But yes, most certainly, there could not even be seen so much as a glimmer of a vibration effecting the cone of the 8 by 5 inch oval speaker, and yet as I slowly turned it this way and that faced into the sound stream I could feel strong vibrations come and go, but the strongest sounding bass sonics came into the sound picture when the hand-held oval speaker felt functionally vibrationless. Plus, touching the cone produced an immediate Whappppp ! This was interesting, because a couple of weeks earlier when first I set up the upstairs room and began experimenting, at the time I first tried the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter as an open air resonator, it could vibrate so strongly in any bass notes that it could literally torgue your hand, resist change of direction like a gyroscope. Not only that, the thing could end up pumping away so vigorously that you could think it had suddenly become a loudspeaker because for sure you could hear strong bass coming directly from it with the ear. Now, with impact vibrations in effect due to better overall control of random sonics in the room, you can hardly hear the thing play at all, even though qualities in the sound stream sharply drop the momemt you disconnect this 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter, coupled long distance to the sound stream's main image by sonically resonating impact vibrations. As for the 12 inch woofer, sitting on its magnet, facing the ceiling in the open air on top of the kitchen utility ladder, at this moment you can scarcely feel anything at all, barely more than a slight tingle under your probing fingertip when touching the cone, when it is seemingly working at its best to kick ass the bottom bass of the sound stream. So impact virbations are definately involving the 12 inch woofer too. This woofer does not really give you more bass, or deeper bass. What it does at this moment is give you more TONE in the bass, more presence, in particular more open air sonics surrounding the bass tone sources in the sound stream, with more stereoscopic depth back toward the rear of the orchestra in the sound image, the depth leading to more MIGHT, and the MIGHT, inevitably, when stablized, to this new thing, called POWER. I haven't yet had a chance to check things over to see if I can get any of the POWER without the 12 inch woofer. I expect I can get some, but will find for the moment that the woofer is needed to make the POWER more obvious and easy to generate. An impression to correct. Actually the woofer at the moment is sitting propped by a brass hexagon nut about two inches across and a half inch thick from a pipe fitter's junk bin, so as to be titled forward by about 30 degrees. The 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter is below on the floor under the woofer, tilted forward by about 60 degrees, supported in place with its magnet propped by a roll of masking tape. It was within moments of setting up these two resonators in this fashion that the hanging Right hand speaker (faceplate) took off from the table and hit the ground when some REAL POWER suddenly loomed out into the open in super resonances during a crescendo in AMERICAN IN PARIS by George-Girshwin. SPECULATIONS INDULGED --------------------------------------------------------------------- I probably couldn't duplicate the exact circumstances no matter how hard I tried, in getting a hanging faceplate to soar off the table again. However that wouldn't be a goal anyway. I remember reading once how dismayed Telsa was when a resonating experiment he was performing triggered a minor earthquake in downtown New York, and when the authorities finally homed in on the source of the local six block disturbance that was starting to shatter windows, they found Telsa in a panic desparately whacking away with a sledgehammer on a vibrating device that was attached to a ceiling support post in the middle of his laboratory. I don't think I will ever want to trigger that kind of earthquake, but did trigger enough to move heavy weight by the sonic resonances of a symphony orchestra. In reconcidering the pipe fitter's hexagon nut, I should mention that the woofer works quit well sitting on its own facing straight up, except the magnet climps to the metal top of the kitchen utility ladder and a lot of extra vibration passes through the coupling to the ladder and it seems these vibrations are distructive rather than constructive. I have used a roll of masking tape as a miniature support stand for the woofer, simply sitting it face up on top of the roll, and also using the roll to tilt the woofer forward. I only had a momentary time to play with the woofer propped at a 30 degree angle by the hexagon nut before the physical system got trashed by POWER. but with an apex point of the hexagon nut faced straight forward, there seemed to be a substantial gain in certain desirable ingredients in the music. For sure I had just made substantial gains in cleaning up the mess in the music (the fracturing, the only half there) leading to a really worthwhile sudden gain in pure fidelity when the POWER crash occurred. How much the hexagon nut as a geometrically sympathetic support prop for the woofer contributed to the fidelity, and the sudden looming increase in POWER, are questions I don't yet have answers for, without sounding fantastic the wrong way. The next round of tests could tell more. It may just be that the hexagon nut helps, just as you might expect, since it is six sided, but intrinsically otherwise is not a 'device' needed in the technology. Now, I am starting to sound psuedo scientific silly and don't want to do that so will quit, because normally I am not moved to run at the mouth or dribble from the brain. Except that this POWER thrust that moved the hanging faceplate off the table has got me very curious. It was also because, right at that moment, I was beginning to hear a very MIGHTY engine starting to take hold in the pictures of sound far back beyond the wall in the room, constituting the symphony orchestra. There was bottom bass starting to well up that was totally beyond anything I was suspecting was inherent in the music. And yet can forsee (having as a newspaper editor once upon a time stood right behind the three bass fiddle players of a major symphony orchestra playing 'New World Symphony' by Dvorjak, and know what the power of such an orchestra can be like when playing in a school gymnasium in a small town, where I was a reporter/editor, once upon a time. The reason why I was able to stand behind the bass fiddle players listening, is that one of them was a friend of mine. We had played numerous jazz and dance gigs together a couple of years before, and I had no idea he was also a professional symphonic musician until suddenly there he was setting up his music stand with the symphony orchestra during a federally financed provincial tour. Apparently he had been playing with them all along but didn't like to boast. Now, get the picture, this fello was 5 feet 4 inches tall, and was playing the largest sized bass fiddle you can get. I asked him what happens when he has to hit the high notes at the top of the fiddle. 'Just forget them', he said. There were three high notes he'd just tried and muffed at the height of some frenzied passage in New World Symphony, for instance, he said. The thing about symphony orchestras is that they can produce very awesome statistics in terms of decibles when playing, but these kind of decibles do not seem to do physical damage due to the generally harmonic nature of the music, witness performers who are still playing or conducting with accute hearing at age 90. On the other hand I remember a girl in 1967 who distained rock or psychedelic music until some people she knew formed a band and opened at a former motion picture theater stripped bare of seats with the audience on the hardwood floors and band up on stage where the movie screen used to be. So around the corner she came to hear the band. When I tuned into the situation a couple of hours later, she was standing immobile, transfixed, her face thrust straight forward into (almost into) the oriface of a gigantic speaker, two styrofoam coffee cups their bottoms punched out cupped over her ears and pointed foward into the mighty speaker like megaphones, and I shouted 'WHAT ARE YOU DOING!, and she shouted back, over the din, 'LISTENING, ITS FANTASTIC!. And I shouted back in alarm, 'BUT WHAT ABOUT YOUR HEARING!. And she shouted back, 'THAT'S OKAY, YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE THE PLEASURABLE SENSATIONS I'M GETTING'. That is what she said. So I left her, standing there directly in front of the humongous speaker box. She didn't move for another two hours till the band quit. And this was the first time she had ever heard a psychedelic band live, a 23 year old woman. Imagine! I sure wouldn't do that, I risked enough with my ear cocked to the ride cymbal for four years as a jazz and dance drummer. There was one time when my sense of hearing failed, as a drummer, this was circ. 1972 drumming in a band called Amethyst Star Family featuring a concert rock approach, lyrical, doing a noon hour concert in the main room of a big city Art Gallery, and band associates kept coming forward to the temporary stage between songs to tell me to tone down, to cool it, the drumming was TOO LOUD, and I got to the point of thinking I was hardly playing instead of the usual rock-like whap and rebounds on the skins, and still the urgent persistent requests to tone it down. The puzzling situation in this instance was the accoustics. Somehow, I could hardly hear what I was doing, compared to the mighty racket that was getting out there into the audience. I have to assume that some kind of sonic projection was taking place due to some unique sonic characterists of that room, or the particular way we had set up the band that noon hour. I do remember wondering for a while after if I was playing too loud because I couldn't tell, but had no doubt about the people who were trying to get me to tone down, this is the only time they ever approached me while playing with frowns on their faces, and these frowns were urgent to say the least. So I must have been playing REALLY LOUD, but couldn't hear the volume from where I was sitting playing the drums at the back of the temporary stage. And another (final) reminis. One of the tapes I have played with recently upstairs was made 10 years ago with a walkman sized IAWA cassette recorder with two cheap stereo mikes taped to a tabletop, in a bar in downtown Ottawa on Rideau street, featuring Tuesday night sessions with a band called MOON MEN comprising a handfull of musicians mainly from the Military Band and the RCMP band. This band's approach was something like Spiro Gyro. It turned out, unexpectedly, that one of the three young Lebonese brothers who owned the bar was a sax player, who got up and joined the band and I got recruited to get him playing a number with soprano sax on tape. Sure I said, since he was a friend of mine. Well, the band started playing an 'opus' ad libbing as they went along. However, as soon as the opus started, up jumped a big beefy fello who also knew the band, and, grabbing a cow bell, starting CLONKING on it, loud, metronomic, precise, not missing a beat, not slipping up once, through the entire piece, about fifteen minutes long, nothing but CONK, CONK, CONK, CONK, with the band playing in the background. Well, that was it for that recording, and that set. The band, when finished the piece, just politely put down their instruments and called a break. You can still hear the cowbell clonking away for the entire piece on the 10 year old cassette tape I have been using for a few sonic tests upstairs, since the whole background of the tape is filled with live audience sounds including waitresses going around and heavier drinkers complaining about the heat. And yet the purpose in telling this little episode is to tell first of all how interference from unexpected negative sources can harm or spoil, but also that the tape is still useable for sonic experiments because of the fact that it is both a poor quality recording made with a small pocket sized device, and the tape itself though 10 years old is still a live audience recording. Therefore all of these things combine to offer a good source for experimenting with how resonance sonics can improve on a poor original hardware technology, while at the same time making the tests easy to judge in terms of Mono in stereophonics. Being able to hear point source voices separated in different areas in space in a Mono sound source tells you instantly that you are getting stereo, for instance. SPECULATIONS FINISHED --------------------------------------------------------------------- I am now beginning to think in fact that an ideal system might be three similar generators, in an equalateral triangle configuration, the generators having to be specially designed speakers geared to work with heightened sensitivity as open air resonators. Like I say, there may be a new technology required to pass beyond a certain point in these experiments. But, maybe not. Every time I seem to start thinking with depression about a barrier, shortly after I pass beyond the barrier like it was never there. Except for the paper mobiles. They took 4 1/2 months to gell from idea to actually doing the work, which was easy when the time came to actually make them. The moral to this story is to not except limitations, because typically they are not there except in the lesser intelligent regions of the mind. SOME THINGS NEED TO BE REPORTED ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 8, 1992, 4:15 A.M. Today I did play with the system for an hour this afternoon with no breakthough advances to report, just some more gains in the overall fidelity and the theory. First it was rummaging through the coin can for enough pocket change to head around the corner to Cumberland Drugs (today is a Holiday) for a roll of 24 shots of 110 color film and back upstairs to photograph the Right hand faceplate lying on the floor about three feet away from the table, just in case anyone wants to dispute that this whole dialogue is fiction. Besides, I wanted a picture as a reminder. Took a couple of shots through both the left eye, then right eye, to see if I might end up with stereo in the photos. Then back to some sound tests. I tried refocusing the flow tubes to different alignments, including uniformly focused all the way to the back of the room to the 'ferris wheel' and found from this that setting up the flow tubes on either North/South or East/West alignments, relative to the four resonating speakers which are focused at angles, has for the moment marginally improved the overall fidelity of the system in a stable way. I began with symphony, and at the last, switched over to the GOLDEN FILM THEMES 2 tape, which came on quite good, in fact I went downstairs for a cup of coffee and while sitting in the livingroom could hear subtle sonic booms overhead from the infamous turbo roar cut of James Bond's 'Diamonds Are Forever', only this time there was TONE instead of roar in the turbo. At the moment the two faceplates are back into original positions focused directly toward the apex of the equalateral triangle where sits the 12 inch woofer tilted forward by 30 degrees to face the main giant sound image. One thing I did do that is different. Today I took the trouble to go into the system and remodify it slightly so that ALL of the four resonators are resonating in the open air with as little contact with solid physical objects as possible. For instance the Left hand faceplate, being supported using a copper wire empty coil slightly different in size than that for the Right hand faceplate, had always hung with the back of the magnet in contact with the thin piece of garden stake holding it up hanging in the air. By placing a pencil in a certain way under the coil, tilting it foward slightly, I was able to get the Left hand faceplate to hang free of all other physical contacts for the first time. Similarly, I modified the prop for the 12 inch woofer, using a roll of masking tape as a base with the woofer on top and the pipe fitter's hexagonal nut wedged in behind on top of the roll of tape so that the magnet of the 12 inch woofer is not making contact with the metal top of the ladder, ie., no longer gripping it with a vibratory kiss. These minor alterations nonetheless seem to have improved the overall hi fidelity of the system. The drums are sounding less crisp and more tonal, and hot instruments like trumpets and flutes are clearer. In fact for one moment I heard something unique. As I was standing behind the kitchen utility ladder making accutely small adjustments to the tilt and focus direction of the 12 inch woofer, I heard something which instantly caught my attention for it was such an anomaly; there was a sax directly in front of me, then a trumpet way off and far back over to the left, then the sax directly in front again, then the trumpet loud and clear way off far back in the distance over to the left again. It was a trumpet, and a sax, trading riffs one bar at a time in the music, back, forth, back, forth. There they were, ping ponging in rythm back and forth in precise full stereoscopic imaging in the sound stream, with the system at 100% Mono. So that puts to rest forever any and all doubts that Mono in Stereo may be an illusion or impression due to better dispersion, perhaps, in Mono regeneration of a sound source. Not so. Full stereo is without question in the matrixes, even when the matrix is played through a 100% one-channel mono reproducer to generate the sound stream. TIMBRE VRS COLORATION ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 10, 1992, 4:00 P.M. I have just been re-reading a former Update dating back to May 13, 1992, which has comments I made back then regards a characteristic I've labeled 'Timbre' vrs a quality I've been calling 'Color'. In those old comments I reported that it was impossible to alter the 'Timbre' of an old two tweeter clock AM/FM stereo clock radio sitting on the fridge in the old apartment we used for survival during this spring and summer of 1992. It turns out that both 'Coloration' and 'Timbre' are easily altered, using sonic devices such as are currently in place in the upstairs room. In particular, the inclusion of the two paper six sided mobiles as conducers in the sound stream dramatically changed the tonal of the whole sound stream, dropping it substantially to lower tones, and cancelling finally some irritating higher frequency pierces and strident echos which had bothered the sound stream for the first two weeks in the tests up there. I would say this has altered the 'Timbre'. It took some doing, including the mechanics of newly built sonic conducer devices (the two six sided paper mobiles) added into the sound matrix to alter the sound stream. So, like I say, it took some doing to alter the system's resulting 'Timbre'. That called 'coloration' can be easily changed at will. For instance bringing in an eerie sounding separate second image into the sound stream locating across the back of the stereo image in Mono in Stereo, (a previously reported strange audible response echoing distantly away as if swimming in the background regions like an entirely separate range of sound operating as if delayed behind the orchestral beat of the main dominant foreground sound) comprising cross over echo reflections from what would be the dominant sound of the other stereo channel if playing in full stereo, is clearly a form of 'Coloration'. Whereas changing the pitch or tone of an oboe soloing in a symphany orchestra, by my deft fine tuning, or moving a few sonic devices around, is clearly a sign of 'Timbre' at work. For instance in a jazz tape I can make a grand piano sound a lot more like a grand piano, or less, just by changing the quality of 'Timbre' in the sound stream. On the otherhand, 'Coloration' as such, does not really exist anymore in terms of coloration added by the sound generators themselves. With a bit of deft fine tuning, I can completely change the tone and characteristic of the sound coming from say, the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter, so essentially that tweeter is no longer adding its own 'Color' into the soundstream. With sonic tunings I am 'Creating' that tweeter's coloration, at will. But also, the so-called 'Coloration' due to cross feeds normally amplified through the other stereo mike and channel is easily controlled, by sonic tuning of the environment. I can talk glibly and easily about such things now, because such things are now easily and glibly induced into the sound stream, by me pretending to wear a lab coat with clip board cradled in an arm and high tech electronnic probes being thrust here and there into 'nodes' or hot spots of scientific interest as I walk around in a serious attitude through the room, testing, in bare feet, wearing shorts and a sleeveless tee shirt. Needless to say tee shirts and jogging shorts are the garb used upstairs, because of sweaty high temperature that gets up there during the day, even with the central air conditioner heat pump working away outside. And all of my 'seriousness' these days is concerned solely with listening to sonic responses as I play away, testing out ideas. Scientific serious is definately not the way things are going up there, since I am not testing theories, I am testing results, and any theory which can be described are coming ad hoc out of the results of the tests, after the fact of testing an idea and learning something new. THE 'WALK' TESTS ----------------------------------------------------------------- For instance about two weeks ago when playing with the Glen Miller mono tape one afternoon, with the upstairs window open facing a small park behind the house, I was able to walk all the way across the park to the fence of a house on the other side and still hear Glen Miller music coming from the window of the upstairs room, whereas downstairs stepping out the patio door I was not able to hear a thing, nothing whatever, from Glen Miller, until getting to the back gate where I could suddenly start hearing stuff from the open upstairs window now at a pretty high volume. The same for the infamous turbo roar tape entitled GOLDEN FILM THEMES 2. Whereas doing another 'walk' test a few days ago, I could hear sound clearly wrapping down to me from the upstairs room coming out through the window above when standing right at the patio door, and could also hear it all away across the park during 'the walk' to the other fence, even though this time the volume dropped sharply as soon as I got out beyond the garden gate, and stayed low but descernable across the park, unlike before, when the sound was actually quite loud out in the park then began to diminish as I got near the other side. In these instances, variables in the nature of the long distance 'Airframing' in the sound stream were at work, being demonstrated by my walk tests. In summary about this, when the fidelity and tone and MIGHT were better in the music upstairs, so was the 'Airframe' projection of the sound that could be heard forming audibly around the entrancway at the patio door downstairs, even though the further long distance carrying power of the volume was less. STEADY STATE VOLUME ----------------------------------------------------------------- One other thing I have forgotten to mention, is that pretty well all of the experiments since setting up the system in the upstairs room have been done at a volume level of about 50% on the getto blaster. At times I have had to go as high as, say, 70% for a volume on the getto blaster to hear anything easily, (but at that level start to get noticable background hiss) but then inevitably turn down again after re-tuning and re-focusing the room. The lowest volume so far has been around 40%, but typically, these days, the volume is being left untouched at about 50%. At this level of gain, say, 50%, I am powering the two faceplate panels (from the original speaker boxes, plus the oval tweeter, plus the 12 inch woofer, all in open air Mono unison rather than amplified by enclosure resonances. I recall that in days past, last winter, high volume tests in the low rental condo could be conducted with the volume level as low as 25%, using just the two getto blaster enclosure boxes in full stereo as the sound generator sources but assume that perhaps something as irrelavant as the amount of juice in the hydro wires could be a factor, more raw power in the hydro at the low rental condo. For a fact, the hydro there used to fluctuate up and down and at certains times during the day or night could click in an instant to a different level either a big step up or down as some industrial power switch was thrown On or Off at the start of a new shift of workers. The power supply of the computer could suddenly shut down to about half the speed in the morning around 5:30 A.M., as but one example leading to the conjecture of juice in the hydro. But I was careful not to let that cloud my judgement as to volume tests. To wit, more volume without changing the gain (turning the volume knob up) was always a tell-tale that better sonics were getting into the system simply by the techniques of room tuning and its many resulting effects on the sound stream. What was significantly different in those days was there was not even an indication of anything resembling MIGHT or POWER in the sound stream, and whereas in those days seemingly most of my time was spent in trying to coax bottom bass into the sound stream one day to the next, I now have more bottom bass than ever was had last winter, with the added proviso that these days such bottom bass is coming with the Dynamic Bass Expander permanently shut Off, and in 100% Mono, and entirely by tweeters hanging around in pure open air resonance modes. Progress, you see. Little time has been wasted over the past year. Everything was a learning curve. THE 'OHM WATT' GENERATOR ----------------------------------------------------------------- We around here (my twin brother and I) call juice in the hydro wires or speaker responses the 'ohm watts'. Of course there is no such term in hydro. The term was invented 10 years ago when my twin brother first started playing around with an open air resonating speaker approach to improve the sound range of traditional stereo speakers and a demo was set up for a visitor, only at this moment we were still a bit paranoic having just recently stumbled across the principle of open air resonators, so bought a piece of electronic junk from a discount place, probably a piece of circuit from an old mantle radio, and had it sitting beside the Harmon Kardon Amplifier when in came the visitor, the both of us making a big point about the existence of this 'ohm watt generator', pointing to the piece of junk, fake wires coming into it and out of it, not wired to anything in fact, just stuffed into a crevice between resisters to make it look good. Whenever I use the term 'ohm watts' I am usually referring to the amount of juice making its way through the wires at any given moment especially hydro but always remember that little piece of junk sitting there on the ledge set up in such a way that it seemed like the open air resonance discoveries being displayed by that demo couldn't work without it. Just to waylay any misleading impressions, the open air resonators being played with in those days were impossible to operate on their own. They simply hissed and pissed out a totally distorted tinny feeble sound and did scarely anything more, when played on their own. They started with a pair of 5 inch tweeters used to juvinate more open 'air frame' qualities in the output of traditional loudspeakers, when sat elsewhere in a room and pointed toward the loudspeakers, and soon evolved to 8 inch size custom designed woofers being held on upright post stands to resonate entirely in the open air. These tests were abandoned because although they worked to give lots more body to the sound of most loudspeakers, they also added a lot of undesirable coloration into the resulting sound. Hence, attempts to improve on the resonator idea was abandoned for the time being circ. 1983. And then, not most, but ALL of the stereo gear got sold for groceries in bits and pieces over the intervening years. Ergo the Fisher 8400 getto blaster, the first sound system it was possible to later afford. Which, as you may remember if reading from the very start, triggered this whole saga of sonic experiments due to the fact that when the getto blaster was first hooked up in the low rental condo, (after sounding rather impressive in the high tech discount warehouse where it was purchased), it sounded so fierce, so god awful, so unacceptable in the low rental condo, that I desparately began to search around for ways to try and control its awful sound to try and salvage its unrefundable purchase price. And now, experiments are underway upstairs in which the idea of open air resonances has been taken entirely the other way, from those first attempts in the earlier part of the 1980's, Now, all sound generation is by open air resonation and no box or enclosure whatsoever is in the system, and any speaker 'Coloration' is simply tuned out of the sound stream with but a few minutes of careful listening when adjusting the various sonic tuning devices in the upstairs room. Neat, wouldn't you say. This isn't even science, it's fun, especially since the whole thing is being done these days with a system that is 100% Mono to generate the source of the sound stream. INERTIA FREE ACTION - INERTIA IN THE REACTION ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update Cont. September 10, 1992, 4:00 P.M. I find the fact of such Mono very forefront. It makes me think at once of Reality and a much larger picture, for instance one that branches the Cosmos. For instance it seems (unless I am devastatingly mistaken) that the current situation regarding impact vibrations and the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter is more than just a novelty. Unless I am missing half a century, it seems there is a possible demonstration here of a non-inertial system (the oval tweeter) being used to generate very inertial movements of energy (the faceplate that flew off the table, and strong floor and wall vibrations). As said earlier above, the oval woofer when originally first hooked up had a very vigorously moving cone, expecially when slowly turned in the sonic winds by hand to couple more directly (in or out) with more powerful bass waves, the stronger the bass, the more the oval tweeter's cone pumped with vigor, and the more the oval tweeter tended to resist movement as if acting in some ways like a gyroscope. It felt like a big PUMP at work in the inertial action-cum-reaction in the oval tweeter's kicks to the hand with each throw of the cone in the bass waves. Hard, firm, strong, solid, mass moving vibrations, the whole oval woofer moved, as did the hand, vibrating as a unit. This thing felt like a working motor for sure, when hand held and faced in directions of hot sonic responsiveness. Whereas now at this moment in time virtually NO MOTION WHATSOEVER can be seen by the eye for the cone itself, for instance instead of being bounced around at lightening speeds, dust and lint can sit on the cone in a totally dormant state, and I would have to say energy is imperceptibly felt, in that any vibration indicating motion of the cone when the oval woofer is held in the hand, is just marginally discernable at best, the LEAST feeling of energy at all being most involved, when the oval woofer is hand held in a tuning position which most vigorously excites the sound stream. This turnaround in physics over the past two weeks was not intentional and I assume has been due to gradual better and better control of sonic tunings, leading directly to more energetic impact vibrations effecting the cone itself. The lack now of any hand held inertia stemming from action of the cone, is something to think about, because it seems to demonstrate that systems can operate to produce great energy without inertia, but then inertia appears projected elsewhere through some other reaction. And unless I am mistaken, most all mechanical systems are supposed to be directly involved in obvious action-reaction situations fully involving the laws of inertia, except that upstairs a now-inertia-less speaker system is non-the-less producing plenty of inertia, elsewhere, completely away from the speaker masses per se. Its as if a new kind of Newtonian physics is starting to appear in a glow on the horizon. I have daydreamed over the years that assuming UFO sightings (some) are real, how can they work without inertia, changing angles in perfect right angle changes of direction at high speed, for instance, assuming they are not just images of pure light energy but also contain some elements of mass toggled to the third dimensional frame when manifesting. If true, the mechanical physics of such devices (UFO's) has to be different than mechanical physics taught in high schools. And now, here, in these sonic tests, a state of high inertia has been replaced by an inertial free system which nevertheless is generating with greater and greater degrees of sonic POWER. And right in the midst of this INTERESTING SITUATION are impact vibrations at work. Makes you think, doesn't it. It sure has me buzzing with ideas that are difficult to pin down because they are not definative enough to be obvious in self evident truth. I think there is going to be some self evident truths made apparent by such things as the existence of impact vibrations per se. Behind that I sense a whole new level of understanding as to how higher dimensions could in fact operate in Reality and the universe, the standard text book physics approach notwithstanding, because another physics is starting to open up in the eyes and mind and the senses including those that are strictly physical, such as touch, and the aforesaid 'gyroscope' effect, and the recent cancellation of it, as the sound tests get better and better in the Mono in Stereo experiments upstairs. Which raises another question? Firstly, I know that impact vibrations are just as much a part of good traditional stereo, since my twin brother's researches done in the early 80's involved stereo loudspeakers which performed at their best when the cones of the woofers were most absolutely seen by the eye to be completely motionless, immobile. On the other hand, can an inertia-less system be just as hard at work in a genuine full stereo situation, or is this a fact of MONO in the properties of, for instance, sonic behavior? Gee, I don't know at this moment. I think what I do know (entirely by intuition) is that Mono sources can be far more efficient in terms of energy conserved vrs energy wasted. On the other hand, obviously there are times and places when stereo energy sources must be used to gain greater stability, for instance in the moving of a UFO, perhaps. For instance, 3 point stereo, instead of 2 point stereo, to help control the time place and space in the movement of a UFO, the 3 points being for instance equalateral and thus entirely within the principles of a Cube and Sphere. I have to assume that the 'quote' inertia normally to be expected for the oval woofer throwing its weights and torques mightily in the winds, held in the hand in the energetic vigorous vibratings of the bass wave responses, is being sublimated elsewhere, for instance perhaps taken up as extra by the walls and floor vibrations, and so is still in the system nevertheless, even though displaced completely away from its source, when impact vibrations are at work. I am beginning to wonder if impact vibrations can be at work in other systems, for instance in magnetic fields. Why not. No one can say no to that idea unless they can demonstrate a positive answer that is obvious in self evident truth. PEACE JOY AND HAPPINESS. R.S. LIVINGSTONE Orleans, Ottawa, Ontario. September 7, 1992. MIGHT IN THE RIGHT SOUND OF A TV ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 14, 1992. 1:30 A.M. An old re-run of the MOD SQUAD is on the TV. I have to tell you something about this. The TV set is in the living room (its the old 23 year old Quasar with one 4 inch tweeter its entire sound source). It is sitting back and around the corner from where I am sitting at the computer typing in the small dining room. Through big doorways both to the hall immediately to the left, and directly behind into the kitchen, are large room areas. Off to the left of the kitchen (actually the end of the main hall, is a big opening into the living room area, at the back of which are found the patio doors leading to the back yard and the small park beyond. If I got up and go to the left into the large hall, turn left a few feet then turn right, then turn facing toward the far rear corner to the left, I will be looking straight at the TV set. There is a main portion of the living room wall, plus the walls and door opening of the dining room, separating me and the TV set. And yet, at this moment, I can hear people on the TV as if people are talking in the livingroom, there is no flat compressed artificiality in the sound, just, of course, some coloration as if the people are talking in a room with the kind of echoes you get when talking in a room made of tin walls. Just a minute... ...I have just measured the distance to it. The TV set is 25 paces away from this chair at the computer, which makes it about 25 feet away, the way I count paces. The point is that here at the computer I can still hear the MOD SQUAD very clearly, though not at the same volume. In this episode, the Mod Squaders are out on the desert in a bad wind storm and seek shelter from an old timer who suggests an old mine shaft. So there they hole up. However, the old timer has a gripe about his son getting killed in the war whereas types like the Mod Squaders avoided the draft, so they are responsible for the old timer's son's death, which is why he has to set off the dynamite, sealing the Mod Squaders in the mine shaft. Ironically, this is a most excellent sound track for sonic tests, long distance echo effects, 3D surroundarama in the sound and so on. For that is what I am testing tonight, and reporting to you in this up to the minute Update. However, I wish to continue 'a walk' test first to bring you up to speed as to how this MOD SQUAD sound track is 'Airframing', at this moment. If I walk left to the wide hall and turn to the right, it is ten feet to the stairs. Up the stairs and 18 feet back along the upstairs hall takes me into the upstairs room where sound tests have been taking place. In the upstairs room I can still hear the Mod Squad sound track. The sonic volume takes a drop as I turn to the right and start along the downstairs main corridor, but stays a little less than approximately the same as I head up the stairs and walk along the upstairs hall for about 6 feet, where the sonic volume takes another drop, then stays roughly the same until I actually enter into the upstairs room, where I can still hear the TV set downstairs in the living room but not nearly so clearly or fidelically, nevertheless I can still hear it coming not through the floors, or through the walls, but along the corridor, wrapping its way the long way out of the livingroom and up the stairs and back down the long hall. Otherwise, for instance, if attempting to sleep in my room right next to the upstairs room, with the TV on downstairs, in days past the TV sound comes entirely through the floor, there has been nothing prior to be heard coming through the open air up the stairs from the livingroom itself. Also, tonight, for the very first time, I heard some MIGHT in the sound of this old TV set. I never before suspected for an instant that the old thing had such stuff in it. TWO NEW SONIC TESTS TRYING OUT SOME IDEAS HAVE WORKED ----------------------------------------------------------------- What has happened in the last 48 hours is this: Two days ago, late at night, taking some time off to watch what junk may be on TV now that the cablevision is working (it was like the Bruce Springsteen song - '57 Channels And Nothing On'), but, the opportunity was there to try the two new three-piece six sided paper Mobiles downstairs in the livingroom, to see how they might effect the sound of the TV. So downstairs came the two paper Mobiles, still mounted upright on the two home-made mike stands, and after a bit of random checking of locations around the room were duely positioned in what seemed duely deemable as suitable hot spots, a roughly equalatoral triangle was the resulting array with the two paper Mobiles, the 4 inch tweeter portal on the TV being the apex of the triangle. The sonic boost of the sound stream was so impressive, specially in now being able to crank up the volume without the sound breaking up or rattling, that I went ahead and spent the next night making another pair of Mobiles, only bigger. A couple of days earlier, it happened that a Minolta copier we were finally able to arrange on a lease for our Anti-virus Software business was set up in the dining room, sitting off to my right by the window. This is a jazzy machine with up to 200% percent magnification along with 50% reduction. And so, out came the template for the paper Mobiles (about 9 inches in diameter across its narrower face, and I used the Minolta to magnify it a to single piece maximum, to about 11 inches across the smaller diameter, which was a 1.20 times increase, to produce a larger template, which I then used to cut a new paper Mobile. Then instead of making a second, changed the design of the inner hexagon of the template slightly to make its end points more an actual Star Of David rather than merely another hexagram within a hexagram, and made the second paper Mobile in this new matrix. There was no question; since the apparent sonic effect was immediate; that the new matrix produced a much better overall sonic response. My twin brother heard it as an obvious improvement in the mid range. What I actually heard was a major jump in the 3D sonic effects of the sound of the TV, which axiomatically resulted in an increase in the discrete audibility of the mid range sounds. What was on at the moment my twin brother volunteered a few moments of experimental time to 'A or B' test the two different kinds of Mobile matrixes, was a Blue Jays baseball game. I reached forward and cranked the volume a WAY up, far beyond what could be concidered reasonable for normal TV viewing, so I could hear more, hear better. What was heard in the 'A or B' sound test was that the stadium roar, in the background behind the announcer's voice, changed. In the first test involving Mobile 'A' (the original Mobile matrix used to make a larger Mobile), there was a wall of stadium sound behind the announcer which became more fidelic when the 'A' Mobile was set in place on the home-make mike stand. But when the second Mobile, the 'B' version made from a modified template featuring a Star of David in its midsection rather then another hexagram, a difference in the sound of the baseball game was immediately heard the momement the 'B' Mobile was set up on the hand-made mike stand. The giant stadium sound wall behind the announcer's voice moved back and spread out to become an image of a GIANT STATIUM beyond the announcer. All of a sudden you could hear distinct single voices yelling and echoing from the crowd from nearby as well as long ways off, into the announcer's mike, and involving all this the greater roar of the prevailing throng of spectators, and so on. Space opened up and became the huge distance reaching away toward tiny people on the far side of the stadium. This huge deep space was real, not imaged. It had existed in the single monochrome white noise typical roar of background stadium noise, now it had just opened up to become the stadium itself, in 3d, blah blah blah. The point is; Principle confirmed! A better conducer was found to be in the design of the 'B' Mobile, in which the conducing led to a more authentic sonic texture in the sound stream, in particular giving the test the extra heavy duty roar of a live baseball game heard with the volume of the TV set cranked sky high, with the throng of spectators filling the stadium heard as the announcer must hear it, live and hoary with the roar of many voices blended as one, a sound board of an instrument the size of the stadium itself, in fact. Only I didn't see the full size of the stadium in that sound image, but certainly far more than ever before the roar of such a mighty crowd all rooting for the batter to score a homer for the Blue Jays, raising the hair on the batter with every pitch. It was that extra discernment in the dissolving of the solid homogenous wall of sound behind the announcer which my twin brother immediately picked up on as definately an improvement in the mid range. This interested him, and is the reason why it was instantly noted, since mid-range sounds can often be the most difficult to control or bring out in experimenting with the designs of loudspeakers. Mid range would include violas in a symphony orchestra, and often enough, even on a really GOOD pair of stereo speakers, even in, say, the $7,000 dollar class, the violas can be more a blending into the mix of other instruments, rather than strong resonating sound sources on their own. We learned this back in the early 80's doing sound tests featuring open air resonators coupled into sound streams generated by both cheap, and expensive, speakers. What was learned then, was that (for instance) in the sound track of Star Treck Movies 1 11 and 111 the sound track featured giant sound sections (for instance associated with the Kinglons), which on cheap radios or a cheap stereo system sound like the overpussed workings of electronic music special effects, but when heard in a proper sonic setting, turn out to be huge batteries of sound generated by non other than violas and chellos going full tilt in a symphonic orchestra. For that matter, as far as we could tell, no electronic special effects were used in those Star Treck Movie sound tracks, ALL of the score was done by symphony orchestra, which I found, at that time, verrry interesting. The point was, we were using a pair of $7,000 ADS Studio Monitor audiophile speakers for reference tests at that time, and could fool a listener into believing a better sound they heard was coming from these, rather than from a pair of specially designed small boxes with just an 8 inch woofer and 4 inch tweeter in each enclosure, and no crossover relays or flat curve response, hand built by my brother in testing new ideas he had for enclosures with tunable open ports. The significant point being that these boxes were able to handle the mid range in a far more noticable manner than the ADS Studio Monitors, hence the reason the listeners were easy to fool. The sound of the ADS Studio Monitors was otherwise so big and impressive in its own right that you wouldn't know major ingredients in the sound of the ADS was missing until you kicked in either a pair of our open air resonators, or our single box pair. (Our pair did not have the bass in terms of solid deep sound, but had most of the range, the rest of the range kicking in in the presence of the open air resonators, though still nowhere as powerful sounding as the bass of the ADS Studio Monitors though in many ways substantially more authentic, except for the native strong volume of really big bass sources which the ADS Studio Monitors were famous for. However, I am rambling, which is not good, because there is quite a bit more to do to report the last 24 hours. All I wanted to do in the preceeding long winded blowout was to reveal a little bit more regards having had a hand in speaker testings before, even though those test from before (circ. the early to mid 80's) were nothing like the kind of tests going on at this moment. In fact that whole time (circ. early to mid 1980's) mono was concidered only good for Bo Bo and his best friend Longstockings. So, back to the Update. Upon the success of the 'B' Matrix Mobile, I made another, using a different media. The first was made of artist's water color paper, the second from three square sheets of plastic sold in a crafts store for making templates for crocheting, painting patterns on tee shirts, whatever. The plastic was very tough to cut with an Exacto knife (even though guaranteed on the package to be cutable by scissars therefore suitable for granny's). The plastic was hard to cut by scissars and even harder to cut accurately) by Exacto knife, so several hours passed to cut the templated pieces, and another hour to try and assemble this plastic Mobile, since once cut the plastic had little intrinsic strength so eventually I had to resort to running a copper wire up the center to give the whole Mobile some extra support. Even so, the thing sounded shitty when tried. The moment it was set up on one of the home-made mike stands you could hear a whole bunch of stuff disappear in the sound stream, stuff which instantly came back the moment the plastic Mobile was removed and the smaller paper Mobile originally carted from upstairs was returned in place. Good enough. Another variable has been pinned down. Paper works better than plastic. Another variable was also determined at the same time; that rough paper (the artist's water color paper) works better than smooth paper (the stamp album paper). So here it is now, late in the evening tonight, and I am sitting in the living room watching TV for an hour (neither of us felt we had anything to do), and I am playing with a few small objects on the table beside the chair, twist tuning and touching them by large and small and extremely small amounts, listening to higher (better) sonic qualities come and go quite literally as clicks of sound switching in and out of the sound stream, as I touch tap things as mundane as a piece of paper. (The 23 year old Quasar TV plays in the corner of the living room, in front of which sit I half way back in the room). Which started me thinking that it is too bad that the very best ingredients in the TV's sound stream at this moment are coming from extremely small almost imperceptable light touches to a few random objects in the room. Why can't I have some main way to gain a major boost so that the sound stream can stablize beyond the point of having to spend the whole of my time touch tuning objects so lightly it is as if I am not even touching them, as the minutes and hour passes. An idea occurred. Up the stairs I went to get the little 1 1/2 inch Sony wafer-thin tweeter, plus the consol for the Fisher 8400 getto blaster. Here is the situation: the idea is based on the fact that the sound of channel 3 (Global TV) comes over local FM at FM frequency 87.7, right at the far extreme left (hence lowest possible end) of the FM radio band. So the idea is to simply switch to channel 3, and hook up the getto blaster to the 1 1/2 inch wafer-thin tweeter, and mount it in the middle of the 'B' version paper Mobile using copper wire independently wrapped around the shaft of the home-made mike stand, and so test the wafer thin tweeter as an open air resonator to see what it does to the sound stream of the TV set. What it does to the sound stream of the TV set is what I have already described, under topic 'MIGHT IN THE SOUND OF THE TV' at the start of this update. Besides the 'Airframing' facts newly gained at once by this experimental innovation, something else was gained, which I can now report for the very first time. Here is the picture. Before turning ON the thin wafer tweeter, the sound picture and all of its sonics were coming from the vacinity of the TV and the corner of the room behind it. As so far excited with the paper Mobiles in place in an equatorial triangle array, normal rumbles and rough stuff, distortions, rattles, and the like, in the TV's sound, had opened up into bottom bass and echoes, and the like, and sonic depth, with no rattles or distortions effecting the resulting sound. What happened when the tiny wafer tweeter was turned ON, is that a still present rumble-like presence in the sound MOVED OUT INTO THE ROOM, and became echoes all around the room. What's more, within these new echos was an entirely different ingredient in the sound. What could suddenly now be heard as plain as day was indication of MIGHT in the TV's sound stream. I can now describe 'MIGHT' with a few more terms of description. For instance, a heavy duty rock band can still sound powerful, even if from a long distance away hence at major reduced volume. I can now tell this ingredient regards such rock bands even if used as background noise for a beer commercial. The thing is, there are things in the sound you can still tell are being made by a mighty strong band. On normal TV sound NOTHING whatever of such might can be sensed or intimated in the TV's sound. Even with the paper Mobiles in place, the sound range, and power of the sound range expecially the bass range, was dramatically increased, as was the distinct sonic nature as a 3D sense in the sound. The MIGHT came into the picture when a whole range of echoing effects in the sound stream existing as a somewhat homogenous thing in the background wall of the 3D sonic sound, suddenly MOVED OUT INTO THE ROOM, surrounding me with transient echos, with the sound still focused toward the front but now moved out and beyond the corner. There I was standing in the ambience of more real SOUND, the ambiance surrounding me in the room being what I have come to call 'MIGHT'. I could sense right away that for instance, at the first moment the MIGHT was heard, that the band doing the background sound for a commercial was a powerfully strong rock band, not just toy musicians playing in a little box of a studio. These guys were stirring turd with single minded intent. Right now I would like to have a golden tongue, to be able to say in a few choice words what has been lineally laid out in the preceeding long paragraphs. Sometimes the golden words are there, sometimes not. Tonight is a not night, but the thoughts are there clear enough to be able to write about them into the computer, so thanks for the clearities of the thoughts but sorry for the long windedness. A QUICK SUMMARY ----------------------------------------------------------------- I wish to summarize with a remark. More and more it is becoming self evident that a great deal of information is inherent in any sound no matter how it was recorded or put together. For instance in the sound track of the MOD SQUAD it was ridiculously easy to hear that revolving drums made of canvass (more than one was used) were being frantically hand cranked by sweating studio grunts, to produce the sound effects supposed to substitute for howling winds in a storm on the desert, which stranded the Mad Squatters, ahem sorry, Mod Squaders. In another special effect, the bad guy (the derranged old timer shouting down an air shaft into the sealed mine to taunt the trapped Mod Squatters, was actually shouting into a long culvert, or piece of oil pipeline pipe with a mike at the other end, so that the result was an echo effect that was authentically an echo down a shaft on the sound track of the Mod Squad, but in the hightened clarities of what I can now hear coming from the TV, the echo of the shouts was obviously not authentically from being piped down a long mine shaft to the listening Mod Squaders, it was strickly a studio special effect done with a few feet of culvert pipe. You can now clearly hear sound track stuff that was recorded live, on the spot, with mikes picking up the rustles of clothing, and the grunts of actors breathing as they move around and try to pretend a paper mache rock is heavy, vrs sound later dubbed in a sound booth, the sound booth dubs clearly being done in a small boxed room, the original clearly being done in a large open studio, or out in the open outdoors. These qualities of sound can no longer be hidden by disguise by the sound engineers working knobs to effect a wanted simulated sound for the show (in this case the Mod Squad episode). In my living room settup for the TV, you can unmistakably hear WHAT THE ORIGINAL SOUND WAS, no matter how it was attempted to be disguised, leading to some rather foolish sounding sound track special effects, to say the least. So, in a short summary, is the observation that original characterists of ORIGINATING sound are still trapped forever on the resulting media, after the fact of recording, no matter the recording media, or no matter the special alterations used by studio sound engineers to disguise the source of an original sound. And secondly, the original sound can be re-created as a RESULTING sound, more or less irrespective of the generating source used to create the resulting sound stream. For instance, in the experiments herein being reported, I am legally using only a 4 inch tweeter enclosed in a TV cabinate, and a flat 1 1/2 inch wafer as an open air resonator, to generate all of the sound I hear at this moment, including volume levels well beyond anything the TV set was ever designed to produce, plus range well beyond anything the TV producers or makers of commercials thought possible. Give or take a few iotas, I hear EVERYTHING. So the toys generating the sound stream don't matter. And so it seems I can also make the claim that the generators for the source of the sound stream can be ANYTHING. At least anything within reason. And yet, how much without reason is a 4 inch tweeter, and a 1 1/2 inch square flat mylar resonator, producing a sound stream that has a most noticable 'Airframe' long distance carrying quality. Just one moment. I'm back. I just did another 'walk test'. This time, instead of going upstairs again I went out the patio door, out across the back the yard, through the gate, and more than half way across the small park before I reached a point where I was no longer convinced that I could hear sound from the TV other than in partial fits and starts. I should mention that at this very moment the volume is set at about normal for the way TV is watched around here late at night. Something every interesting about this sound as I went out the through the back door (the patio) and out the gate. The sound I could hear was still STRONG and vibrating, its sonic STRENGTH for instance in the form of sonic booms did not diminish, even (though the volume did) almost right out to the point where I called it a stop for 'The Walk' test. From there, where I could no longer guarantee hearing ALL sound from the TV, I paced back into the house and right up to the TV set. It was 98 paces, ie., 98 feet, 82 of those feet outside in the wide open air with no houses blocking the projection. Deep booms on the TV sound track were still heard as deep booms outside beyond the gate 98 feet away from the TV. Now, here is a wrinkle. That, the immediate paragraph above, is only with HALF the system in place. Since Global TV (channel 3 went OFF the air about half an hour ago I had to turn off the wafer-thin open air resonator mounted within the center area of the inner Star Of David in the large model 'B' paper Mobile. I have forgotten to mention that sonic snowflakes are still very much a part of the master ingredient to coax authentic information out of the sound stream. This premise was quickly tested tonight. During the previous two days a single sonic snowflake has been sitting in a sonic hot spot on one of the book shelves, and a giant snowflake mounted on a small hand made copper wire stand has been tried sitting in several different locations around the living room, both sonically focused with regard to their effect on the sound of the TV set. At the moment it is sitting on a glass topped end table roughly straight back from the TV set's speaker in position near the back opposite corner in the living room, to be in roughly a diamond configure incorporting the two paper Mobiles. There doesn't seem to be any one good spot for the giant snowflake, several seem to be okay, but these spots are rather exact in the room, I have so far found nowhere else that will do to produce anything better. However these few spots are real cookers. Currently, a real good cooker is where I have just told you, on the glass topped end table. That the giant sonic snowflake works was tested by the simple expediency of finding a hot spot standing in the room while holding the giant snowflake in my hand facing it focused to the tweeter of the TV set, then whipping the giant snowflake under my tee shirt, then whipping it back out into the open. A 3D effect in the sound stream vanished, and reappeared, on the instant. There is no question that part of the effect that opens up the sound (in this case of course 100% mono since it is coming from the old TV) into a sense of having 3D sonics, is imparted by the crystal facetings inherent in the design of the sonic snowflake, and the giant snowflake design consisting of 13 single snowflakes glued together in a hexagonal array which looks like in fact an abstract snowflake. I don't know how to adequately state the difference between the 3D sonic effect and the absence of it except to suggest listening to something in stereo, then holding a hand over one ear. This still won't tell you. For instance you can still tell that footsteps are echoing across a large room even though the stereo image will be gone and the sound is flat. But take away the snowflakes, and the sound instead of being footsteps echoing in a large room, could be only the approximates of footsteps, being perhaps taps, or ticks, but not richocheting with long distance echos as from heavy feet from the other side of a large room. For instance with the added influence of the square 1 1/2 inch wafer thin tweeter resonating in the open air, the snowflakes can change the sound to tell you if the footsteps were made by tiny fake objects in a dinky sound lab somebody runs in their back room to produce cheap sound effects for TV or film, or whether the footsteps are the actual recording of someone walking across a large room. Without the snowflakes it would be harder if not impossible to tell. Well, maybe the above paragraph is not correct. However, since it is now 6:45 A.M. I was able to turn the TV back to Global (channel 3) since it is back on the air, and also turn on the 1 1/2 wafer resonating in the open air within the center area of the large new paper Mobile, and do a quick 'A or B' test with and without the giant snowflake effecting the sound stream and heard a definative effect. There was on the TV a cartoon mentality male doing a commercial for a cartoon show for the network, and with vrs without the snowflake (I shoved the giant snowflake under my tee shirt for the without) was able to tell that the cartoon mentality man was standing some feet back from the recording mike when making the commercial. Without the giant snowflake (the giant snowflake under my tee shirt) there was his voice back there in the sound image of the TV, some 3D sonics in effect notwithstanding. But with the giant snowflake faced into the sound stream, I could hear something more, I could actually hear that he had been standing several feet back from the mike when jabbering loudly. I would have had no way of knowing, except by the quick 'A or B' test and the quickness of the change in sound in result, with the giant snowflake. In normal listening, for instance to a conversation, you can tell if a person is standing a few feet from you, or farther back speaking at a louder volume even though the decibles reaching your ear would be the same from either voice sources. This perhaps is one of the ingredients effected by the sonic snowflakes, that spacial separation, even though decibles are the same, the spacial separation results in different surrounding ambiant echoes the further back the voice, despite similarities in volume. Ah, anyway, that pretty well covers the turf for tonight's burst of experiments and observations. Tomorrow the plan is to try the two 4 inch tweeters from the getto blaster in a total open air fashion (unscrewed from the faceplates) and hanging dangling completely on their own from the garden stakes, to see if there is still enough juice in the sound stream (still enough Ohm/Watts) to set up recurrent resonances to produce a sound stream I can play with. My hope, or expectation, will be that there is, though probably requiring more gain in the volume knob, unless I can also click into more POWER in the MIGHT range of the resonances, in which case maybe LESS gain in the volume will be the result. I will let you know, one way or the other. The intent is to pursue the possibilities of ALL total open air resonances as being BEST for regenerating an original sound stream. To wit, decoupling the two 4 inch tweeters from the inertial mass of their faceplates will either result in improved sonics, or not. I don't yet know but if forced to bet would nudge on the side of better sonics being the result when uncoupled from the inertial mass of the faceplates. Till tomorrow. THAT AFTERNOON ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 14, 1992. 1:10 P.M. A postscript... The setup downstairs is going to get temporarily dissolved as I move back upstairs to the upstairs room. So one last test was in order. I cranked up the TV right to the top, hard over, no more turns. Mostly before this TV set could never take more than about 1/3 volume at most. I also cranked up the volume for the Fisher 8400 getto blaster to a gain level of 45%. It was feeding via the Left Channel the 1 1/2 inch SONY thin square wafer open air resonator. And felt uncomfortable in the loud volume. This kind of volume can get you charged in the neighborhood for noise pollution due to rock and roll stereo playing at top volume from a balcony or patio. Only, this wasn't that, it was the 4 inch tweeter in the TV set, and the 1 1/2 inch wafer, horking away as if Leadbelly's stereo set had just been brought to town and moved out to my place. Since the patio door was wide open I went for a 'walk test', straight out the patio door, out the garden gate, and straight out across the small park to the backyard fences on the other side, a distance of 138 feet, and could still hear the TV set loud and clear though at a reduced volume. I tried walking laterally out there by about 50 feet and could still hear it, so straight line projection out the door was not the total effect. To double check, to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, witnesses were in order. This turned out to be the neighbor next door, she walked out to the middle of the park and stood there listening. What is it I am supposed to hear?, she asked. The volume of the TV set, I replied, (the volume was loud indeed, though not cranked all the way to the top, at this moment), it is all coming from a little 4 inch tweeter on the TV set, plus a tiny 1 1/2 inch wafer resonator, I continued. The TV set is 23 years old and normally you could not turn up its volume anywhere near this level before the sound completely broke up into rattles and pissing and utter chaotic noise. Yes, I can hear it out here, she said, and went back inside her place, the demo done. Thus marks another milestone in the sonic experiments, the volume of a neighborhood disturbing Rock and Roll stereo set, produced by the ridiculous dinky tweeter of a 23 year old TV set, kick assed by a 1 1/2 inch wafer thin tweeter by SONY resonating in the open air, conduced into stable high powered matrixes by two paper hand-made six sided Mobiles. And the sonic snowflakes to add real live presence to the sound stream. Some technology is starting to get pinned down, after 13 1/2 months of experimenting. End of Postscript. INERTIA FREE ACTION IN ALL OF THE EMBODIMENTS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 15, 1992, 2:10 P.M. I have another test ready to cart upstairs and set up. But first a quick resume of another brief experiment done later yesterday. Sure enough, it was as I suspected, when I devised a metal hook using stiff 13 1/2 guage copper wire which could be used to suspend in free open air one of the 4 inch tweeters removed from one of the getto blaster faceplates. In setting it up upstairs late last night several things were learned at once. Firstly, the open air speaker entirely on its own without the frame (HENCE WITHOUT THE INTERIA OF THE FACEPLATE) worked, better in fact than I thought it would. It happened that the infamous 'turbo roar' tape was in the machine so I used it for a quick ten minutes of experiments, leading to enough new insight for more work getting ready for today's tests. The quick test yesterday afternoon was done without the paper Mobiles, which turn out seemingly to be able to stablize power as in power of volume, for instance super high volume of the TV set downstairs was gained by setting up the paper Mobiles in the living room. So, at this moment, the following report is without the paper mobiles, they are not in use in the upstairs room at this moment. In its new embodiment, hanging suspended by a metal hook from a short garden stake, the weight of the voice coil magnet of the 'free-air' tweeter from the getto blaster caused it to hang jutting out at an angle. When I first hooked it up to the Left channel of the getto blaster and played it on its own, (just it was working) two things were instantly apparent in the resulting sound stream: 1. The resulting sound stream was much more fidelic. 2. There was no bass. What bass there was was nothing but a pok pok pok. In comparing A to B; hooking up the Right hand speaker (a faceplate), then the Left again, both to the Left hand channel of the getto blaster; it was instantly apparent that all of the puky distortions, the spitting, the fracturing, the noise I had been contending with all along, was inherent in the faceplate speaker, (which was also producing some bass albiet muddy sounding) but such noise was mostly gone from the freely hanging open air tweeter that was now free of the kind of inertia still being imparted into the Right hand speaker due to it being screwed tightly to the mass of the faceplate. However, I was not over the hill, with this new embodiment. It could literally start rapping at high speed, producing no usable fidelity. In and out of these phases, phases were found where the bass was a loud pok pok pok. Otherwise generally the fidelity was excellent. A major problem solved in a single stroke - the puky distortion had always been there but was one of the ingredients I had been able to suppress by judicious and careful tuning and retuning of the room during any tests, now that crap was gone. But no bass, at first. At first I noticed that in playing around with the 'inertia-free' version (the Left hand speaker, which I shall now call an 'inertia-free', or 'free-air' tweeter), there was conciderable activity respecting the cone. It was pumping like a piston with vigor such as I hadn't seen since when first hooking up the oval 8 by 5 inch tweeter about three weeks ago. When hooking in the other two speakers, the 12 inch woofer and 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter, some bass came into the system, but so did far more excitement in the cone of the 'free-air' tweeter. I mean, in turning this 'free-air' speaker around slowly, the vigor of the pumping cone decreased, or expanded, through focal nodes, to such an extent that at times the entire sound from it could dissolve into nothing but a 'R A P P'. What was obvious was that despite a loud POCKING for the bass, the new 'free-air' tweeter was producing, say, at least 100% improved fidelity over that of the other getto blaster tweeter still hanging suspended in the getto blaster's faceplate. The new embodiment had a much cleaner sound, to end the report. Oh, I forgot to mention, there was MORE volume, not less, when the 'free-air' tweeter was working by itself as compared to the faceplate tweeter working by itself. Not much more volume, but nevertheless more. So, what might I do to contend with the lack of bass, and the vigorusly throwing cone of the 'free-air' tweeter. Tipping it to hang perfectly vertical didn't work. It did much the same, pocked and rapped, with a little more distortion overall. It turned out that tipping it at an angle upward helped. It was found that tipped all the way to be almost horizontal but actually at about 30 degrees from the horizontal, and carefully twist tuned back and forth, a sonic hot spot in the focusing was found where the cone's pumping vanished into it being rock solid immobile-seeming in impact vibrations, and BASS welled forth, far more than was being produced via the inertial input of the Right hand speaker still screwed within its hanging faceplate. So that was the getting ready for this afternoon's tests, devising some means to be able to support the 'free-air'tweeter in a horizontal position tilted at about 30 degrees from the horizontal in the sound stream. A support means was made by a second piece of 13 1/2 inch copper wire, wrapped around the wooden garden stake and sticking out with a hook bent by plyers on the end to cradle the tweeter upright. In fact, the combined support means to hang the tweeter from a hook, plus strut it out into space horizontally, have combined to make a rather very stable support cradle overall. Merely bending the copper wire by small amounts should allow me to tilt the tweeter to any angle. So it was time to make a second support cradle for the other tweeter after removing it from its faceplate. The theory was good, the practice lousy, the stake broke in half. Ohh wowee what a short circuit. Today it was out the door and across the boulevard to the new gigantic White Rose Garden Center which had just opened only 5 days ago. It had only thin plastic garden stakes, and thick bamboo garden stakes, but NOTHING resembling the pencil thin sized stake I was using. Well, as luck would have it, the next door neighbor had a bamboo garden stake in the garage which was about exactly the same thickness as the one I was using, so now I have a second cradle made for a second 'free-air' tweeter for the Right hand member of the equalatoral triangle array upstairs, and am now ready to try the new system assembly. This time, all parts of the assembly will be entirely inertia free, in that NO parts of the sound stream generating aspect of it will be attached in any way to any inertial mass; no faceplates, no enclosures, no magnets kissing metal, nothing, the entire generating apparatus will be via open air responses totally. Ergo ANY sound stream responses can only be by sonic resonance effects projecting long distances away from the generators. I am predicting more BASS than before from the glimpses indicated in a few minutes of testing upstairs yesterday afternoon, and also that the greater bass responses will come in when the tweeters are focused via their copper wire cradles into near horizontal upward tilt, so that impact vibrations take control and there will be no visible motion of the speaker cones. If these two predictions happen, then I will have just specified two salient points comprising a theory of sonic reproduction in reality. I may be suprised; using two 'free-air' tweeters it may be that cancellation of piston fighting (instead of re-enforcing) by the sound stream may come into the picture, with the tweeters hanging vertically rather than cradled out in the air horizontally, but who knows until I actually find out. Oh, one other thing is going to be tested. In playing around yesterday afternoon, it seemed that certain fidelities improved if I lightly touched my finger to the cone of the 'free-air' tweeter, after it was focused in a sonic setting so that impact vibrations were in control and there was no visible motion of the cone. So, to test this observation, I have placed six thin strips of masking tape in a six sided array on the cone of one of the 'free-air'tweeters, and will do an A or B test to see which 'free-air' tweeter produces the best overall or fidelic sound. Here goes, be back in a few minutes. First test is completed. The 'free-air' tweeters are better without the masking tape strips. There is more high pitched stridency, more muffled bass, and less mid range (such as whap of the snare drum), in the tweeter doctored with masking tape. I tried both speakers cradled in the free air in a proper upright support stand and thought there was more high frequency hiss and piss in the doctored tweeter, so to double check just simply placed them on the mahogany panel door being used for a table, letting the door act as a sound board (since it is hollow inside boosting the bass range), and ran both speakers first one then the other then the first back and forth using one of the more infamous turbo roar tracks on the turbo roar tape, this being the James Bond "Diamonds Are Forever' theme. It was clear that, all things being equal, the undoctored tweeter plainly sounded different, better. My twin brother just arrived home. He'd made a remark the other day that hanging a tweeter entirely in the open air probably wouldn't work because such a tweeter just couldn't produce bass responses, technically impossible. This was not an arguement, just a comment. I rejoined that room tuning by the sonic snowflake devices upstairs had changed things around so that I should get bass. No other comment passed between us. So today just a moment ago, while waiting for coffee to brew we went upstairs. First demo was to hook up the tweeter by itself still sitting on the table, and me commenting that the table being used as a sound board is why we could hear strong BASS in the James Bond theme song. Then I set the tweeter into the cradle comprised of copper wire supports jutting from the thin garden stake stuck upright in holes in a copper wire empty coil being used all along for temporary stands, and there was more fideily, and me just touching the now 'free-air' tweeter slightly, produced magnification in sound with me stepping back saying, and now, there, we have bass drums, (way more bass than with the tweeter lying flat on the sound board mahogany door). And I hadn't done a thing otherwise yet, the other resonators were not hooked in, and there has been no new room tuning, this is just the single 4 inch tweeter working by itself. End of demo. We went downstairs for the coffee. The system works!. No bass - the theory! Plenty of bass - the fact! And now I have a lot more testing to do - hooking up the second 'free-air' tweeter, room tuning the sonic devices, carting the paper Mobiles back upstairs and setting them up again. Playing around with variables. The point is that already I have far more fidelity and far more bass than ever before achieved with a single speaker, and I haven't even started to do sonic refocusing yet. Oh boy this is getting interesting. Oh, I should mention, in the test just done with twin brother upstairs observing, the sound image was in a large image area in the room, and not merely a tiny object in front of the 'free-air'tweeter. There was in fact a difference, plenty of sound could be heard eminating from the 'free-air' tweeter when standing close to it, unlike the situation with the hanging faceplate version. But in the overall, there was a bigger, cleaner, more fidelic, more roomy in resonances, sound stream in the room itself. I am just going upstairs for a moment to check for imaging, I never thought to check if 3D stereoscopic images were happening with the single 'free-air' tweeter the only resonator generating the sound stream. Here goes, be back in a moment. I'm back. I tested just the 4 inch tweeter on the garden stake. No question there is sonic dispersion. I use the word dispersion because you can hear sounds coming from a region to the left, and different sounds coming from a region to the right, the regions separated by a maximum of say up to six feet, but no distinct precise pristine point sourceness in the large sound image. For the stereo image test I put on the 'Mood For Swing' cassette tape, since this features a large orchestra with tracks including large choruses of vocalists and seems to have been recorded in on-stage embodiment as an entirety (rather than as singles in a sound booth with instruments and vocals then superimposed over a same central spot in the studio engineers concept of a sound image). IN THE MOOD FOR SWING, manufactured and distributed by Diamond Records limited, 50 Bullock Drive, Markhan. Ont. DB4 82205. Another thing just observed, is that at this moment a rather large bodied sound can be heard coming from the 4 inch 'free-air' tweeter itself when standing close to it, not unlike standing in the vacinity of an ordinary large speaker enclosure for a normal stereo system. When moving back to about a perimeter of 3 feet, the sound image suddenly jumps entirely back into a larger area along the wall behind the 'free-air' resonator, and thins out, that is, the sonics and ranges are still there but not dominantly up front in front of your face as when standing close by a sound source, for instance a live jazz orchestra, as opposed to getting back beyond the perfomance perimeter and listening in the audience. In fact, upstairs, the sonic live sound presence of being a performer fades most noticably when stepping out of the performance perimeter of the 'free-air' tweeter. At this moment there tends to be quite a bit of 'speaker' coloration coming and going in the sound stream, either changed, or dissolved, by discrete touches of the support stand structure, or changes in the tilting of the cradled 'free-air' resonator. This change may be tough rather than easy to control. Huge gains vrs huge diminishments are coming and going in the overall sound stream just by the tiniest of adjustments. I had to fiddle a bit with the copper wire cradle supports, which took more than five minutes to achieve just to change the support angle slightly. So there is a fundamental weakness in the experimental picture at this moment - a difficult to control cradle method. Otherwise.... There will be more to report on an ongoing bases for sure. Signing off for the moment. I'm back. I just went upstairs and set up the Right hand 'free-air' tweeter then hooked it up to the Left hand channel so that both were working in 100% Mono off the Left channel of the getto blaster, then stepped back out of the performance perimeter, and presto! there was the In The Mood For Swing Orchestra in FULL STEREO. Yes folks there it was the left side instruments over there at the left, the right side instruments over there at the right, and the middle instruments right there in the middle. The thing about intuition is that often you don't know until after the fact that the thing you did before the fact is exactly what was needed during the fact. And here it turned out to be an entirely serendipitous situation, that exactly the way the 'free-air' tweeters had been mounted and intuitionally positioned, before turning on the system, and exactly the position I stepped back into to listen, combined to produce the full stereophonics of the orchestra, for the moment I laid hands on one of the 'free-air' tweeters away went the full stereo back into dispersion only, and so a saga ensued attempting to get back full stereophonics, which was found to be a very head in the vice situation, ie., move a foot this way, or that way, and the full stereophonic effect either appeared or vanished. NONE THE LESS ... it is THERE in the sound stream, not any more just one or a few instruments popping up in point source locations but full stereophonic imaging Left to Right as well as front to back. The only thing I can do to fully test this is to either get a tape of a jet flying overhead left to right, say, or go out on the main intersection a block from here with a stereo walkman tape recorder and record traffic going Left/Right, then North/South, then Left/ Right again as the lights change, and try THIS tape upstairs to see how much illusion and dillusion, or truth in fact, is happening. One thing to do with such a test is to also record with one mike only (instead of full stereo) to see how much difference might be heard in a genuine 100% Mono playback source vrs a stereo tape played through one channel, if any difference could result, if so, from cross over line leakage from the other stereo channel to the tape. To get back to the business at hand upstairs, I have a problem still, as before, a tendency for the sound stream to have a high pitched hot standing wave shrill in it, which can be greatly amplified or taken out by the merest of touches to either or both of the 'free-air' tweeters, or one or another of the sonic tuning devices positioned around the room. I was secretely hoping there would be no high pitched shrill or hiss in the music but am not lucky once again, it is still there, though not nearly so bad as before when the tweeters were mounted in the faceplates. I have not yet tried the system with the two other open air resonators hooked in (the 12 inch woofer, and the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter). Pass some time, about an hour. So I finally got around to doing it, hooked in the other two open air resonators. What I seem to have done is gotten rid of two problems, and inherited a third. The tendency toward a compressed or squeezed effect in the sound, or crispness, which commonly came and went as I tune around the room day after day, seems to have been taken away, as has the always-there tendency for the sound to be fractionated, with pieces and fragments missing, as if only 50% was there at any one time, a lesser effect which can be taken away for brief moments by extremely tedious fine tuning of the system. But what I now have in abundance is BARK. This seems to be a new problem. I am well aware of the BARK, said I to my twin brother, after he came upstairs to turn the thing down, after I had turned it up for a high volume test. It immediately resulted in a very hot intense texture to all of the sound stream at the higher end. Hence the word 'bark'. At first, when the other two open air resonators were hooked into the system, ALL of the four pistons in the system came on throwing in and out like crazy. Standing at the back of the room I could see the cones of the suspended 'free-air' tweeters at the front of the room pumping away as if the speakers were trying to turn themselves inside out. Not to mention the 12 inch woofer, for the first time I could see its piston and cone thumping as hard as a trampoline. Notwithstanding, the sound was not bad at all, but did get more, or less, rubbery in the bass end as I twist tuned one or another of the sonic flow tubes to get more or less 'trampoline' in the cones. Tuning the sonic devices turned out to be an easy way to bring the trampoline under control, to where eventually (after a few more minutes) the cones fell idle again, you couldn't see them move, except ever so slightly transiently (for a few seconds at a time) as you moved around the room, your body the interference causing the cone motion. And now, with the cones stationary, there is 'BARK'. Well, gee, I sure wasn't expecting THAT. Not a good ingredient. How would you like the world's champion hog caller howling straight into your face the whole thing magnified by the worst kind of watts electronics used at a rock concert. This can give you an idea of how much that bark is an undesirable. THE DAY GOES ON ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update Cont. September 15, 1992, 10:40 P.M. I have gone to a mall two miles from here to buy two large sheets of artists water color sheets 'made from pure fibers' for 7 bucks each to make two new paper Mobiles to try these upstairs. It didn't matter in the slightest whether it is made from pure fibres or not, just that it is rougher textured, and more than sturdy enough to support itself in the form of a large mobile, clipped standing upright by an aligator clip. Tonight's late night plan is to template and cut one or two new mobiles. Have also had a snack for dinner, a two hour nap, woke with a touch of indigestion from the snack solved by a slug of Pepto Bismal, and am waiting for coffe to brew. In the meantime a friend who knows a litte about 86 Buick Skyhawks has come over and has just walked in the door announcing that at last the gonner turn signal flasher has been fixed! Now this may not be a short story worth reporting except that my twin brother has been on a two day saga trying to get the thing fixed and NOBODY, repeat NOBODY, could find where it was in our 86 Buick Skylark. What started the saga was in buying the flasher at a Canadian Tire Store for a few bucks (hardly anything) then to a garage to get it installed. After two and a half hours, after the brake and tail lights had suddenly failed completely right in front of their eyes, the garage finally tracked down the problem to a pinched wire for a rear tail light which had apparently been intermittantly shorting due to a badly installed tail light, so the short in the wire was fixed and the rear lights worked again, except all the turn signals were still deader'n a doornail. So it was to another garage, sorry, then to a GM dealer, "the flasher is supposed to be by the steering column", so to another garage, "sorry fella don't see anything there", and so to another GM dealer, this time reporting it is supposed to be on the right side of the steering columm, so, back to a garage but "sorry guy". So today we drum out of hiding the owner's manual along with a parts manual for GM cars for Buicks dating 82 to 84, both say that flashers are on the right side of the steering column. But no, my twin brother goes out and rummages around for awhile and can't see anything resembling the flasher. So tonight over comes our friend and they go outside with a flashlight and start probing around, the first time was time wasted with no luck, but an hour and a half later our friend decides to try again, not being the type who likes to be defeated, and finds it after about twenty minutes, it was in a wad of high tech stuff under the heat and air controls quite far over to the right from the steering column but once found an obvious place for it. So goes the story of fixing the turn signal flasher on our 86 Buick Skyhawk. See, high tech information breakdown and overload is looming on the horizon for sure, say, by about the end of 1996 or the start of 1997. Lets see what is happening in the bends and circuits around the world at that time, the end of 1996 into 1997. Oh, P.S., September 22 this year is a date we want to keep an eye on, I don't know what is supposed to happen then but that specific date came buzzing up in a dream one day just before we moved out of the basement suite on Somerset East in Ottawa, so that fact has me curious. I saw the date as if printed by fancy computer graphics across the top of a screen, late one afternoon while taking a nap, and being wide awake while lying totally still, not physically awake yet not officially asleep, the consciousness keenly aware at that moment, the kind of state where any outer thought from the ego blasts away the images. Along with that date were the words: 'NEW FARSTAR". A NEW ART PAPER MOBILE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 16, 1992, 1:20 A.M. Well, the new paper Mobile just built does quite an acceptable job to the sound track currently on TV. The new paper Mobile is somewhat larger than the other two versions, the greater diameters around the hexagrams so far tried are: 9 inches Model A 10 3/4 inches Model B 12 1/4 inches New Model. And now, regards the late night movie currently on the TV.... This is a British black and white, circ. 1937, listed as a comedy, based on a novel by H.G. Wells, and named 'The Man Who Could Work Miracles', with British ladies twittering away in strange bird like voices, a stocky short male lead actor with thin mustache and the usual histrionic puff puff twit twit, I S A Y, acting style but important, you know, the kind of Brit that Britain used to like to tell the world was VERY important in their movies from those days before and after, the simplest words said with the greatest of preposterous thespian pomposity, especially in the more serious movies. This one is listed in the TV guide as a comedy. Well, hah hah hah. I've donated a laugh to it. And that is all that turkey is going to get. More consciousness invested to it would be a waste of planetary salvation time. Enough nomore. I can't understand why such pictures were ever made, but have even more trouble understanding the Warner Brothers bunch who commonly foisted 40 year old bald males as Yale undergrads and freshman, or, even worse, 18 year old rookie major league baseball players being given their first workout at pre-selection camp, boy, did those old men ever look bad trying to suck and goo like a teen was supposed to, according to the stereotype images for those days. Not to mention the horsey women supposed to be beautiful young prep schoolers. Nowadays, you get young prep schoolers pretending to be beautiful older women. When are they going to get their act together and make movies with honest content. Anyway, the new bigger paper Mobile works. One problem with it is that at this moment it is extremely muggy and humid outside with murk hanging tight around the street lamps and a supposed layer of torpedo mosquitoes perhaps twenty feet in length sorry in the air waiting for large night targets to wander by. I have not heard any screams from the outside yet, so won't worry about the mosguitoes. The only reason I mention them is some are in the house and I itch in several places, right now. The moisture has made the new art paper soft. It has lost its crisp tone when rubbed or scraped on the edge, it is soft. And so, the new Mobile standing upright in place with an alligator clip is slightly warped, slightly bulged in the middle like a flattening pumpkin but I am not worried because I know that as soon as the air dries the paper will stiffen and harden into its proper shape again, I hope. Even so, as is, I set up this new paper Mobile, exchanging it with the original small paper mobile on the homemade mike stand, and heard improvements in the movie's sound track. There are stereophonics for sure, though not I would say any major gain in the overall imaging. What did happen is as I had hoped, a lowering in the overall timbre of the sound stream. I went over and re-adjusted the giant sonic snowflake, and when hitting a key focal nodal, heard the high pitched voice of a twittering British lady drop by almost an octave in the tone of her voice. That is good, that is the idea. The point is to try and GET the lower tones dominating in a voice of any kind, taking the voice out of the higher pitched registers normally heard for any voice produced through a tweeter. Not as much major gain as I would of liked, who wouldn't like a single big major score in this late day in the game. But, as it happens, the gains in this project are unfolding inexorably one small gain after another. In this case, the gain, with the new larger Mobile made with a thicker more tonal sounding art paper, is something more of a major gain. Two more variables have been pinned down; a larger size again worked; and a different kind of paper for the Mobile works better. Science stomps onward. I've just done a minor retune with one of the paper Mobiles in the livingroom, and footsteps of a lead lady walking across a dining room changed from mere bits of static in the background of dialogue to footstep of her walking across the dining room to a table in a fancy German restaurant, at which are sitting three other lead actors all talking. So here is being demonstrated a prototype for a new kind of sonic device which can be hung in a livingroom or whatever to immediately give improvement to the sound stream of a TV set, for, where else have you ever heard of a device that can take a sound and change it from a bit of static in the background, to footsteps walking across a dining room. The channel has been changed. This is now 2:45 A.M. and the movie is: 'Spies, Lies, and Naked Thighs', starring Ed Begly Jr. and Harry Anderson from Night Court, plus two leading ladies to make the romance nonsense in the movie complete, according to Hollywood. When you think about it, these hand-made paper Mobiles are quite an innovation. Needless to say it took a lot of time working through thousands of variables over more than half a year's time to home in on the concept and design of such a paper mobile, part of the time delay being due to deep thought trying to figure out a way to make Mobile protypes for testing, with the process continually getting bogged down in thoughts of graphic computer technology and high tech cutting and shaping at a factory, until PAPER, cut with an EXACTO knife, and brought together by two simple hexagonal COLLARS with slots cut in them, all came together in one picture in the thoughts. I have just played a bit more with the Mobiles. What seemed like static due to dirt on the sound track of an old print of the film, straightened around and turned out to be more detailed sounds in the room of a cocktail party, some of the former static turning out to be microphones rustling against clothing, for instance. Also, a German band ompahhing in 3/4 time softly in the background came out of the transistor radio, so to speak, and changed around to became sonically stereo and a long way off in another room, playing softly. And so its official. In the middle of a large scene, dialogue recorded on the set, then a sentence dudded er dubbed in later in a sound booth, then more dialogue live on the set in the same scene patching together continuity of one sentence following the next, sonic timbre in the changes of sound sources is unmistakable, the sound booth sounds having echoes completely surrounding the voice in close quarters, the differences in the timbres of the different kinds of sound sources not apparent at all without my sonic re-excitement due to the paper Mobiles. These room tunings are taking the sounds on the TV back to the original sound as heard by the mikes at the time of recording, these are no longer the sounds you usually get after the fact altered by the special effects of specialists working cunningly to disguise the resulting recording with electronics for typical motion picture theatre or TV home reproduction. My paper Mobiles seem to be able to peek around the corners of the illusions to be able to see right back to the sources to what the mike heard when originally recorded. This fullfills a speculation by me made back in the fall of last year, a speculation that annoyed some friends of mine when I told them, to say the least, none ever thought ANYTHING could be coaxed out of a getto blaster, let alone the getto blaster's tweeters hanging around in the open air. And now, a 23 year old ordinary big old TV set, with nothing but a four inch tweeter for its sound, originally designed to be cheap and in 100% Mono, is being coaxed to give up carefully concealed secrets in moviedom sound, and to come to a clarification of what most people would assume is static dust and scratches on the sound track of an old film. Not so, such background static can actually be the STEREOPHONIC signals that you cannot hear otherwise, without right conducive sonic tuning of the environment into which is issuing the sound stream, for instance a living room, totally bypassing the performance of the 4 inch tweeter per se. Neat. Things are looking a lot brighter than last fall. A QUICK LATE NIGHT UPDATE - a prediction? ----------------------------------------------------------------- I got rid of the BARK. I got rid of it by something I thought of just before shutting off the computer this morning at 4:30 A.M. to hit the sack. What I thought of was to try turning the horizontal 'free-air' tweeters away from the listener, to be jutting backwards toward the wall instead of jutting forward, and to try switching the polarity phasing of the 'free-air'resonators, reversing the polarity when turned to jut toward the wall, to see what these changes might due to the resulting sound stream, in the room upstairs. Instead of trying out this variable I wrote this mini-prediction and went to sleep. Tomorrow I have to try it out. SOME NEW TESTS ARE UNDERWAY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 18, 1992, 2:15 A.M. In fact the best position seems to be with the 'free-air' tweeters jutting out sidways, away from the equalatorial triangle mid-point and aligned at more or less along a straight line between the two 'free-air' resonators, ie., along the side of the triangle which transverses along the front of the main sound image. What seems to happen is that the BARK goes, along with the bass. In tests done last thing before going to sleep very early not today but yesterday morning, I got rid of the BARK but ended up with no bass, and when going for more bass, back came BARK. The simple fact seems to be that in cranking up the volume gain enough to start generating strong bass resonances, the volume is loud enough to start crapping out in the mid and higher ranges leading directly to BARK. So I went to sleep, thinking something NEW might now be needed to get the system beyond this current experimental stalemate. The something new occurred in the idea of making a homemade speaker, something I had been thinking of for some time but thinking in terms of duplicating the SONY 1 1/2 wafer thin tweeter only larger, with a six-sided flat face instead of a square face. The problems were in where to find a voice coil and magnet I could glue onto such a face, and how to make the face, with heat shrink mylar, for instance? Having seen that a six sided Mobile made of clear acrylic plastic sheets didn't work well at all as a Mobile, compared to the art fiber paper, the idea suddenly occurred yesterday night to make a makeshift flat speaker using a six-sided piece of the art fiber paper with the existing SONY 1 1/2 inch flat tweeter glued or attached to it, somehow. Part of the design was to bond a six-sided 16 guage copper wire hexagram around the six-sided piece of art fiber paper, and simple clips made of four pieces of 13 1/2 guage copper wire bent like ordinary hair pins more than served well to hold the SONY 1 1/2 inch wafer tweeter in place in the middle of the six-sided piece of art fiber paper, the piece of paper itself simply being the center hexagram cut away when making the six-sided large sized art fiber paper Mobile. Here is a quick summary of what happened with THAT idea. Today, early this afternoon, I got around to trying it out upstairs. The result is that I now have a lot more STEREOSCOPIC sound, and a lot more volume, and more bass, but one helluva lot more distortion. The last thing playing when I shut it off was the Glen Miller tape with original Mono recordings cir. 1938-42. The sound image is extremely wide, almost the width of the upstairs room now, and no longer likely to shift into the corner or back out depending on how one or another sonic tuning device is slightly twist turned. What I did to get this is to put the new homemade speaker on the kitchen utility step ladder, mounted in a vice whose head can be rotated and tilted, so that the homemade speaker is leaning back at a 30 degree angle like a leaf sticking out backwards. Behind it on the floor is the 12 inch woofer, and behind that on the floor is the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter. There is no doubt that some resonance pumping is going on between the 12 inch woofer and the new home made speaker (I have come to call it a 'tympani resonator') since it is a flat face which is resonating like the tympanum, the skin of the human ear drum. In the meantime, in thinking a six-sided template to make a paper Mobile needed to be somehow stiffened to get around the problem of it going soft in real humid air, I started treating a template with crazy glue, a brand named 'Atomic Instant Glue' made by Les Laboratoires De Recherche Et Developement, Montreal, Quebec, which turned the art fiber paper semi-transparent and hardened it with a somewhat crisper sound in the paper when scrapped. Except in falling asleep for about 15 seconds when applying the crazy glue, part of the Mobile bonded to a hard carboard sheet I was using for a work surface so now there is firmly attached some fragments of cardboard, in extracting the Mobile template. So I started making another template, except ran out of crazy glue, so raced two miles to the super mall for another bottle, except the hobby store was out of the 'Atomic' brand and offered instead a brand called 'Cyclone Super Glue', made by ... well, it doesn't say, it just says 'Made In England'. The owner of the store insisted it was exactly the same kind of glue except more economical because this time there was an ounce sized bottle of it, more than twice the amount, for only a dollar more at $6.95. So home I went and used it. I should mention that when first applying the crazy glue from the first small bottle (the 'Atomic' brand) I was in the livingroom and was tolerating the occasional sharp wiffs of the glue smell until suddenly a real sharp sting started in my nose and proceeded all the way down the passages to the inner rear regions behind my mouth and down the throat. So straight out the door I went in a hurry, expelling as much air as possible on the way, and the painfull sting left immediately the moment I started breathing fresh air. So, a w o r d o f C a u t i o N ! Anyway, I could see right away that the second brand of crazy glue was behaving differently, for when applied it did not turn the paper semi-transparent. And sure enough, when it dried, the paper was curled slightly around the rim of the hexagram, a problem mostly straightened out by leaving it flattened under a telephone book for an hour. Furthermore, when this new brand of glue dries it leaves a white powder residue which wipes away with a damp cloth and I suspect this white powder may be baking soda or equivalent mixed in in very small amounts by the manufacturer to hastening the hardening process, for this Made In England glue sure does harden fast. Furthermore, when hardened, it has left the paper more with a subtle rubbery texture to it, rather than crisp and crinkly hard, and it darkens the paper, rather than turning it semi transparent. So this 'Cyclone' brand is certainly a different kind of mix used to make crazy glue. Another difference between the two glues is that the 'Atomic' brand soaked through the paper immediately, turning it semi transparent, whereas the 'Cyclone' brand didn't soak through the paper at all expect where most heavily applied. In trying out the two Mobile templates, by holding one, then the other, up in the air in front of the tweeter speaker port of the TV set, it is clear that the rubbery textured paper treated with the 'Cyclone' brand of crazy glue has the best sonic effect on the sound stream of the TV set, quite the reverse of what I was expecting. On the other hand, untreated art paper definately sounded better, so stiffening by crazy glue didn't work. (A few days earlier I had tried to stiffen a template with spray acrylic paint, but this caused the template to warp and twist out of shape so acrylic clear plastic paint was not suitable, leading to the other idea of trying crazy glue as a stiffener). (Ahem something else I forgot to mention, the new stiffer grade of art fiber paper isn't going to work for a stand alone Mobile which can be packaged and sold in stores. It bends slightly and won't hold its pure shape whether the air is humid or dry. And as already tested, stiffening it with substances such as crazy glue destructs its better sound). A NEW EXPERIMENT IS UNDERWAY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Same day September 18, 1992 Well, okay, now it is evening and I am sitting there in the livingroom stuck between half way here, half way there, not knowing quite what to do with the two Mobile templates made very different by the two different kinds of 'quote' identical crazy glue. It occurred to me I should make another Mobile template and compare its sonics with the sonics of the two treated templates, and when getting ready to cut out the template, thought to try holding up the two existing Mobile templates together to form a twelve sided matrix, which unquestionably seemed to improve the sonics of the TV's sound stream when held in front of the TV's tweeter port, compared to just one of the templates held up. So I rotated the master template for a Mobile by 30 degrees to draw out a 12 sided figure, judisciously cut it out with a sharp hobby knife, and now have it hanging temporarily from the lip of a chrome table lamp by a simple hook made from a bent piece of copper wire. In getting up to go to the downstairs washroom, a journey up the main hall, and through a door into a main floor utility room for the washer and dryer, and through another door into the inner sanctum where sits bonjour toilet and the quick sink, I was struck by the clarity of the sound reaching me within the sanctum with both doors partially open. So outside I went, pacing all the way into the park to nearly across it to the far back yard fences, a distance paced of 117 feet before the sound of the TV set dropped away to be indistinct. What was most interesting about THIS 'walk test' is that the TV set is at normal listening volume, right now, it is not at all cranked up or anything, the volume hasn't been touched since early today around noon. Presto we now have long distance carrying power for the TV set WITHOUT having to crank up its volume to Leadbelly's stereo levels. So this new 12 sided template for a Mobile is really doing some interesting things to the TV's sound stream, it (the template) is just hanging there from the lip of a lamp in the living room and is swinging slowly back and forth in idle humid air currents of the room stirring through the open patio door late at night. The thing tomorrow morning is to try it upstairs coupled to form a one-piece device by the home-made hairpin clips using the 1 1/2 SONY wafer tweeter to make a giant 'tympani' resonator. There are 3 variables I would like to try in next experiments upstairs: Is the 'tympani' effect better, or worse, with a copper wire hexagram bonded to the inner hexagram's one piece solid face to which is clamped by home-made hair clips the 1 1/2 Sony wafer; similarly - better or worse - with a second larger wire hexagram bonded around the outer rim of the template itself; or both wire hexagrams, or neither. At this moment I do not know if a wire hexagram bonded to the template improves its performance as a 'tympani' resonator or whether the wire hexagram disturbs its fidelity. The reason for the uncertainty is that the small protype already been tried upstairs is very distorted, even though a major booster of stereoscopic imaging in Mono in stereo. Whereas downstairs the large template without a wire hexagram bonded to it is much better sounding, but it has been treated to be stiffened in a rubbery way compared to the template with the wire hexagram whose crazy glue stiffening treatment has resulted in a much crisper sounding, much more stiff, paper, but one with much poorer sonic qualities. Then there is the fact of the new 12 sided Mobile template hanging around in the livingroom, doing a very nice job of juicing up the sound stream from the TV set, thank you. This one, the one hanging around juicing the TV's sound is not treated with any crazy glue nor is there a copper hexagon ring bonded to it. Will the 12 sided figure work better - or worse - as a 'tympani' resonator, and/or is one as large as the one I've just made better - or worse - if 12 sided is good. Well? See, still plenty of variables. Tomorrow I will let you know if there is anything more to tell about this confusing but interesting situation. Wait a mimute. I'm back. One variable just tested is curvature vrs flatness. Due to the high humity in the air the hanging 12 sided template is slightly curved. Since the paper is slightly soft due to the humidity it is easy to bend it, either straight or even more of a curvature. In fact a curvature all the way to a parabolic curve was just tried, and saw that a curvature; in particular a full PARABOLIC curve; definately hardens the sonic qualities in the sound stream. The best FIDELITY, and best opened up STEREOSCOPIC presence in the sound stream, is had with the 12 sided template perfectly flat. In conclusion, curvature, even slight is a spoiler, VARIABLES RESOLVED.... ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 18, 1992, 1:00 P.M. Pure paper works best. Three paper templates were tried upstairs one after the other with the 1 1/2 SONY wafer-thin tweeter climped to them to create a modelling for very large style 'tympani' open air resonators. The two six-sided templates which had been treated to stiffen the paper by crazy glue did not work. Furthermore, the large template with a copper wire hexagon glued into place did not respond at all as a 'tympani' resonator. End of story. The new 12 sided template worked at once. V FOR VICTORY - SORT OF ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 19, 1992, 11:15 A.M. It comes, then goes, then comes round again. Right now I am rather relaxed, pleased with the Mono in Stereo experiment - the way it is sounding - at this moment upstairs. Yesterday afternoon the story was completely different, in fact I finished off a long work session around dinner time feeling somewhat flattened and was thinking thoughts of discouragement for the first time in many moons. What happened yesterday afternoon is that things started from a high note and progressively deteriorated from worse to god awful. It started after climping the 1 1/2 inch SONY wafer tweeter to the new 12 sided paper Mobile template, then having to stiffen the large flat 12 sided template with a 15 inch piece of 13 1/2 guage copper wire, clipping the starflake to the wire with two alligator clips in order to be able to support it standing upright or at an angle. When tilted at about 30 degrees from the horizontal, lilting backward to be hoving over the 12 inch woofer on the floor, what I had hoped would happen happened, the 12 inch woofer and the 'starflake' started kicking each other to pump their resonances, leading to more bass, and certainly more fidelity in this new style of a sound system upstairs. Don't forget, the original getto blaster speakers are now two 4 inch tweeters mounted in cradles to be sitting sticking out suspended in free air at an angle of about 30 degrees to the horizontal, like a tea cup saucer held out in your hand with the crumpet stuck to its back underneath. As much inertial mass has been removed from the sound generators as possible. Like I say, at first there was a major kick in the overall thing of the system, when first setting up the new 12 sided 'starflake' art fiber paper template in 'tympani' mode early yesterday afternoon. But from there on things began to rapidly deteriorate in a dismaying way. At one point I tried a 2 inch tweeter from a computer, climped to the 'starflake' but two problems occurred with this. Firstly the whole 'starflake' began to respond with volume levels on par with a good speaker even though powered by only the 2 inch computer speaker, but, its fidelity was rather rough, to say the least. Notwithstanding, the weight of the computer speaker was too much for the copper support wire. When attempt was made to tilt this arrangement at an angle, the whole thing slowly bent over as if it was solder wire. It didn't fall, just slowly sagged over under its own weight, taking about 30 seconds to fold all the way over like a limp lollipop, or rather, a limp stopsign. It was also noticed that one heck-of-a lot of pure hiss was now coming from the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter, so it was removed, to be replaced by a new device consisting of the computer speaker climped to the original small hexagram 'tympani' (as described in the preceeding Update), with a hexagram rim of copper wire as was used in the original 'tympani' experiment of day before yesterday). Now, then, what happened. Well, the sound just kept on getting worse and worse in the room upstairs. Fine tuning and fiddling of ALL of the various sonic devices led to no avail. Turning the re-assembled 'starflake' around to different alignments availed even less, in fact, at one point the whole BASS suddenly disappeared and after two more hours still had not been found again. What a mystery. Until it was noticed that the leads for the 'starflake' were shorted out, not just touching each other on the mahagony table but actually joined together by the alligator clips, it had happened that stray wire strands from one of the leads actually sliced their way into the jaws of the other lead's alligator clip unseen when doing rotation alignment tests with the 'starflake'. When the two snagged leads were separated, bass immediately reappeared, but nothing at all worth crowing about, it was just a weak feeble attempt at letting me know where bass was supposed to be occurring. Oh boy wowee what a frustrating time, back and forth through the room over and over again trying just about anything that came to mind to try and improve upon the raw shriek, the bark, the missing sonic bass, the compressed sound, and so on. About the only thing I was able to achieve before calling it quits for the day was getting some semblence of stereo into the signal of 54 ROCK, an AM station in Ottawa, hence a pure Mono source. Right at that moment arrived a cablevision service person to drop off $20 owed for a copy of our Virus Alert anti-virus software carted home the previous week when he'd come by to get the cable vision working after the previous day when a technician had spent two hours installing a new cablevision line into the livingroom that simply didn't work; after all the dust had settled and numerous new holes drilled into the house, when it came time to turn on the converter absolutely nothing happened, so the day after came this other service person with a cluster of high tech devices by which he quickly found that the main cablevision line feeding into our yard from the street, had a main line feeding to the garage that was duely wired in and circuited but had not been clipped at all so that nothing was making contact with anything inside the big standup post housing the circuit connectors out by the front street in the yard, this dud cable having been duely connected up by the technician the previous day. ! ? We looked at each other and smiled, a bit, about this. Talk about the effort that went into installing this new main feeder, everything done perfectly correct from a rote point of view, but absolutely mistaken at the bottom line where the connection counts the most, that leads have to make contact with leads. More information overload creeping into the progress of today's modern hell state society?. Anything to finish the story. Yesterday the returned cablevision service techician and I whip up the stairs and into the upstairs room for a demo, and right from the start I am not embarrassed but helpless, because to start with a big thunder storm is approaching and the AM band is nothing but lightning static, I mean, nothing but. And then, can't find an FM station playing music, it is all yak and station breaks, for minute after minute, and finally some bad rock and roll comes on one of the FM stations and try as I might I can't coax any fidelity out of the system, the only thing worth noting is that the sound, as awful as it was, seemed stereo. Sort of a passtime, ay, an interesting hobby, keeps you busy, whatever, says the service technician, leaving. We are still friends, but a hobby, yes, that's all that it was possible to hear in the system yesterday. So downstairs I went in a sort of deepening funk, puzzled by the main question - where went the sound? Was it the giant starflake new 'tympani' resonator? what? what? Last evening I started thinking of another kind of matrix for a 12 sided paper Mobile template, so got out the compass and ruler and drew one out, this time both the inner cutout area and the outer rim areas are 12 sided, so I am calling this a 'starmaster' snowflake, since this is a twelve pointed star. To make a long story short, to blow up the original drawing to be able to end up with a large template master required using the Minolta copier, feeding in 11 by 17 inch sheets one by one by hand to get the blowups, except this machine does not work properly, it creased 16 sheets of the paper and produced only two that were crease free. By this time I was grinding teeth dust, couldn't understand why a lease company would send out a machine delivered by major van, then a technician by the house twice to set it up and calibrate everything, then sit back waiting to collect monthly payments, for a machine that is faulty from the very start, it creases sheets of paper passing through it. It seems to work fine for ordinary letter sized paper, but that so far is the only thing this machine works fine for. This is not a simple small desk top unit. It has a large collection of buttons and read messages and symbols, plus a secret compartment filled with many store/recall settings for print shop work doing margins to the nth degree and such, and sits on top of its own self contained cabinet on big coasters. Like I say, it is a sophisticated model, yet after all the work done to refit it then set it up on location by personal technician service ready to answer your call in moments' and so on, the sucker creases most every sheet of paper I tried to hand feed through it, using the adjustable hand feed tray whose guides slide in and out but are so flimsy, so poorly designed, they are not repeat not capable of staying put when set, after every sheet, the quide has to be reset. So, you see, a toy machine, looking good to elevate the user into the big time, but working bad to degenerate the user's piece of mind into a kind of lesser frequency cursing the conditions who cunningly, slyly, market this show for profit. Okay, by late last night I got the 'starmaster' snowflake cut out and held it up in the livingroom but couldn't tell in an instant if it was or was not better than an ordinary original six-sided Mobile template in boosting the TV's sound at low volume. It seemed to improve the stereophonics but it was hard to tell if the fidelity got better or worse at that low volume. End of the day. Today my brother left for a couple of hours which meant some time for high volume tests upstairs. Turns out I didn't need any high volume tests. When I turned on the system upstairs it came on sounding worse than it ever has since late last summer. First thing was to return the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter back into the sound generating matrix. This time, for some reason, no hiss. Then it was around and around the room subtely retuning everything over and over again, until suddenly, low and behold, here came the sonics, and fidelity, welling up into the sound stream, with a sudden jump in the lower bass, the jump taking place two or three times each with more audible gain in the bass as I touched tuned things now that some stability had come back into the system. Like I said, high volume wasn't necessary. Whereas yesterday I had gone to the extreme of trying volume gains all the way up to 75% on the knob to try and get some volume and resonances, today I started out at 25%, quickly went to 45%, and left it there, needing no more, there is plenty of volume. At first I couldn't turn it up to any more than just 25% due to much intolerable shrill and distortions, but as stability came into the picture, it became a moot point, I have plenty of volume regenerating in the sound stream and don't need any higher gain than what I've got with the knob at 45%. In gist, there is some MIGHT now back in the sound stream, the first time MIGHT has appeared with strength since dissolving the getto blaster tweeters from their faceplates a few days ago. At this moment the whole system is EXTREMELY fragile. You can think of it as like a spider web designed such that if you touch one strand the whole web falls apart. That is just about the way things are in the upstairs room right now. Every random object in the room is EXTREMELY sensitive in terms of being a spoiler if merely TOUCHED the wrong way. The main ingredient I am liking in the sound right now, including the lower point in the deep bass, vanishes if touching something as prosaic as a small piece of wire lying on a table, and returns if I just touch the wire again. The whole system is EXTREMLY fragile. The last thing I did before leaving the upstairs room this morning was to place the new 'starmaster' snowflake (the new 12 sided template made from two pieces of typewriter grade paper taped together and cut out late last night) over the face of the 12 inch woofer, to obtain a final immediate gain in overall hi fidelity in the sound stream. In this case, ordinary typewriter grade paper worked as a sonic booster when cut into a sonically conducing matrix. Like I say, a feeling of satisfaction has taken hold of the thought stream. I have no doubts that progress is being made. So downstairs I came to make some coffee but ended up typing this Update instead, feeling that faith has been vindicated. INERTIA FREE STATUS ------------------- It has happened that I have now completely converted the sound generating system around to a total embodiment of 'FREE-AIR' resonators, having successfully heaved the whole thing over to INERTIA FREE STATUS with all resonators operating without retraint in having minimal contact with any stationary masses, and the system as it now sits playing away upstairs works better than it ever has before. As focusing started to finally gell, after three quarters of an hour's effort, the big bass and other desirable sonics starting suddenly moving into the big picture. The walls, tables, floor, and objects in the room suddenly started to vibrate again, a tangible vibrating you can feel in everything you touch. The cones of the two cradled open air tweeters from the getto blaster are still pumping in slight intermittant bursts of a sort of vague sluggish transience so the system is not entirely locked solid in Impact Vibrations at this moment. I have to say one thing, the sound at the moment is very crisp, with a metallic overtone through most of the sound range, yet all of the information is there in the sound stream, including high cymbols and low bass drum, etc., etc. I think the metallicness may be coming from the two tweeters of the getto blaster, which I don't see as a major shortcoming. I'm thinking that such coloration can be fended off by using different tweeters. Otherwise, the mere existence of such things as the high cymbols and low bass drum, etc., etc., goes toward proving the new theory that a sound's information can be stored like a hologram in the matrix of the sound, independent of how the sound was originally recorded, or re-created after the fact, and most of the sound range is is regenerated as after-the-fact resonances cascading downward from the higher frequencies produced by the sound generators per se, as proper sonic room echos and transient cross harmonic sonics start to click in through constant positive harmonic re-enforcement to re-create a projection of the original sound now recurring in the environment, for instance in the room upstairs, the whole system becoming stablized including vibrations in the air and in the solids of the environmemt by the existence of 'Impact Vibrations'. To re-iterate; the re-generating aspects upstairs consist of pure and simple open air resonating tweeters, plus the one 12 inch woofer also resonating in the open air and currently sitting on the floor tilted at a 30 degree angle facing upward. The next project is to build a six wing paper Mobile using the new 12 sided 'starmaster' snowflake template, and see how this might improve the greater qualities which (it seems) can now be reached within the experimental scope of the sound system in the upstairs room. To repeat an earlier remark: There is something I want to mention again. The new stiffer grade of art fiber paper isn't going to work for a stand alone Mobile which can be packaged and sold in stores. It bends slightly and won't hold its pure shape whether the air is humid or dry. And as already tested, stiffening it with substances such as crazy glue destroys its sound. WHAT CAUSED THE TEMPORARY BACKSLIDE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 20, 1992, 4:00 A.M. P.S. I think I know why the system deteriorated to such a dismal state during the tests of yesterday. It is because the presence of the new paper template with a 12 sided matrix (being newly used as a conducer for the very first time) takes longer for a new sonic image to gell after a touch, tap, or twist to retune or super tune any object in the room. I didn't know this until later last evening in playing with 12-sided paper templates while sitting in front of the TV set, cutting template model variations with a craft knife and listening to the effect each template has on the TV's sound. Out of this, by the way, came a super booster paper template to jump start the stereo sound of our car's stereo FM radio. This is a very touchy stereo system, with four way speakers, and it doesn't sound all that good. However, I went out for a test drive at 11 P.M. last evening, hanging from the visor via a copper wire hook a small 12 sided template featuring a 12 sided star with a hexagon cube in the center area, and heard an immediate clarification and straightening around of the car stereo's messy reproduction. But, that car stereo test has nothing to do with discovering that a new way is now needed to handle on the spot focusing changes in the experimental system upstairs due to the advent of 12 sided matrixes introduced for the first time as conducers into the sound stream. To be more precise, up until now, all tunings had a characteristic delayed reaction, say 2 or 3 seconds, for sonic responses to gell in the sound stream when anything was tuned or focused. This delay in time as an effect first came under description last winter. I'd long since gotten used to waiting each 2 to 3 second interval for sonic responses to gell when touching anything. Now the response takes at least 2 seconds to INITIATE. What this means is that now I have to learn how to wait for the sonic response to initiate, as well as for the final response to gell. What I was doing to deteriorate the system so ferociously day before yesterday was acting prematurely on responses that had not yet taken hold, in taking the onset of the response to be the gelled resulting resonance. This was NOT paying attention. To resume quality, in re-establishing the sound system to something satisfying yesterday afternoon, without knowing it I was waiting for the response to initiate, after about 2 seconds, then further waiting for it to gell, before tapping or twisting an object again. This slight difference was all that was needed. The only thing I have to do now, is figure out a way to be able to set up the 12 inch woofer into a proper resonating position and have it stay there all day. At the moment in order to tilt the woofer to an angle necessary to most potently kick the 12 sided 'typani' resonator leaning over it, I've made a kind of feeble support stand using 3 different objects; these being a roll of masking tape, an empty cassette tape box jambed on top of the tape roll, and on this a small brush with tiny brass wire bristles, with the magnet of the 12 inch woofer propped by the brush. It so happens that the combination of these three objects can give me the most potent angle of tilt, but, the gall darn 12 inch woofer moves under its own steam, (once the strongest resonances are set up with the potent angle most focused), it crawls out of position, in fact it even rolled completely over backwards a couple of times. Can't do anything about it till I figure out some way to pin the woofer down so that it doesn't walk off with all the good stuff seeping away in iotas until there is nothing but weird off-harmonics and stiffled bass, and so on. It fooled me. I had it set up real good, thought I had it aced. Went downstairs for two hours leaving the system running. Came back upstairs and ... what the hell happened to the sound ... ! I started at the door of the room, retuning a flow tube sitting by the doorway, then over to the table made of a mahogany panel door on tripods and tried the two flow tubes there, plus the two 'free-air' resonators, but, nothing seemed to work, there was noisy amiss harmonics and plenty of wierd sounding distortions and no good stuff. Then I discovered the 12 inch woofer had somersaulted backwards off its perch on the floor to end up facing the other wall totally out of focus. So I repositioned it and stood back and watched it fall off the perch again. And so began a mini saga, not a long one because I knew that the good stuff was there in the system whenever I got the woofer resonating again in most potent capacity if I could just get it to stay put in position on its perch. But no luck. The moment the good stuff struck in the sound stream the impacting struck, and the woofer crept or toppled. Turns out that I had been extremely in touch with intuitive dexterity in setting it up earlier when the good stuff reported earlier above in this Update was finally gained. I had somehow on the intuitive factor set the woofer into an exact point of balance, which lasted for as long as I had stayed in the room, but inevitably failed sometime thereafter when I was downstairs when it departed the hot spot and somersaulted backwards. I figure right now that about 80% to 90% of the best sound potentially available with the way things are currently setup upstairs is harbored in the 12 inch woofer and its most potent focus position, a position I cannot test freely at will until I can figure out some way to keep the big thing from vibrating out of place. So be it. If its not one thing, its another. I read where astronomers who do super projects in Hawaii sometimes have to go through this kind of thing for weeks getting an experiment de-bugged in the most ridiculous unforseen ways to get it to the point where it actually works the way it was designed to in the planning stages. Cotton batton, bandaids, paper clips, even chewing gum, are used as freely as wits for such de-bugging sagas. I know the Melchezedeck task force working night and day in getting this planet to turn itself around have to cope constantly with things that are supposed to work but don't, or not as expected, as one small problem after another is encountered and dissolved, making it more and more plain what the big problems are. PINNING DOWN A PLATEAU - NOT QUITE STAMPED IN GOLD ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 22, 1992, 5:30 P.M. I think I've gone about as far as I am going to be able to go for the moment. Yesterday afternoon I played with the system for about an hour, then shut it off. There was a sustained level of an odd kind of twisted distortion in the sound stream which I couldn't seem to get rid of. Further to that, the bigger bass ranges came and went, in and out, with no seeming predicability as to what was actually bringing them in, then cancelling them a moment later. One thing I learned is that sonic tuning and focusing where 12 sided objects are present is far more precise, and positively advantageous, than merely six sided devices and conducers. It takes a LOT of care to tune things with 12 sided objects present, but the results are a LOT more obvious when the proper CARE is taken. The reason why it took so long to get to 12 sided objects is apparent in the previous paragraph. Sometime last winter and even earlier last fall, 12 sided objects were tried in quick experiments but were found spoilers compared to 6 sided objects but this finding has turned out to be an illusion due to the fact that in those days tuning and focusing tests were taken for granted at a far more crude level than now, as of today, so that 12 sided objects were passed over for many months. Last night I got around to cutting out a template made of art paper based on a blowup of the new template made a few nights earlier that worked so well in boosting the audiophonics of the car's four-way stereo system. That car stereo template has a cross sectional diameter of roughly 6 1/2 inches. The new template is exactly the same, but with a cross sectional diameter of 12 1/2 inches. It was made as a blowup on two pieces of ordinary typewriter paper 11 by 14 inches taped together then used for outlining the same image on a stiff grade of art water color paper. Today in the upstairs room, the first thing done was to lay the typewriter paper version of the template on the face of the 12 inch woofer, finding that a certain position there (placed about 1/3 the way down the face), helped to sharpen the overall fidelity of the sound stream noticably, so there it was pinned in place with two straight pins stuck into the paper collar which surrounds the woofer's cone. This proved to be quite a gain for it quickly became apparent there was some source or sources causing a certain steady state form of distortion, perhaps polarities out of phase with one or another of the five speakers operating as open air resonators. Sure enough it was found right away that the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter was out of phase and more bass tones welled up into the sound stream the moment its leads were reversed. Then it came to finishing the purpose of making the new art paper template in the first place, to try it as a modified starflake design for the 'tympani' resonator using the 1 1/2 Sony wafer thin tweeter clamped to it. Sure enough there was a better sound in the 'tympani', period. The difference with this new snowflake and the former is that this new starflake version has twelve star points around its rim, basically consisting of two integrated Stars Of David to form the 12 sided star, whereas the original starflake version has two interlocking hexagons forming an outer rim around two embodied equalateral triangles. It is now being demonstrated that the out-in-the-open tips of Stars Of David are positive conducers in sound streams. The new 'tympani' resonator was made by simply using two small paper clips to clamp the 1 1/2 SONY wafer thin tweeter to a hexagram cut in the center of the 12 1/2 inch starflake. As soon as the modified 'tympani' resonator was up and running the bothersome strange twisted distortion in the sound stream became even more noticable. So the next job was to disconnect everything, and try each open air resonator (speaker) one by one checking for its polarity factor, starting with the 'tympani' resonator working first. It happened that the next set of leads hooked up were for the two other resonators sitting on the floor behind the location of the 'tympani' and both working in synch with it. The moment these two speakers were hooked up (as one combined unit), a big clean sound soared forth, entirely missing the strange twisted distortion. Only a moment was needed to confirm the obvious, that the getto blaster's original 4 inch tweeters, now operating as 'free-air' resonators jutting suspended 30 degrees to the horizontal via copper wire cradles, were the entire source of the whole of that particular twisting kind of distortion. In other words, these two tweeters had been running hot, and with a lot of spit all the time, from day one over a year ago. That these two getto blaster tweeters were major distorters has been confirmed. So they are now shut off, no longer wired in the system, which now consists of just the three remote resonators; the 'tympani' mounted on an electronics soldering stand via an alligator clip, sitting on the household stepladder in the apex point of the equalateral triangle, leaning backward like a leaf or fan at a 30 degree angle from the vertical, and behind it on the floor pointing upward at a 30 degree angle the 12 inch woofer, and behind that the 8 by 5 inch woofer tilted upright at a 60 degree angle. And oh boy, in playing around with the 'tympani' and the flowtubes in the room, both stereo and a full range of sound could be brought in for brief moments, much more full sound than before since heaving the whole system over to entirely inertia-free open-air embodiments several days ago. It turned out that a subtle modification improved the performance of the 'tympani' by worthwhile amounts, and that is to slip a small metal hexagon collar under the wafer to lift its face from direct contact with the paper of the starflake, using a small alligator clip to hold the lift collar in place. Today I heard Kablammo's in the deep and nether realms in the background of things; you can expect certain sounds to impact even in a sound studio when a big orchestra is recording at powerful volume, these I heard today for the first time. At this point testing has become non availing beyond a certain point. There is bass which can rumble the floor, however, the wafer of the 'tympani' embodiment tends to rattle, which distorts the sound stream. This rattle can be coaxed around to diminish or vanish for brief moments, then it comes back. However it seems to be about the only source of major distortion in the system, and in working around it, for brief glimpses you can hear large auditoriums, and mighty big orchestras, taking shape in the sonic sound pictures forming in the room for brief moments until rattle in the 'tympani' returns. Even with the rattle and its diminishment in the overall POWER you can still sense the MIGHT in the sound stream. But even the MIGHT is transitory, coming and going almost at once by the merest touch tap of things so mundane as a piece of speaker wire on the floor, any one of the sonic flowtubes or any other object including a cassette tape box or whatever. The point is that TWO features can now be demonstated at once in the embodiment of the experiment as it currently is set up in the upstairs room. 1. STEREOSCOPIC and STEREOPHONIC information can be re-projected from a MONO sound source. 2. Open air resonators for the entire sound source can respond to rebuild original information after the fact in for instance a room, including deep and strong bass sounds and higher frequency harmonics. The second point is that the experimental embodiment in the upstairs room is a demonstration of principles only. At this moment it is EXTREMELY unstable. Anything can distrupt it, quitting the good stuff. It is very much in the Theory of Choas concept of the Elephant and the Butterfly's Wing, where a small pertubation introduced into a delicately balanced stable system can trigger a turmoil which spreads through a much larger system, a much greater energy re-arrangement than was inherent in the original pertubation which triggered the greater collapse into turbulence. In real terms, it means I know I can get better and better sonics out of such a system as the one upstairs, simply by devising other ways to better control the operation of the 1 1/2 inch SONY wafer in its embodiment as a new kind of speaker conducer called for the heck of it, a 'tympani resonator', it being home made and made of paper. And further can get even more good stuff out of the system by some better means to control the exact positioning of the 12 inch woofer and the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter as well. These are strictly technicalities, as far as I am concerned. For brief moments off and on this afternoon, I have had better sonics and stereophonics and fidelity than ever imaged possible with this getto blaster cum 'New Farstar' sound system. I have heard it, and so know it is there in potential. I no longer have to look for techniques to coax more out of a hopeful sound stream. I have seen and heard the greater glory, so to speak. And so the summary is, that I have a template design which can be used for six sided spherical hexagon shaped mobiles, a small starflake version which can be hung like a stinkeroo in a car to boost the car's stereo, and a similar but much larger starflake which can be used to make 'tympani' resonators which can work in conjunction with resonating traditional speakers operating in open air instead of solidly attached to the mass of an enclosure, and can modify the design of a traditional loudspeaker with collars made of starflake designs. So, technology has now been developed and integrated to produce results which are obviously both predictable and controllable, even though the controllability at this moment is the weakest link in the chain of commands, the control factors being so fragile because powerful sonic images are being regenerated in three dimensional mid-air by extremely fragile transducers operating as the generator sources for the sound stream. It is like trying to balance magnets in mid air using magnets to balance the magnets. If you have ever tried to suspend a magnet in mid air using other magnets as the levitating power, you will know without question as to what I mean by fragile. Now, try to image a Cosmic Task Force, trying to telepathically and intuitionally induce higher consciousness information into a mass consciousness of this planet's lower planetary habitation in which the thoughts of the inhabitants are typically focused between their legs where their sex organs dominate their lives and thinking needlessly. Further, try to percieve an induced input for a multitude of such beings at once, not just as a one to one form of induction between beings. Holding the induction stable, even for brief moments, is a challenge of the most extreme reaches of fragility, at this present time, for the Earth. But, at least, a modelling means demonstrating how such indunctances can occur is immediately available in the sonics of the experiments herein being described in which certain principles in the propigation of information from one source projected to recurr at another source are made obvious in analogy. LONG DISTANCE 'AIRFRAME' TUNING ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 24, 1992. 6:10 P.M. I learned something new this afternoon. In thinking of using the TV set in the livingroom for a quick demo for a friend to show how certain sonic techniques can be used to rejuvinate and super boost a sound stream, I spent the last hour playing around with the sound of the TV set. What I learned is that it is very easy to get bass and DEEP bass resonances into the sound stream issuing from the TV, using a few sonic devices and a few techniques now known to be useful, to get a big sound, with stereophonic qualities in the echos and dispersion, and so on. I'm talking about deep reverberations that H A N G in the air, fading, then are finally gone. Normally, these revererating sounds are gone in a second since there are no true reverberations in their echos, in ordinary Mono. I am talking about deep sonic echos ricocheting with H A N G through a vault, in certain beer ads and those 'devil's gonna gettcha if you don't buy our chocolate bar' commercials, for instance. What has always been in effect, however, with the TV, is a tendency for voices to lisp slightly, expecially when the bigger more open airy live sound is present. The lisp is like a whispy sound in the 's' of any words. It took a short time to get big sound into things, tuning in slight ways the single sonic snowflake, the single giant snowflake, the Model B paper Mobile supported upright on a home-made mike stand with an alligator clip, and two of the new 12 sided templates one of which was used to super boost the car's 4 speaker stereo a few nights ago, all of these currently in the living room inducing the TV's sound system to PERFORM. However, I had noticed that random objects at a long distance from the TV set could also effect the TV's sound if touched, tapped, or moved around into juicier hot spots. For instance, here at the computer in the small dining room, a mechanical pencil lying on the table, the phone, even a couple of pieces of paper, all sonically adjusted, improved the sound I could hear from the TV set wrapping all the way from away back there around the corner into the far distant corner of the livingroom. It started when adjusting just for the sake of curiousity the earlier six sided Mobile made of acrylic plastic which didn't work well, it is now sitting on a file cabinet behind me as an orniment having a high tech look in the dining room area. When marginally adjusting its upright position, I heard noticable improvement in the sound of the TV coming from back there around the corner in the living room. Oho. This led to further tests touch tuning a number of random objects in the kitchen area, including what direction the handle of coffee cups on a counter were pointing, the handle of the glass coffee pot itself, even the spout in the sink, it was turned until a hot direction focus was found for it. And lo and behold! suddenly there was no more lisp in the TV's sound. It turns out that long distance spoilers in the form of random objects in the environment were causing the slight lisp, cleaned out by going longer and longer distances out into the greater environment from the sound source to sonically conduce latent nearby matrixes with more harmonic vibratory responses. What it means is that the 'Airframe' principle in the sound stream is being kicked in a favorable way by the long distance tuning of random objects. The idea makes sense, in fact. Wait a minute... I'm back. To put the last remark regards 'Airframing' to the test, I took one of the earlier large size hexagon templates which was lying on a small pile of stuff in the livingroom (not a part of the room's sonic tuning), and took it down to the end of the hall by the front door, then held it up in a hot spot focus, then shoved it under my tee shirt, then held it up again. There is no question that the clarity of the sound wrapping all the way up the hall from the living room improved, then diminished, with, then without, the sonic object present. For a plain fact a slight lisp still in the voice range of the TV (a 6 o'clock news broadcast prior to the daily dose of Star Trek - The Next Generation), vanished when the sonic conducer was present, meaning that vibrations in surrounding masses are still sensitive in a FEEDBACK way to the sound stream even at very long distances from the generating source of the sound stream, which is back down the hall around the doorway and over into the far rear corner of the living room where sits the TV horking away at an impossibly loud volume. Do you see what I am saying - strictly lineal transmissions are not a factor. It is the same for live voices of humans talking, their voice transmissions over long distances are not lineal unless the human cups their hands over the mouth or uses a megaphone or some such lineal focuser. On the other hand many stereo sets and sound sources can be strictly lineal in terms of better or poorer heard sound at a long distance away from the source. Disco speakers are a good example, self demolition freaks like to stand directly in front of one in a room to get the best explosions. So another variable has been pinpointed. Long distance spoilers can adversly effect matrixed sound by interferring with the 'Airframe' effect, until sonically focused, or the area at a long distance is super boosted by a sonically interactive device. Just a minute... I am back. There is no question about the previous remark about 'Airframing' just made. To prove it, I went out and hung the hexagon template from a small light chandelier at the front end of the hall by the staircases, using a short bent piece of copper wire as a hanger. The TV's sound improved. Period. This is true both for the sound wrapping around out the living room and long distance down the hall, and in the livingroom itself. The improvement is more gain in certain live sound textures, with of course mostly all lisp tendencies are gone. The lisp in voices was hardly present due to prior sonic tunings at long distance, but now a final slight residual lisp has been taken care of. Voices on Star Trek really do sound like live people talking in the living room. This is also true when standing in the livingroom itself. It is not easy to tell that this is talking from a TV set using only the TV's 4 inch tweeter for the sound generating source. The sonics and echos are correct for live people talking in a room which is otherwise slightly colored by an echoing effect. We are still talking about the 23 year old Quasar TV with a single small tweeter in the lower right corner (facing you) its only sound source, obviously mono. P.S. You should hear the Warp Drive engines down in the engine room of the Enterprise when the Star Trek sound track is super boosted as is mine. New territory was really hit by the sound special effectists cooking up deep throbbing unmistakably hoary for the Warp Drive. The rings of light that pulse up and down in the glass tunnel housing the Warp Drive's containment field pound away with powerful low frequency power strokes for the motor that reverberates the floor and moves sensations vibrating around your feet if you turn up the volume, when your room is super juiced by sonically conducing matrixes as is mine, as opposed to a pukey little sound rattling the TV set with a pointless crackling noise no matter the volume. Mind you, it is still not in any way perfectly stable. I can introduce some degree of lisp, then cancel it, just by moving a piece of paper sitting near my left hand on the table where sits this computer in the small dining room. Otherwise, something new has been DEFINITIVELY learned today. This is that long distance sonic focusing works to boost both local definition, and the long distance carrying power of a sound stream, due to the sonically enhanced sound stream's intrinsic 'Airframing' property. Long distance now means in other rooms through doorways and right angle turns. I have to admit to being aware of very long distance tuning before, but never to such significance as it now appears to require. In particular, the tendency for 'lisp' in the TV's sound was accepted over the past year as a condition related to perhaps the kinds of materials the sonic devices are made of, or supposedly even more so to factors in the design of the TV's sound system itself. Not true. Today I got rid of the 'lisp' all the way to near zero, for the first time, and know EXACTLY HOW I DID IT, by long distance re-tuning of sonic spoilers in the environment thus bringing in a greater harmonic interplay through a much larger environment responding a long way off via the sound's 'Airframe' principle. During this day, my twin brother has independently discovered that hanging a large twelve sided snowflake from a wire hanging out from a wine bottle on top of the TV can make or break a whole lower octave in the bass. HURRY UPDATE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 29, 1992. 6:10 P.M. I had mentioned earlier a forecasted possible significance to the date September 22, 1992. That date did turn out to have some significance. This was the day my steady state pre-occupation with sonic experiments ended. As reported in the prior Update of September 22, 1992, a few certain technical chasms had been reached in which I knew that major improvements in the overall sound in the experimental system in the upstairs room could come from improved means of controlling the 'tympani' resonator, and the focus angle of the 12 inch woofer resonating in the open air, for instance. Well, after writing that Update, the experiment in the upstairs room was essentially forgotten, per se, no pre-occupation with things to try, nor ways of extracting better sound inch by inch in tiny iotas during long sieges of trial and error. Today about half an hour ago, I went upstairs and tried a quick test with the 'tympani' resonator sitting on the table (the mahogany panel door in temporary use on wooden tripods), setting the 'tympani' directly in front of the getto blaster consul, so as to fall in a straight line to the back of the room with the 12 inch woofer sitting on the kitchen ladder at the apex of the equalateral triangle, the straight line continuing through the paper Mobile on the mike stand behind it, and further behind to the 'ferris wheel'. I found that I could tip the 'tympani' to a more vertical alignment so it is now tipped back to the wall at about 30 degrees from the vertical. In this position, the wafer-thin tweeter stands supported by two paper clips, on its own away from flat faced contact with the stiff art fiber paper of the 12 pointed starflake comprising the 'tympani's' resonator, and so the small hexagonal collar which was been held in place by an alligator clip can be taken out, leading to less fracturing in the 'tympani' sonic inputs into the sound stream. One thing I should mention is that any fracturing in the sound due to spurious impacts on the flat face of the 1 1/2 inch wafer thin SONY tweeter; (these are transient fracturing pops and ticks that start up then quit as I move around the room thus disturbing the overall stability of the sound stream); although tiny and very high pitched when listening with ear near the 'tympani' resonator, come through loud and deep sounding when standing with ear cocked in the region of the 12 inch woofer, but become barely discernable when you stand well back anywhere else in the room well away from the immediate vacinity of these sound generator sources. In other words, the pops and ticks being generated by the wafer tweeter are being amplified mightily in syncopated resonances with the 12 inch woofer and the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter. The 12 inch woofer on top of the kitchen ladder is tipped forward about 30 degrees from the horizontal, being supported by a roll of masking tape. And the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter is on the floor behind the ladder, tipped at about 60 degrees from the horizontal. In the overall, via this quick test, I have very good fidelity, very good bass, and very good stereoscopic definition both in terms of dispersion and point source imaging, in a more easily controllable dynamic arrangement. It turns out that a flow tube sitting at the back of the other work table which is against the East wall (in which is a bedroom window facing east overlooking the back yard and small park beyond), can have a great deal to do with stereoscopic imaging. Minute adjustements of this flow tube can cause precise stereo images to focus in widely separated point sources, or to blend as more homogenous less effective mere wide spread dispersion images. This particular flow tube has a giant snowflake (13 single sonic snowflakes glued together in a hexagram array) and a super giant snowflake (31 single sonic snowflakes in a larger haxagon pattern) mounted on a horizontal shaft of stiff copper wire and separated by about 6 inches, the super giant snowflake at the rear and the giant snowflake at the front, the flow tube itself focused in the general direction of the 'tympani' resonator on the table against the north wall. In the overall, this hurried new test array (setup) is more easy to control, compared to before with the 'tympani' resonator sitting on the ladder and the 12 inch woofer on the floor behind it. That is it for the Update. The test took about 1/2 hour, the first test since September 22. THREE RING CIRCUS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update October 1, 1992. 3:20 P.M. Like I say, this may be the end of the story for the time being, until some new technology is evolved. Today I played with the system for about an hour then shut it off. Firstly, it seems the wafer-thin resonator is blown. In turning on the system today it was noticed that the wafer was not operating. Tapping it's flat diaphram caused it to intermittitantly rattle then quit. I could get it to work producing sound by careful adjustment of the 'tympani' resonator, then the moment it or anything else nearby was touched it would quit operating again, and even when operating was producing noisy rattle along with the proper sound. So out it came, the wafer-thin tweeter is officially retired. I substituted the 2 inch computer tweeter climped to the 'tympani' resonator and heard some improvement in the sound stream, but also a lot of high pitched static. Some room tuning of the flow tubes led to a marginal improvement in the overall sound, but I became more accutely aware of the high pitched static and so shut off the computer tweeter, (at this point it was supported by itself upright in the open air by an alligator clip since it did not seem to work well climped to the 'tympani' resonator). Also, during these moments, I pulled the two free-air getto blaster speakers out of the room entirely, stored them away in another room upstairs, and placed two flow tubes in the locations formerly occupied by the free-air resonators, to reform an equalateral triangle array with the flowtubes at the two focal points, and the 12 inch woofer on the ladder as the apex of the triangle. This worked. Things sounded better at once the moment the equalatoral triangle was re-created with the two flowtubes now doing work not being done by the two stored free-air resonators. So, like I say, I disconnected the computer tweeter, leaving the 12 pointed paper starflake itself (now comprising the whole of the 'tympani' resonator), supported upright in a vertical position and twist turned 30 degrees relative to a line formed straight out from the table to the 12 inch woofer on the ladder and behind it on the floor the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter, both speakers now sitting on edge still facing the foward wall and standing at roughly a 30 degree backward tilt relative to the vertical. When I unclipped the computer tweeter there was an immediate different improvement in the overall sound. Bearing in mind the long distance 'Airframe' tuning properties learned the other day in playing around with the TV set's sound downstairs in the living room, I moved one of the flow tubes out toward the end of the upstairs hall, sitting it on the floor, and spent a moment focusing it until I heard a better sound eminating from the room further up at the end of the hall. In coming back into the room I must say there was a VERY NICE sound. Lots of bass, lots of high end, clear distinction in voices and instruments. Effectively, the whole room seemed to have been turned into a loudspeaker. Gone was the tendency for the sound image to jump around to different distant locations due to 'lateral projection' depending on where you moved in the room, in this new instance the sound dispersion seemed to be more universal in a kind of 'surround sound' mode, with very good stereoscopic shapes wide spread as well no matter where you walked around. And then I touched one of the paper mobile templates hanging around, and the sound vanished in an instant. It was back to a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a new round of hurried tests with me trying to coax back and forth between almosts but not quites in trying to get back that great sound image. But no luck. The last thing tried was to see if I could get a major boost by making a major change in the system settup, by supporting the 5 by 8 inch tweeter on a cardboard tomatoe box stood on end. The sound tightened but lost dispersion when the oval tweeter was moved in place directly behind and below the 12 inch woofer and then focused to harmonically couple with it. And big roomy fidelity went to sonic heavan when the oval tweeter was moved far back, as far back as possible given the length of speaker leads. On the other hand, the bass ranges improved with the oval tweeter moved as far back as possible on the floor behind the ladder. But no big room 'surround sound' and no impressive fidelity. Once again, the fragility of the embodied system for sound generation has been demonstrated back to the demonstrator. I had it, then lost it, simply by moving a paper mobile template, breaking a momentarily stablized balance. So, that is it, a stalemate. I heard the nice big surround sound, then lost it in an instant. This surround sound was not powerful, as for instance noted in previous Updates involving tests with cassette tapes of symphony orchestras. On the other hand it was a very big open roomy and stereoscopic effect, while it lasted, for a few minutes, with a French FM station playing english 50's era 45 rpms amongst other things. At the instance of the big 'surround' sound, only the 12 inch woofer, and the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter, were working, both resonating freely in the open air, both still entirely in Mono piped in series hooked up via the Left channel to the getto blaster consul. As it has been for about two weeks the Right channel speaker leads are not plugged in at all to the getto blaster, and the balance toggle is shoved all the way to the top for Left channel only, and both the DBE and Surround Sound of the getto blaster are OFF. STRUCTURAL SIX-SIDED ARRAY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update October 2, 1992. 6:00 P.M. Today I re-arranged the structural array in the upstairs room, creating a six sided hexagram consisting of sonic devices, with the 12 inch woofer at the centerpoint. Two points of the hexagram are the flowtubes on the table, the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter is at another hexagram node, the large paper mobile is at yet another node. And the final node is occupied by a twelve sided starflake (the orignal 'tympani' resonator but without a tweeter climped to it). The results of these changes to the structural array is better range in the overall sound stream. I went outside the room and added long distance external sonic tuning via a paper 12 sided starflake standing up in the window at the very end of the hall, plus down the stairs at the first level a giant snowflake is in tune focused there. In this new array it turned out that the oval tweeter has been imparting a high pitched and spitty hark all along, so this was partially controlled by wiring in rheostats into its speaker leads, a rheostat wired in series in each lead, so I now have some range of volume control for it all the way down to zero. So, I got rid of some bark, but had to crank up the volume knob of the getto blaster to compensate, thus sending more juice to the 12 inch woofer, but this turns out to have a slightly muffled sound now especially more noticable when given high gain volume pushing 70% on the getto blaster's volume knob. Otherwise the whole presentation of the system distinctly improved the moment the six-sided hexagram array was created with the 12 inch woofer in the middle at the point of center. I get better fidelity if both the woofer and oval speakers are tilted forward at only 15 degrees relative to lying flat facing up to the ceiling, but the sound is rather thin and weedy. I get better body in the sound with the two speakers tilted upright to a 60 degree angle, but loose the fidelity. Briefly I tried a few tests, leading to both a 'surround' sound presence, or else extreme lateral projections met with extreme wide spread point sources of instruments, for instance at one point in playing a cassette tape of Famous Western Themes, a military snare drum was rattling far away BEHIND the wall of the far left corner, while a sax was playing out in the air in front of the other corner, a wide spread of beyond 20 feet between those two instruments. This, as per usual, was in 100% Mono. In the meantime, I got some 'POWER' back in the system, with the new array and using only the two speakers. I got back the presence of H A N G in the bass ranges, with echoes reverberating, this time using only two speakers resonating entirely in the open air for the sound generating source. I tried focusing the flow tubes all focused toward the point of center of the hexagram array, ie. to the 12 inch woofer, as well as laterally in straight lines parallel with the walls of the room. The intwisted tuning (toward the point of center of the hexagram) was unquestionably better in terms of overall sonics and stereoscopic sound. It helps in forming a conclusion; that a six sided figure is a fundamental constant in the nature of Reality, such that it can comprise in toto one piece, one step, for instance in Reality based mathematics. Ie., the whole figure itself is one term, with its radius the term's single variable. ??? SOLVED ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update October 3, 1992. 12:30 P.M. Well, hmmm, and hmmm. Interesting. The 'TYMPANI' RESONATOR is working again. I kept thinking of a prior occurrence reported in an Update of September 4/92 under subheading 'HOW CAN AN ARCHANGEL APPEAR IN FRONT OF YOU TO GIVE YOU A MESSAGE' when at that time the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter had quit working, seeming to have been blown completely, producing only a rattle for a few seconds when I tapped its cone, then it would quit, until suddenly after some room tuning with the thing still on by chance, ON it came again, suddenly, working like nothing had ever been wrong. So it had to be assumed that Impact Vibrations had momentarily set up in the room in such a manner that they were impacting too hard on the cone, causing it to stop moving completely. The same was happening with the 'Tympani' resonator. Just for the heck of it, today, I decided to give it one more try, using the speaker leads for the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter with the two rheostats (one wired in series into each of its leads) to give some volume control for the 1 1/2 inch SONY wafer thin tweeter. Climping the wafer tweeter back into place on the giant 12 inch starflake with two small paper clips I recreated the 'Tympani' resonator and lo and behold it worked. The wafer tweeter started working again, but intermittantly, cutting in and out, and with a lot of distortion. So I moved it into a new position raised on a stand and tilted at an angle behind the 12 inch woofer and found that with a bit of room tuning, the 'Tympani' resonator works just fine, thank you, mutually kicking the 12 inch woofer and getting boosted in return so that it is working with reasonable fidelity through a wide sound range and helping to produce an extremely wide spread lateral image, at this moment, I can hear things spread more than 15 feet apart between say, a triangle, and a singer's voice or a bass instrument. The focusing is extremely fragile, just a touch and the 'Tympany' can start distorting, or quit intermittantly, or permentently, until another touch or focus of something gets the 'Tympani' working again. I am sure that a better 'Tympani' can produce a better fidelity, and become a source of real P O W E R but will have to wait until something better comes along or is devised. Anyway, today, the 'Tympani' resonator is working again. Its problem day before yesterday was conflicting out-of-focus Impact Vibrations. The trouble is, the 'Tympani' resonator device still won't stay in position through minor touches or adjustments. Otherwise, when temporarily in focus, you can hear big bass tones coming from it when the ear is cocked close, even when it is working on its own with the 12 inch woofer shut off. Climped to anything else, and the 1 1/2 inch wafer tweeter sounds even worse then when working on its own. But when climped to the STARFLAKE a whole lot more happens. In principle, the 'Tympani' resonator is amplifying a weak narrow range generater signal into a stronger wider ranged generated signal via synchronistic resonances with the matrix of the 12 sided giant starflake. Well, that's the say for the time being. Signing off for the moment. Greydon Moore Orleans, Ottawa, Ontario. October 2, 1992. ---------------------------------------------- PRINCIPLES CONFIRMED Postscript ---------------------------------------------- Update June 23, 1993 This Update is brief. Not much has gone on in the way of experiments since the topic titled '??? SOLVED' immediately above in UPDATE.2 dated October 2, 1992. However two further tests were done during the winter and spring, with revealing consequences. One served to further confirm basic principles; that: MONO sound can hold the information needed for STEREOPHONIC sound. And the other test revealed a new aspect of the whole SONIC hologram manifestation in principle. FIRST EXPERIMENT ---------------- The first revealing new experiment is as follows: In midwinter, the 12 inch bass woofer was hung suspended from a laboratory stand set on the floor in a corner of the livingroom, this woofer's suspension being nothing else but two thick produce store elastic bands slung vertically between two 12 inch long nail spikes sticking out horizontally in the air from laboratory clamps. The two elastic bands were merely shoved through two opposing screw holes on the rim of the woofer in order to use them for suspension slings. Also present in the livingroom were three 8 inch woofers, a cheap 6 inch speaker, and a very cheap six inch oval speaker, all hanging loosely in a waving row, each suspended by a single sturdy elastic band from a cross beam supported by a laboratory stand sitting on the floor in the middle of the livingroom. The cross beam was a 2 1/2 foot length of 1/2 inch copper pipe for house plumbing. Two small plastic cabinets belonging to a Fisher 8400 model getto blaster were also sitting looking importantly sore on the floor spaced widely apart along the rear wall of the livingroom, in stereo positions. These two getto blaster speaker cabinets were nothing but the shells, the entirety of their loudspeaker circuitry unsoldered and had been in storage upstairs, the useless front faceplates merely eased into position and not screwed into the plastic box cabinates at all. The three speakers for each faceplate were each held in place by a loose screw. The only purpose for using them was to have a pair of fake speaker boxes. Hence the two cabinet boxes were plain and simple duds, with no sonic capability whatsoever, but, when set in place on the floor looked on first sight to be importantly functional. THE EXPERIMENT ITSELF --------------------- A couple of hours were spent in obtaining an appropriate show of force regards sincere stereophonic image, and reasonable fidelity. ....Note, lets see the results from a listener's point of view. Assume you (like the listener) have not been told at this moment what comprised the fiddling for this experiment to finally produce listener results, which are described as follows).... Once everything was set up, an observer arrived at the house and was then allowed into the living room to comment on what they heard. What happened is as follows. FIRST In standing in the livingroom archway, the observer had no trouble determining if it was Mono or Stereo, of course it was very good stereo in fact, said the listener. The main sound image was spread out along and behind the long length of the livingroom, on the opposite side of the room from the archway, with gas fake fireplace in the middle of the far wall. SECOND The next question was, which speakers were working? The array of 5 open air speakers dangling in a row on a lab stand on the floor in the middle of the room was eliminated when I held up speaker leads in the air. No leads had ever been connected. The sound boomed on; big deep reverberating bass, plus clear, rich yes strong high end cymbols and tamborines. As songs came and went over the radio the whole smalsh was heard, from Rock to Orchestral and back to Rock; violins soared away, trumpets all loud and clear, tympanis reverberating away in deep sonic booms and body, the whole smalsh. The only thing missing was a thinness in the midrange, not as much power as would be normal for midrange with an exceptably fidelic home stereo system. The two plastic cabinets of the getto blaster were eliminated when I carted them away one at a time into the kitchen, making a bit of a circus show of it, the unnattached speaker leads trailing across the floor and into the kitchen, where I pulled away the faceplates revealing nothing whatever inside the two boxes except air. The tweeters and electronic circuits within had long since been entirely removed from the faceplates and were upstairs in storage, only the speaker leads themselves were still soldered to the input leads on the inside of the faceplates. The sound in the livingroom had in fact marginally improved with the removal to the kitchen of the pointless getto blaster speaker boxes. The TV set sitting back in the corner was then turned off, eliminating it as a candidate. The 12 inch woofer hanging by elastic bands in the air in the corner was the only thing left as a candidate. It had been producing the huge stereo effect all along, working in 100% MONO mode, playing an AM radio station through the left hand channel of the getto blaster consul. The 12 inch woofer had obviously been carefully tuned per se, with regard to its exact alignment (facing out from the far rear corner of the livingroom), plus its precise distance out from the corner on the floor, and the tension in the elastic bands supporting the 12 inch woofer as it hung loosely in the air. Two long spike nails had been put to work as two horizontal support rods (attached top and bottom to the speaker rim by the elastic bands), extending out from clamps attached to the laboratory stand. The bottom rim of the woofer hung a few inches above the floor. The elastic bands stretched down from the head end of the spike nails, and some greater/lesser tension was tried by moving one or the other of the spikes up and down by tiny iotas, until a support tension seemed to work best in which the 12 inch woofer was held tight enough so as to not twist slowly two and fro, yet was otherwise as loose fitting in the hang of the elastic bands as possible. This comprised some of the tedious fiddling needed to get this experiment to work. In and around this was great care taken in the exact positioning of many hand made sonic tuning devices elsewhere around the environment. And gradually but inexorably a greater and greater quantity and quality of sound began to appear in the sound stream in the room, without touching the volume of the getto blaster. Until finally it was working to the point at which in walked the luckless observer unexpectedly, luckless because this soul was immediately recruited for a 'fool the guru' listening test. In this case, an otherwise flubby weak and toneless 12 inch woofer hanging totally alone in the open air by itself suspended loosely by two elastic bands from a post on the carpet floor in the corner of the living room, and which could normally produce at most ONLY a semi audible 'pap pap pap' for its total output of sound when held in the hand in a normal (untuned) sonic environment, had been pacified via sonically altering the open-air long-range environment around it, to be producing by itself the full stereophonic sound and powerful reverberating very low and high range sonics being heard in this experiment. It was a revealing test, in that a 12 inch woofer so mishandled should not be expected to produce anything resembling usable sound when hanging around dangling like a pie pan in the air by an elastic band. (It had turned out along the way that TWO elastic bands for support resulted in a slightly improved sound over the use of just one elastic band, in that the second elastic band allowed the 12 inch woofer to be supported with its face more fully vertical, as opposed to dangling at an out-angle above the floor). IMPACT VIBRATIONS ----------------- Impact Vibrations were definately in effect, in that not the tiniest iota of movement could be seen to involve the 12 inch woofer as it performed at its sonic best, hanging loose in the open air. The fact that this woofer could 'woof' was easily verified when attaching one or the other of its leads, and the woofer would kick in with a few giant flubby pumps of its big cone, before a bit of fine tuning and adjustement resulted in it settling down to pure Impact Vibration performance. In fact the Impact Vibrations were so intense, so thoroughly in place, that small cobwebs weaved in the back area of the 12 inch woofer by an occasion spider, were utterly motionless, even now you can see the cobweb lace flimsily clung to the woofer's cone and across to backpiece metal, and not a trace of motion of any kind can be detected amongst these flimsy cobwebs as the woofer horks away producing strong sound. The air is utterly without any flowing motion, it is vibrating strongly, rather. The intense vibration of the woofer's cone is moving to slightly to pump, it is not acting upon the inertia of the molecular weighted air. Or rather, the air back there is probably incredibly reorganized, and once reorganized, incredibly stationarily stable. THOUGHTS -------- It is clear that the source for a sound signal is not the critical factor which determines success or failure in sonic experiments. Although, for the record, poorer quality cheaper made loose coned speakers with smaller voice coil magnets seem to be better suited all around, rather than costly high tech high priced speakers with giant magnets fabricated in expensive ways to the back of them to make them "lookin' good", or, to rigorously control their own sound. Hologramic sonic Principles were confirmed, in other words, with that experiment. SECOND EXPERIMENT ----------------- The Second experiment, (which took place one afternoon in the first week of June, 1993), concerned a 50 year old wooden portable mantle radio with test tubes. This radio stands about 10 inches high, is a foot wide, and is 5 inches deep, and is made of small ornate wood pieces with a leather handle plus a bit of leather trim. A flexible wooden shield slides down over the dial when the radio is not in use. A typical small portable radio from mid century days, in other words, picked up at a yard sale for ten bucks one weekend afternoon about 10 years ago for nothing more than decor its original intent. I believe the wooden portable radio's vintage is the late 40's or early 50's since I have seen this radio on occasion in movies of that vintage. This old test tube radio's sound was entirely traditional; no bass, high end distorted out of range, and typical fuzzy output from its single 4 inch oval speaker. After three hours of experimenting with room tuning and the placement of sonic rejuvinating objects around the environmemt, the sound stream had improved to such an extent that once again it fooled an observer. In this case the TV set was on in the background, tuned to a background music channel commonly played during the day around here except the volume was turned off completely. And the getto blaster consul was sitting on the floor near the wooden 50 year old test tube portable radio, the getto blaster consul turned on and red lights flashing up and down its indicator display. The getto blaster boxes were upstairs in storage, still completely dissassembled down to the last tiny screw. But that is beside the point, the point being that the getto blaster speakers had long since been totally abandoned for any further research and were simply not anywhere near the getto blaster itself, the apparent functioning getto blaster was nothing per se but voodoo for the experiment. THE 2ND EXPERIMENT'S RESULTS ---------------------------- A listener came into the room and went to turn off the TV's volume but when going to crank the TV's volume control realized it was not turned on, so went to turn off the getto blaster's volume, but since that volume was already turned off and it was not connected to any speakers (just its jumping indicator lights were working away) nothing whatever happened when the listen sought to crank down that volume knob with a big toe. The listener turned to the portable radio and decided to turn its volume down, which ended the stereo rock orchestra playing loudly in the form of a gigantic sound image filling the entire back wall of the living room. NEW INSIGHTS ---------------------------- What was learned in this particular 'Second' experiment included several things. First, all sonic advantages in the environment were used. For instance, the back of the portable radio was off and lying on the floor behind the radio. The door into the garage down the main hall to the front of the house was open, as was the front door of the house, and the patio door at the rear of the livingroom also was open to allow all possibles for the sound to escape narrower confine and so to project and rebound from as far away as possible. I forgot to mention that the fuzzy intrinsic sound of the portable radio had been totally eliminated. Also, there was bass sufficient to pound the walls of the livingroom. And high end cymbols and the high hat plus tamborines sounded clean and clearly in audio with lots of body in the sound stream. Further, at ordinary room volume, the sound was projecting out through the patio door and carried 120 feet across the small park to a neighbor's fence on the other side of the park behind the wire fence of the back yard. What was learned through this 'Second' experiment was very important. It turned out that the handmade sonic enhancing devices, such as hand made six-sided paper mobiles, giant snowflakes made of six sided filed cartwheel beads crazy-glued together in six sided starburst hexagrams and so on, became important when strategically located in sonic HOT SPOTS to redisperse and rejuvinate the quantity of sound, such redispersement breaking up standing waves which setup and quickly muffle sound in an enviroment which is totally foreign to the environment in which the music was originally recorded. Setting up this wide ranging sonic environment described immediately above resulted in the range of the old wooden portable radio's sound stream to expand both bottomward and topward until (as already said) there was powerful bass causing the walls to pound with noticable impacts under the findertips. The sonic tuning extended all the way out into the garage, with a few objects in the garage discretely adjusted until sound in the garage noticably became clearer. (These objects were random, i.e., a couple of cardboard cartons, a floor model lamp stand, etc.). Outside the patio door, a plastic open topped jug which had just been used to fill the bird feeder, and was sitting on the concrete steps, was also discretely positioned such that sound eminating through the patio door was noticably improved outside in the back yard laterally wrapping to the left and right of the open patio door itself. Here is where the 'Second' experiment actually ended up running in two parts: TWO LEVELS OF TUNING ----------------------------- TO REVEAL A NEW INSIGHT When the main sonic devices were eventually arrayed in what seemed to be different suitable lively HOT SPOTS, a second level of tuning came to be needed. This was an extremely discrete fine tuning of ANY object in the environment, including not just the six and 12 sided sonic enhancers, but ANY object, including a coffee cup, or pencil lying on a table in another room. It turned out that something new and important was learned this day. First, the sonic devices sitting in sonic hot spots seem to have everything to do with the opeing up of the range of the sound, both upward into higher frequencies, and downward into the bottom bass. And secondly, ultra fine tuning of the sonic tuning devices after the fact of their placement in sonic hot spots, and ultra fine tuning of a few random objects of any kind, brought in greater and greater degrees of improved overall fidelity, the more ultra fine and seemingly microscopic the fine tuning became. Only a few random objects seemed to be needed to be tuned to near ultra micro lengths for major results to be heard. The main setup comprising sonic enhancers set in sonic hot spots did the job of expanding the sound stream's RANGE and POWER, for instance completely overcoming the fuzz tones (otherwise inherent in all old small test tube radios), and bringing forth bottom bass, and ringing cymbols. Tap a butterfly with a fingertip lightly enough that the butterfly does not fly away, this is the sense of ultra fine tuning to seemingly 'microscopic' lengths - the lightest taps possible to muster without not tapping at all. The descrete ultra fine tuning of random objects turned out to handle the FIDELITY. For instance a sax sound could suddenly become two separate saxaphones playing in melody when a coffee cup was touched so slightly that you would swear it could not have moved. Or a sound of female voices singing in the background could suddenly well up anew and spread out into a wide sound image, and become a choir of singers across the back of the orchestra, and so on, after a few random objects were touch-tapped in the tiniest of ways until suddenly a new fractal pattern stablized throughout the whole sound stream, with a sudden major jump in the overall fidelity occuring in the space of 3 or 4 seconds, the jump to a higher FIDELITY PLATEAU being obvious and unmistakable, and often an audible jump in volume accompanying the change in sound quality. The problem was, that the MORE the sound stream became rejuvinated, the MORE it also became SENSITIVE to the SLIGHTEST of disturbances, which could result in an abrupt deterioration in the sound's range and clarity within 3 or 4 seconds after the bad touch of any object in the environment. In other words, the more the STEREOPHONIC sound in a MONO signal source was built up, the more F R A G I L E it became. In fact the fact that the listener arrived right at that time was fortuitous because, even though the RANGE of the sound was somewhat stable, its fidelity was not, the better and the worse coming and going back and forth, the better in place for only a moment or two at a time, and the range itself would sometimes vanish, to be restored a moment later by re-adjusting one or two of the sonic tuning devices. At the moment the listener arrived, the whole setup was about at its best during the course of this afternoon's experiment. Again we came back to princples in Chaos theory. For instance 'The Elephant and the Butterfly's Wing' - the beat of a Butterfly's wing in such theory is presumed to be able to trip a cascading or spreading chaos that can effect the Elephant. In this case (the 2ND experiment), effects of destructive minute disturbances were more instantly heard due to the sheer poor quality of the sound generating source itself, (ie. the typical late 40's sound of a portable wooden shell test tube mantle radio playing the 100% Mono signal from a 100% AM radio station). DESTRUCTIVE MINUTE DISTURBANCES ------------------------------- What was clearly heard, in this case - (the STRONG sonic STEREO hologram from a WEAK MONO signal) - the more the original STEREOPHIC information was rebuilt anew in the sound stream, the more it was succeptable to destructive MINUTE disturbances in the environment in which the sound image was being recreated by sonic enhancements, rather than by loud speaker projection per se. Let's see if a better Yin Yang statement is possible: 'The greater the authentic original sound image being re-created in the environment, the greater becomes its FRAGILITY susceptability to the tiniest of environmental alternations that can disrupt the stability of ANY resonance patterns reproduced from the sound image as it originally existed when originally recorded, and now re-appearing in a new environment in which destructive standing waves and other greater interferences have been bypassed by an entirely new enviroment created by tuning techniques and dispersions described herein at length, based on fundamental six and twelve sided fractal geometry principles which operate at all times from macro-space to micro-space levels. Functions at crystaline levels of matter are intuitively supposed as likely without question also involved in the resulting sonic sound stream images, projections, and recurrances of sound. In gist, the more perfect the results achieved in non-destructive dispersion, and re-creation, the more perfectly stable HAS TO BE the environment within which the re-creation, (the sound stream), is taking place. When I say small disturbances, I mean SMALL. The last stages in getting the little old wooden test tube radio to produce STEREO well enough to fool a guru, was by going around and around just touching ANYTHING with the lightest of touches I could manage with a tremble free hand or middle finger. Such random objects included the dog's chewie lying on the floor (sinew bone), the radio's power cord lying on the floor between the radio and the wall, a pencil on a work table in the dining room, a cardboard carton sitting in the hallway up near the front door, a vitamin pill bottle in an open cupboard in the kitchen, just tapping the tops of two paper mobiles on microphone stands, just tapping their tops, it was THOSE degrees of essentially micro-scopic focusings that brought in the final high degrees of fidelity and definition into the stereo sound stream during this test. And so it was learned, the better and better the sound attained, the faster it could vanish in an instance with the most minor of disturbances in the resonating matter of the environment within which the sound image was manifesting. I have to mention also that the loud 60 cycle buzz from the hydro current, typically effecting old AM radios and in this case most noticable because of deterioration and leaked gas in the small test tubes, were completely overcome, no loud 60 cycle buzz could be heard, nor weak, no 60 cycle buzz could be heard at all. POSTDATE ------------------------------------------ Remarks suitable for the moment As far as being a useful way of improving one's home stereo, not much chance. With the tuning devices now sitting in various locations around the environment I get better (sometimes even arousing stereo) sound from the 24 year old TV, but it comes and goes intermittantly, sometimes better or far better, sometimes worse or far worse, just due to the random patterns of home life in the living room, kitchen, and rest of the house. One half or one hour at best is a good long time to expect to listen to real good stuff after a room tuning. Something will be needed that can generate a rejuvinating signal response, and hold the response stable so that it continues being pure, despite the distrupts of changes that are random and variable in a room. Some private thought has led to the idea that more than one sound signal source re-generating the original recorded sound, and played back in MONO, may serve to better stablize the whole sound stream, with the multiplicity of sound generators imparting more kenetic strength into the resulting sound stream, overcoming spurious disturbances from random objects moved by iotas. On the other hand, technical problems such as changed impedences from more than one speaker hooked in series will immediately change the basic parameters of the sound stream and its source generation. In fact, it could be possible that MORE speakers in line so as to all work together in the same MONO could result in even MORE ultra hyper sensitivity in the enviroment when the sound stream is regenerating and juvinated anew its to re-create projected sonic recurring images. On another hand it may be possible that a super potent sonic tuning device or two may be all that is needed to keep the sound up to snuff irrespective of a pukey weak or almost irrelevant sound generating source. It has been noticed that larger sonic tuning devices seem to hold more in the way of stability, then smaller devices, not surprising. INHERENT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SONIC HOLOGRAMS AND HOLOGRAMS OF LIGHT ---------------------------------- As for fundamental forces in Physics, this whole show of sonic powers inherent for instance in a Mono sound stream, is an entirely new covenent. It is as revealing in its own way as is the discovery of hologramic images in light. However there is a distinct difference between the hologramic properties of light, and of sound, as so far envisioned and witnessed in the preceeding descriptions of these ongoing home sonic experiments. In the case of light, the hologram image is projected from a source to a fixed location in a room that is external to an observer. The observer has to be outside, standing back from the light image hologram, in order to see it, and the image's projection has to be exactly precise for the image to be in focus. Further to this, the entirety of a light hologram is in the technical equipment to produce it; the high quality fine tuned capability of a laser beam, light source, the optics to diffract the laser beam, the quality of the laser photograph or film which holds the moire pattern blueprint of the laser image. As you can see, a hologram made from light is entirely in the hands of the technology used to produce it. In the case of sound, the technology itself can be almost anything capable of producing a sound generating source no matter how poor or inefficient, the inefficiency including quality or radio AM or FM reception, small to large speaker single or multiple, cheap walkman cassette players, CDS, and so on. Also, in the case of sound, the sonic patterns resonate all around the observer, so that in a sense the observer is inside a giant loudspeaker reproducer of sound, if the whole tuned environment including long distances is concidered the sound stream's hologramic (or holosonic) environment. And so, it is clear, that the whole of the sonic environment is effectively one giant loudspeaker per se, with you the listener (the observer) walking around anywhere inside it when walking around anywhere in the environoment that the sound is heard, including outside. P.S...... Along the way another ingredient has been added. This is a large plastic hexagonal shaped bird feeder. It is cyan blue in color but when put in the back yard the birds stayed away in droves, eyeing the thing with deep beedy eyed suspicians and coming nowhere near, no matter where in the yard it was placed. When it was moved back into the house, the birds immediately started hitting the original bird feeder in droves again, the cap of the original being red in color and of the same shape and design only much smaller, hanging from a small tree in the back yard. What happened when the big feeder was moved inside was that it was discovered at once to have capacity to substantially stablize the bass ranges of the sound stream when sitting on the floor in any hot spot in the living room. This stablization is quite universal. It matters not whether the bass is clear or muffled, weak or strong. Whatever the signal, it is stronger with the hexagonal bird feeder sitting in a hot spot. ANOTHER DAY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Note: August 12, 1993. 4:00 P.M. There is no question of the longtitudinal sound waves which issue forth from a sound source, and reflect longtitudinally back to the sound source. These longtitudinals are intrinsic for the existence of sound in a room. There are also the spurious longtitudinals which reflect willy nilly around the totally artificial environment into which the sound waves are being propigated from a reproducer source. The artificial environment (for instance of a living room) is totally different than the original environment in which the sound was recorded (for instance a recording studio). The question is in the exitence of myriad much shorter cross harmonic waves which work back and forth cross ways between the longtitudinal waves. These were present in the original recording environment, and come up in a totally new way, in a totally difference matrix, in any current enviroment in which the original recording is now being reproduced. In either case, the short cross harmonic waves contain sonic information which can be called 'laser-like', or 'hologramic', or stereo. For instance two 'stereo' speakers working inter-actively to produce products from two separate recording sources serve to create a cross-field form of polarization between the longtitudinal propropigating waves, for both sound reproducing sources to create the so-called 'stereo' in an arbitrary room. In fact these short cross harmonics can be of such short wavelengths in their total range, as to include submicroscopic, even atomic magnitudes, having such extremely short activity lengths as to be on par with interactions at atomic crystaline levels. Or so it may seem. These ultra short waves can have fundamentally important frequencies not just in the, say, 20,000 cycle range, but the 200,000 cycle range, perhaps even more than a 2,000,000 cycle range. So take it to the bank that most of the information comprising sound is contained within the fractal patterned grips of these supersonic hyperwaves, which work cross-harmonically between forward and backward rebounding longtitudinal waves. That which you finally hear, the end product; the reverbs and echos mainly conveyed by longtitudal reflecting waves; are the end product, the sound which finally comes into place to produce the humanly audible sound range, after the fact of environmental excitation, after the fact of the initiating pattern taking shape in the cross harmonic excitements connecting information in cross field excitments between the longtitudinal waves per se. A PAIR OF SNEAKERS IN A NEW LIGHT ----------------------------------------------------------------- Technical update: August 14, 1993. 12:05 P.M. An ordinary pair of shoes can be used to boost intrinsic sonic sound quality in an environment. These shoes can be anything; a pair of shoes, or slippers. Whatever. The secret is to a find a hot spot in your audio environment and place the two sneakers shoes in a certain way, in tight focus, in ultra fine tuning, and it will happen that the apparent sound in a sound stream from any crude sound source generator will be heard to improve. For instance in the home environment currently being used for sonic reproduction experiments using techniques concidered impossible in normal accustical theories, a 12 inch woofer is hanging suspended from a thick elastic band from a laboratory stand sitting on the floor near the far South/East corner of the living room. A second elastic band was earlier being used to support the woofer in a more vertical upright position but the second band dissolved due to oxidation and snapped and it has been found that the amount of sonic improvement gained by having the second band is not worth the effort when just wishing for comfortable listening background music, in that a second elastic band requires far more in the way of tedious fussing and fumming to handle its tuning and sonic focusing characteristics. So, for the moment, just one elastic band supports the 12 inch woofer, which currently hangs at an angle of roughly 15 degrees offset from the vertical and this open air suspension with the face 'hanging' at a noticable angle works just fine, more than enough to be completely acceptable. There is nothing else at all adding anything to the sound stream. Just the 12 inch woofer by itself is producing all of the sound, which can be heard like a loud stereo out in back in the park behind the fence, and out in front of the house when the front door is open. The high end sound is weedy and not very natural, but that is beside the point, some modern rock and roll musics (and rock videos) have sounds which sound so unnatural that the weediness of this experiment's high end can go virtually unnoticed as a lesser effect. The point is that in this experiment's high end you can hear cymbols, high hats, tamborines, triangles, and all high end percussions and instruments with no difficulty at all, it is just that their tone and timbre is not true to life, nor is their overall presence a complete singular standout as if heard live. I forgot that it is the lower most bottom bass booms which have made this experiment the most interesting, these booms are very vibrant and include loud bass drum kicks and so on. NOW FOR THE NITTY GRITTY ABOUT A PAIR OF SNEAKERS ------------------------------------------------- A pair of sneakers located by the east doorframe of the kitchen doorway, or by the west doorframe at the front office further up the hall, will boost the overall resonance of this sonic producing experiment, when the sneakers are handled in a certain way, which will be described shortly. The particular handling of the sneakers is being mentioned because, behind the handling, are mechanical accustic principles at work which are usefully definative. In a quick review, the current listening is via a 12 inch woofer hanging suspended and totally loose, free swinging, in the open air. There is no cabinate or other forms effecting the woofer in any way other than that it is located hanging a few inches above the floor and about 2 1/2 feet out from the corner of a room (the livingroom). The signal source is a getto blaster consul (model 8400 by Fisher), which is currently set to FM radio, with only the Left Channel of the getter blaster's line feeds plugged to the 12 inch woofer, so that only a mono signal is being produced. Nevertheless, accustics are such that stereophonic echoes and reverbs are being heard at a satisfactory listening level for background music while working at a computer in another room. SPECIFIC HANDLING OF A PAIR OF ---------------------------------------------- SNEAKERS AS ROOM TUNING DEVICES ---------------------------------------------------------- The following information regards 'a pair of sneakers' is included since a great deal of sonic-environment information seems to be paramount, which has nothing to do with theories or constructions of accoustic loudspeakers either stereo or mono. ---------------------------------------------------------- Talking about a pair of shoes may seem pthhh!. In particular when trying to make the pair of shoes sound important. There is a reason. The difficulty is in that there is not much about a pair of shoes that is scientifically definative. So, language has to be conspired that can communicate, but not to foolish readers, or to cater to TV Bingo mentalities. Here, then, is the language. In place beside the west doorframe up the hall near the front of the house, a pair of sneakers are sitting in a sonic hot spot. Locations near the frames of doorway openings seem to be areas of increased sonic excitement in general, (where sound wraps to other areas and chambers, such as up a hallway and into another room), where either destructive, or enhancing, effects result from any object placed in such 'wrap' sensitive locations. The sound generating sopurce for this information is a 24 inch quaser TV set of 24 year old (1969) vintage, with one 4 inch tweeter comprising the whole of its 'sound'. It seems a rule that in the questions of the frames of doorways, a doorway frame farther to a sound generating source is more sensitive than that closer to the sound generating source. For instance any doorway has two frames, one on either side of the opening to a room. In sonic tests in this 'home' environment, the frame farther from the sound generating source seems to be better at offering sonic tuning controllable locations (the hot spot is the farther door frame), although this is not necessarily a firm fixed rule and seems to depend on other factors effecting the tuning of a sound stream at any time. Today, the best place for the shoes is by the door frame farther from the sound source at the living room opening, and in fact up the hall the shoes are better placed also against the farther doorframe, where the front office is located. A pair of sneakers are at this moment sitting beside the door frame furthest removed up the hall, because they are positively conducive there but not so sonically sensive, so that it takes less work to get the sneakers positioned at such long distance from the sound source to create new positive input into the sound stream's ambiant reverbs and echoes around the whole environment of the house per se. In the doorframe nearer the sound source (ie., in the doorway to the livingroom itself), it takes more frustrating fine tuning to get the sneakers properly in place to result in a kick uphill in the overall sound stream. The sneakers are set from center to center about 6 inches apart. Here, further up the hall, their toes are pointed along the hall toward the livingroom doorway. If placed by the doorframe to the livingroom, their toes are best aligned toward the sound stream generating source itself across to the rear back corner of the room (where sits a 24 year old TV set and its 4 inch tweeter). It turns out the way to place the sneaker is obvious, with definate rules which logically make sense for the outcome. First, a rule which seems to be true for any object which has a rectangular or pointed shape: is that the longtitudinal axis of the rectangle be pointed toward the sound generating source. In the case of pencils or such, the point of the pencil, (the smallest cross-sectional face), seems best turned toward the sound generating source, rather than, for instance, the erasure, or blunt end of the pencil. In the case of sneakers, this is a rectangular object having a topologically typified by narrowed toes, opening up to a cavity at the heel end. So the narrower toes are pointed toward the sound source to accomodate a better sounding alignment. It seems a second sonic property is also being advanced by the kind of topological product evinced as a pair of ordinary sneakers (running shoes). This is that it seems any topological object which is assymetrical (not uniformally shaped along all axis) and which has a cavity which thus can act as an accustic resonator, is best positioned with the cavity to the rear of the object relative to the sound generating source. Except in the case of cavities which are part of topologically uniform objects. For instance a desk drawer when pulled partially open, can act as a sonically enhancing accoustic resonator which works best with the cavity (ie., drawer front panel) faced in the direction of the sound generating source, or focused laterally at an offset angle of say 15, 30, or 60 degrees. The degreeness is non specfic to one angle only since the accustic interaction of the drawer's accoustic cavity also has a lot to do with the ambiant environment of the room it is in, and the kind of sound generating source currently at work. ENTER THE REALM OF THE HUMAN EARS -------------------------------------------------------------------- The tuning of the pair of sneakers (as explained above) requires technical input of a specific kind. The reason for the specific input is due to a physiological input of an even more specific kind. To wit, the human ears. In fact, the human ears input is so specific that certain parameters can be easily charted in a simple form of illustration, as follows: First, a list of the main parameters of the human ears: 1. External members - the Ears themselves, tissue-made reflectors which stand erect on either side of the head. Call these the Ear Flaps. 2. Internal members - the Ear Drums, against which sonic waves impact to produce vibratory information which is then translated into electrical information via the tympani's and cilia of the inner ear. In assuming a distance between one ear and the other; in saying here is a distance to hear stereo separation through two ears; the direct distance between the two 'ear flaps' can be measured (flap to flap). However, in assuming a distance in which sound waves must travel in order to become activally engaged in the human's physiological methods of detecting sound, then the distance which separates the two 'ear drums' inside the head can be concidered (ear drum to ear drum). Which raises instant questions; is the 'inside' distance that which is measured if shoving a ruler through the head and measuring the exact distance between one ear drum and the other, from the inside. Or is the real distance the distance which starts inside at the ear drum and comes out the ear canal to the ear flap. So that the real distance is the diameter between the two ear flaps, plus the added distances along each ear canal into the location of each ear drum? In concidering that cross harmonic sound waves likely energize from the sound cavities of one ear (both the flaps, and further inside to the ear drum) and can wrap around the head to become percieved in either other ear, then the total distance comprising the spread of the head between ears is a lineal sum comprising the width between the ear flaps, plus the canal distances to the two ear drums. Okay, enough of derivation descriptive philosophical interpretations. Here follows is a simple illustration showing the specific mechanical inputs of the human hearing array. ILLUSTRATION 1-A -------------------- Ú----------------------------------------¿ ³ ³ ³ ³ A  B C  D À---- ----Ù | | |ùùùù³ INSIDE THE HEAD ³ùùùù| | |     ³ ³ ³ ³ ³ | | ³ ³ Left ear Drum Right ear Drum ³ Left ear canal Right ear canal Left Ear Flap Right Ear Flap The real distance between ear drums is concidered to be the combined distances of (A to D), plus ear canal distances (A to B), and (C to D), rather than merely (B to C), or (A to D). But in fact, several real distances are yielded by the human anatomy. 1. Cross diameter Distance between ear Flaps. 2. Cross diameter Distance between ear Drums. 3. Cross diameter Distance between ear Flaps plus the extra distance to each ear Drum. 4. Total wrap around distance (wrapped around the head) for (1). 5. Total wrap around distance (wrapped around the head) for (2). 6. Total wrap around distance (wrapped around the head) for (3). In fact, the first three distances seem to have significance when it comes to attempting to fine tune two similar parallel objects so as to be stereophonically responsive (enhancers) in the presence of a sound stream which is being generated by a 100% MONO source, with only one sound generating source at work to produce the sound stream. In this situation, two pencils laid side by side separated by a distance supposedly approximating a pair of human ears can clearly produce a positive input factor when laid side by side at a similar approximate distance as which separates a pair of human ears, but can also clearly indicate at least three small distances also having good input, a main other input most noticable as being that which would arise from Distance value (3). Which brings us right back to the pair of sneakers sitting apart carefully positioned near a doorframe. The width of the each sneaker -would -could -should be in synch at least for one part of the sneaker to at least one of the main ear related distances, for instance the inner shell heel rim vrs the outer side of the heel rim or perhaps the tongue right up the middle, for the pair. It seems a pair of sneakers have inbuilt mechanical configurations suitable to resonate in a plus positive way with sonically fine tuned room resonances because several human anatomy distances for the human ears are approximated in the topology of shoes sitting apart as a pair. Aug. 15, 1993. Orleans, Ont. Greydon Moore NOTE... ----------------------------------------------------------------- Technical update: August 19, 1993. 1:15 P.M. THE 'ELEPHANT AND THE BUTTERFLY'S WING' CONCEPT IN ----------------------------------------------------------- THEORIES OF CHAOS BROUGHT TO AN OBVIOUS TEST LEVEL Perhaps the most significant feature to come from all of the experiments and tests reported in the above 'Newsound' descriptions, (at least in terms of physical mechanical news), is that sound resonance responses in a room can be sensitive to interferences and re-enforcements all the way down to the molecular level, if not, in fact, all the way down to crystal lattice interactions within the molecule's atoms themselves. By this is meant the observation that just the very tiniest possible human touch made to a random object can be enough to trigger a major change in the sonic presence of a sound stream originating from a single simple 4 inch tweeter (old TV set) 'speaker' operating in Mono as the only sound generating source in a large room. It is the 'Elephant and the Butterfly's Wing' concept in Theories of Chaos brought out in the open in full bloom. In this case the 'speaker' happens to be that of a 24 year old Quasar model 24 inch TV set, tuned to a community news cable channel with music all day its background. An ashtray sitting on a glass coffee table on the other side of the room, diagonally across from the TV set toward the far corner, is plastic, circular, and has a ridge for cigarette butts up its middle. This ashtray, when touched so slightly that a fly could ignore having felt the naughty blow if sitting on the ashtray, can nonetheless (resulting from such a brief tap), result in bass not being heard at all from the TV, to be suddenly roaring and resonating with object-vibrating strength a few seconds after the sound asleep fly got touched by the hand of god and didn't notice. The, ahem, grunt of the bass, is what makes the bass so OBVIOUS. And it can come in, not by expanding resonator cavities in ways deemed necessary to produce more of those L O N G longtitudinal monsters, but at the very HIGHEST frequencies of the sound wave spectrum. Cross harmonic interactions between longtitudinal waves are obviously a factor in this hyper sensitive range of interaction, as well as, obviously, those new above human audio high freguency sounds that experts are now starting to talk about in such as 'Scientific American' Magazine. A REAL TIME 'ELEPHANT AND THE BUTTERFLY'S WING' CHAOS EXPERIMENT ---------------------------------------------------------------- To do a real time theory in 'Elephant and the Butterfly's Wing' chaos experiment, one which does not have to be just conjectured, it is possible to picture a definitive technical arrangement, in which equipment is in the room, hyper sensitive to changes in any part of the sonic range of the sound stream, both in terms of sensitivity to any change in volume, no matter how slight, and any change in range, both top, and bottom, plus of course midrange. The changes are displayable on a computer screen graph. The graph has been calibrated to produce a standing wave of top to bottom ambiant noise being generated into the living room, plus at what current volume. This is translated into a wave pattern on the scientific monitor screen against which any changes in volume and sound range can be compared at a glance. The second part of the experiment requires setting the above described ashtray on a sensitive monitoring table pad, in which, in any approximate position, the exact position of the ashtray is precisely calibrated by cross firing laser beams, to create a completely precise marking of its exact position on the coffee table. So that two possibilites are immediately allowed. One is that the merest slight touch gingerly made by near nonexistent human finger tip will record on the sensor pad in terms of foot/pounds of work, (how many minisculely small ergs were exerted as force against the ashtray by the touch). And secondly, how much was the ashtray actually moved (displaced) by the touch. This is where the lasers come in, with inphase-outofphase cross matching of the wavelengths reflecting off the ashtray. Even the slightest movement of the ashtray can be measured, even if at the molecular level, by interference patterns. Let's be realistic. Molecular levels of displacement (movement) cannot be expected, but the point is, that movements of the ash- tray so slight they cannot be detected by the keenest of eyeballs will certainly be detected and precisely measured clearly by laser interference patterns. The experiment thus set up can then get underway with simple touching of the ashtray to hear greater volume, and bass power, and high end clarity, come and go, in the sound stream, as the ashtray is judisciously tapped and tuned into and out of hyper sonic ranges by the deft master of the craft, me. Actually, of course, anyone with curiousity fueling the motives can do such an experiment. Its success does not in any way require me or my livingroom as mandate for authenticity or proof. 2:50 PM. August 23, 1993 Greydon Moore Orleans, Ont. THE 'FERRIS WHEEL' HAS A HIDDEN FEATURE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Technical update: August 31, 1993. 10:15 A.M. Several months ago, my 'Ferris Wheel' was knocked over by the dog's wagging tail, and so the device sat in a ravaged state out of the way in another room, two of its six large snowflakes in fragments, the device mishappen, its six circumferencial thin brass wires strung like loose telephone wires. Today I decided to get out the crazy glue and fix the thing. When holding it up in my hand, an opportunity became apparent to try a test of a kind which had been seen (heard) earlier as indications, but which had never been tested in any definative situation to date. An off-on observation over the past year had been that every so often, when handling one or another of the tuning devices, every so often a stupendous sonic roar would suddenly appear, then disappear in an instant. Sometimes just one or two beats in a peice of music would hold some mighty power, then vanish. The sonic roar was not of the worst kind, but the best kind possible. For instance in hearing bass tones coming from our 24 year old Quasar TV set, suddenly a whole big window would open up particularly in the bass ranges, appearing as if operating in full high fidelic stereo, then disappear. At times this sudden input could occur with major sound sources distinctly separated by many feet apart in the livingroom, something like the kind of wrap around sound which punctuates the sound tracks of major motion pictures in a movie theatre, suddenly an unseen speaker up against the wall alongside or even behind you kicks in with a voice or other sound effect, with enough unexpected clarity to startle the audience. This is sort of like the few seconds of 'N E W' presence I am trying to describe, which just as suddenly would disappear again a second or two later. What gradually became apparent is that these sudden major kicks were happening when I was slowly (verrry slowwly) turning or tuning a sonic device. It made me try a few tests with, for instance, a short pencil on a coffee table, rotated slowly around an axis, as slow as I could humanly turn it by hand and still keep things steady. With these simple casual tests, I was never able to hit upon a gigantic sonic whooom! But did hear marginal improvements, or diminishments, in the overall fidelity of the sound stream, depending on how slowly or fast I rotated or moved an object. And in which directions the motions were made. But, as already indicated, these casual tests were not exciting in any way because I kept hallucinating the existence of a non existent device that could be used to control rotation speeds down to the pace of, say, the second hand of a clock, ie., 1 complete rotation every minute, or every 30 seconds. Another rotation tried was an occilation, slowly back and forth, like a common household fan. Neither rotations indicated anything more than some potentials lurking in the distrupters of a sound stream. There were no yelps, no eyebrows sliding uphill under discovery power. Nothing but indications of a potential unexplored. I learned no definative parameters by such playing around casually from time to time, except to be left with the idea that if I could come up with some means of being able to turn something at a speed roughly on par with, say, twice the speed of the second hand of a clock, it might prove to offer yet another way of controlling constructive sonic reverberations in a room. TODAY IS DIFFERENT ------------------ This morning I learned something that I think is definative in a constructive way. What I heard was not the mighty sonic whooms as already described above, but a distinct improvement in the overall basic fidelity of the sound stream issuing from the 24 year old Quasar TV. Newly learned today is a third kind of rotation, one never concidered before due to lack of easily intuited, easily recognized, opportunity. It happened that I was holding the 'Ferris Wheel' in hand, studying its broken snowflake problems with an eye to how to go about fixing the snowflakes with crazy glue one step at a time. And so, here is how the stage is set: I am sitting in the old leather chair kitty corner from the 24 year old Quasar TV set playing away on a musak background music channel in the far corner of the living room, and in my hand is being held the 'Ferris Wheel' as I slowly turn it around to different angles to look at its damages suffered by the dog's wagging tail. And suddenly there in the room in the sound stream is sustained improved fidelity, which then is gone again, then is there again, in a sustained way. This is not a jaw dropping fidelity, (wish it was), just a noticable improvement in the overall sound range, particularly in the higher end of the sound stream, with definate clarity in the stereo presence also apparent, although no major sound source image separations were taking place left to right. The change for the better came into the picture, it turns out, each time I was 'S L O W W W L Y' rotating the 'Ferris Wheel' like a real ferris wheel revolving around its central axis. Only in this case I was holding my device upright by hand via its central support post made of stiff copper wires, and pseudo rotating it around its axis. Several different rotations with which the 'Ferris Wheel' could be slowwwly moved were immediately tried, with the result that it was obvious that rotating it in the manner of a real ferris wheel produced significant improvements in the overall fidelity of the sound stream issuing from the 24 year old Quaser TV set, especially in the high end of the sound; the trumpets, clarinets, cymbols, and stereo sonic room presence surrounding the instruments. Etc. The authentic ferris wheel rotation is the only motion which had noticable effect on the sound stream. THE 'FERRIS WHEEL' ITSELF -------------------------------------------------------------- Technical description The 'Ferris Wheel' is an experimental sonic tuning device, constructed during the winter of 1992, to test an assembly of six large snowflakes mounted around the circumpherence of a hexagon frame made of stiff 11 grade copper wire, so that one large snowflake is positioned midway between each of the hexagram's six nodes (angles). The nodes themselves just define the six corners of the hexagram. Each large snowflake consists of 13 small 'cartwheel' snowflakes, each of the 13 having its edges hand filed into sharp 30 degree and 60 degree facets, then all glued together with hobby strength crazy glue to make a large flat six sided snowflake, something that could be used as a christmas ornament hanging from a christmas tree. A very thin grade of brass wire, from a spool the kind which custom jewellers use for making ear rings and such, was then strung around the circumpherence of the resulting figure. Six wires in total were strung through the centerholes of outer snowflakes, exactly in the manner of guy wires strung around the circumpherence of a real ferris wheel, hence the name 'Ferris Wheel' given to label this particular experimental tuning device, because it looks pretty much like a ferris wheel, in fact. The device as hand built has a diameter roughly 8 inches, and stands on an upright support post, to a height of roughly 13 inches. I can give you another quick image idea as to how the 'Ferris Wheel' looks as a mechanical device, to better give an idea of the kind of slow motion rotation being discussed in this Update for today. Picture six large sunflowers mounted on a hexagram frame made of thin but stiff copper wire, the wire puncturing through the center of each sunflower, so that the six are arrayed around the frame as if like six large stop signs, each bent forward 60 degrees from the one behind it. In fact to get a better picture, begin with a straight wire with six sunflowers equidistantly spaced along the wire, like six stop signs. Now, hook the two ends of the wire together, and bend the circular shape into six equal straight lines by making the bends at the six equally distanced node positions that comprise the circumpherence of the hexagram. That is how the ferris wheel was hand constructed. Now, holding this device in hand, slowly rotate it around its center axis, the flat sunflowers sweeping face forward through space around the circumpherence, in the same manner as chairs of a real ferris wheel. It is this motion which has been discovered today to impart a fidelic purity of a noticable kind into the ambiently spitting and squeezed sound stream of a single 4 inch tweeter Mono sound source issuing from the old TV set into an essentially untuned room, the livingroom. By untuned I mean that today the room had not been fussed over to get reasonable background listening in the way of all day 'good listening' music. Notwithstanding that the sunflowers image in analogy is precisely accurate in regard to the hand made sonic 'Ferris Wheel' herein being discussed, the similarity in images vanishes when it is realized that the sunflowers in the real device are large snowflakes made of 13 transparent multi-colored smaller six-leaved plastic beads called 'cartwheels' in the local hobby stores. So the device actually glitters and takes on the look of a virtual reality image in a computer when sunlight strikes it. It on its own is quite a beautiful piece of art. It is also very fragile. Pitching face forward off a table by an elbow knock has resulted in some broken flakes being held in place by the brass wires. At this point no extra work has been done to room tune the environment for better back ground music listening, which is why the sudden improvement in the overall fidelity of the sound stream was so noticable when slowly and very slowly turning the 'Ferris Wheel' in hand, trying to study its damaged snowlfakes with an eye to systematically repairing each with crazy glue. (The technical difficulty is that some of the gluing also requires re-tensioning the guy wires and how to do this has taken quite a bit of thinking. It is either that, or cut away the guy wires to restring new ones after the broken snowlfakes have been repaired. But, if you are like me, having to do again a tedious somewhat difficult job is not exciting). The actual rotation of the 'Ferris Wheel' leading to immediate steady state reverberation improvement in the sound stream is as slowwww as I can muster holding the device upright in the air by hand and trying to rotate it via a grip on the shaft in a way that follows the true trajectory of a rotation around the device's central axis. This is not easy, and in fact there are, ahem, slight hand tremors today, so the rotation's motion is not perfectly fluid. Spinning the device on its support axis, as if spinning a palm leaf by its stem, does not improve the room's sound, nor does spinning the device like the damper of a chimminy. Only the slow forward rotation like that of a ferris wheel works. Not yet having the means to control precise rates of rotation, it seems that slowww and real s l o w w w is best, and the best lineup seems to be with the 'Ferris Wheel' lateral to the sound stream, as if, for instance, a loudspeaker at a county fair is pointing sideways at the disk face of the fair's ferris wheel, so that the ferris wheel is rotating around the rim of the loud speaker, the ferris wheel's axis aligned to the center of the loudspeaker's cone. The one thing the ferris wheel does even when sitting stationary somewhere, is to boost the intensity of point source separations of sound. However, to achieve this takes acute small range focus, felt to be smaller than moves of a 64th of an inch. Verrry small moves is the fuel for final finer focus. The result however can result in sound sources splitting apart, in two ways. Stereo separation can in fact occur, for instance one sax playing several feet apart from another, but this kind of separation is not guaranteed, it comes and goes. The other form of separation is more or less guaranteed, for instance that there are in fact TWO different saxaphones producing a specific note. And in particular the lower more bass notes of an instrument such as a sax become more distinct in terms of point source, rather than part of a blend producing a more solid range of noise in the sound stream, with the kind of separation being herein noted, you can hear behind the sax, as well as to either side of it, and in front, and know clearly that specific notes are originating at exactly that instruments source in space. This discernment, as already said, is brought about by deft use of the 'ferris wheel' as a sonic tuning device. In fact it can be said that really good stereo sonics do not occur without the 'ferris wheel' being somewhere in the environment when dealing with %100 MONO sound sources in true open air embodiments. 12:45 PM. August 31, 1993 Greydon Moore Orleans, Ont. THOUGHT I HAD RETIRED, DID YOU. -------------------------------------------------------------- A FEW QUICK OBSERVATIONS 11:55 PM. MARCH 29, 1994 Greydon Moore Orleans, Ont. Actually, there are DEVICES which can be made cheaply and sold for profit coming from these sonic experiments. Paper cutout models have shown certain design principles which can be easily modified and adopted for consumer use, ie., there is money to be made, when the time comes. It will take some further rather expensive developement to have any product ready for market, since the hand-made proto devices are capable of showing principle only, and are not deemed to be in anyway cloneable and sold on the spot, made cheaply and whizzed to the dollar stores for instant sale. To summarize this profit-loss part, yes, definately, certain sonic images in the form of hard copy hand-made paper and plastic devices will work to become the protos for store sold inexpensive sonic enhancing devices having more than one kind of sonic inducing capacity, and more than one kind of intended use. ----------------------------------------- THE EXPERIMENTS No new experiments have been done other than to redo and redo anew experiments already described in the UPDATES. What this means is that certain sonic devices have been tested in a variety of settings, and all that has been learned is that certain rules work, certain rules don't. RULE NUMBER 1 is that the more a room is tuned to finite perfect sonic enhancement, the more the whole environment becomes susceptible to chaotic decay. It means that as the final sonic chapters boom into place, the slightest disruption, even a move of less than 1/64th of an inch of a vitally tuned device, can cause the real goodstuff in the room tuned environment to vanish in an instant. RULE NUMBER 2 has to be described rather than stated. The description is simply that contrary to intuitive hope and desirous expectations, a sonic device tuned to a sonic hot spot will move OUT OF FOCUS if it is capable of moving in the soundstream, rather than tuning into a more and more harmonious tuned sitting. This does not mean to say that sonic devices cannot be designed to be self tuning, it simply means that all of the sonic device designs so far tested do not have this ultimately desired feature, ie., they all vibrate OUT OF RANGE rather than into more range, in the soundstream. A case in point is an experiment taking place one afternoon using the 24 year old Quasar TV as the sound source. Without going into details, needless to say the environment had been tuned to exquisite levels and on the TV was a flat six sided paper cutout figure mounted on three small paper-made triangular tripods, this array sitting near the back edge of the TV. A new song by a famous moaning groaning mournful melancholy singer who used to be a poet was on the air, and the room was mightily booming with loud powerful bass notes fully evolved as was the singer's voice, very fully evolved in the lower notes of meclancholy for which this singer is so famous. (The word 'Suzanne' springs to mind if trying to get a handle on who I am alluding to. The singer is not important, what happened next, is). Suddenly the apparatus fell off the back of the TV set. The tripods (with the stiff paper six sided cutout parked on top) had vibrated more than an inch across the top of the TV until the whole thing suddenly pitched over the edge, quitting the fantastic stereo sound in an instant. For that was the gist, at that moment I was facinated by the sheer stereo-ness of the sound, and was carefully descretely adjusting something else nearby when the vibrations moved my sonic tuner off stage. Boy what a difference. Everything just disappeared. No sonic booms. No reverberating echoing bass. No stereo. Nothing was left to speak of. And the frustrating fact was that I was never able to get the thing set up to respond in the same way again. I tried and tried through the rest of the afternoon, without success. It had to be some unique local co-incidental set of tuning circumstances that led to that mighty sound which lasted only temporarily and which I had been taking for granted for about 10 minutes, until suddenly it disappeared, when the sonic tuning device vibrated in locomotion half way through this singer's song and fell off the back of the TV set. I tell this short story only to highlight the remark that so far in these experiments sonic devices that can move seem to follow strange attractors OUT of focus, rather than homing in via friendly attractors into the best ranges possible. In Love and Service R.S Livingstone. March 29, 1994 ----------------------------------------- ANOTHER UPDATE October 13, 1994 It is now October 13, 1994, and nothing vitally new has been added to the ingredients, except for a couple of small learning curves. First is that the cutout six sided art paper figures cited above have been found to work far better when supported perfectly vertically upright, the support being the small paper-made triangular tripod, with the six sided cutouts parked straight upright in the grip of an apex at the top of a tripod. The gist of this new-found embodiment is that the sound stream tends to be far more stable, once tripods are set up in the environment. The setups can be anywhere throughout the main floor of the house, except they only work in sonic hot spots which are very dynamic, otherwise a tripod works to deteriorate the sound. However when in a very dynamic hot spot, new clearities are abundant. The tripods thus far seem to have two particular arrays that work in extra strength. ONE, is three tripods with upright six-sided cutouts gripped upright in each, and set in a fan array along the three axis of a hexagram, with leaves of the array each rotated by 120 degrees to be focused to the center of the hexagram. TWO, is to set the tripods in a 'flow tube' array, for instance lineally along the livingroom floor radiating straight away from a focus point of the sound stream's generating source. This has been done with the old 24 inch Quasar T.V. (now 25 years old). In this lineal 'flow tube' array the uprights were set about a foot apart, one behind the other, and definately in lineal array so that I lay on the floor and sighted along through the upright's open centers and found that by lining up the center areas as much as possible, the sound improved. A major change in the bottom bass range of the sound stream came into the picture when one of the tripods was dissolved and its six-sided cutout laid on the ground, supported at the end facing the sound generating source, propped up here by a small tripod so as to sit at a sloping angle of rouphly 30 degrees. With this lineal 'flow tube' array it was easy to obtain so-called 'sonic booms', i.e. deep and strong bass responses that resonated and 'hung' in the room. In fact to get the booms, all I did was crank up the volume and adjust the 'flow tube' until rattles and distortions disappeared from the sound eminating from the old TV set. In normal circumstances the old TV's sound would have completely deteriorated into rattles and nonesense at 1/4 of the test volume used above. With the flow tubes in place, a couple of time pulsed clock motors obtained for 6 dollars each from a hobby store were also set on the floor near the TV set and adjusted. These battery operated clocks turn a second hand by jumps one second at a time, and with a triangular shaped hand made little paper device taped to each second hand, work very well to break up destructive standing waves which radiate along the floor. And so, by combination of strategic placing of the two clock disrupters on the floor, along with the 'flow tube' array, it was possible in just a few minutes to coax sonic booms into the room filling it with roomy resonances, from the 25 year old Quasar TV. Like I said, it only took a few moments to coax the booms into the sonic picture. This experiment had brief duration and could not be left in place with a small dog, and two computer associates, arriving back at the house. ----------------------------------------- FOOTNOTE Another ingredient has been added for playtime. A neighbor arrived at the door and with a big grin handed me an old SANYO stereo set, with FM radio, a built in tape cassette deck (large sized similar to original Panasonic portable tape recorders) which works perfectly. But, the record player is seized solid. The turntable cannot turn even a fraction of an inch. This set has been USED. |--> Nevertheless an interesting new feature was learned regards | its small pair of wooden cabinate shelf sized speakers. The | 5 inch main drivers are rated at 10 ohms. And a tiny paper | cone 1 inch tweeter is included in each box that is totally | sealed with a solid baffle on the back. | | First test with this new toy was obvious (circ. July, 1994). | Off came a back baffle and the balance cranked all the way | over to the right channel only, and some testing occurred | in which stereo sonics were finally built into the room's | sound stream, using the 100% Mono sound source, and using | the wide open enclosure with its two speakers intact. Some | irritating distortion was eliminated after a day by pulling | out the little tweeter and using just the 5 inch driver in | the enclosure. Best results occurred with the enclosure | balanced horizontally about six inches off the floor | on a small cardboard box. | | Then of course the next obvious test: Out came the 5 inch | driver, which become suspended via an elastic band on a small | laboratory stand sitting on the floor. At first there was | nothing exciting to report, until a second (8 inch woofer) | was coupled to the same speaker leads and used as a passive | radiator sitting nearby on the floor facing upright. | | Playtime tests took place off and on for several days in | spare moments until the disaster. It happened thus: the | lab stand with the Sanyo five inch driver hanging from it | was moved a couple of feet closer into a corner to test | results, and the sound suddenly started to crackle and | fade. The stand was moved back out to its original place | and a moment later the sound returned, and after a bit of | playing around a whole big new range of sound emerged | unexpectedly. | | Now, this was MIGHTY, in comparison to previous activities | with this simple test embodiment. So, the lab stand was again | moved into the corner to see if even MORE could now be gained. | But alas that was the last bit of sound ever heard from the | right channel of this stereo set. Yes, fried the circuit. | The sound crackled and faded out the moment the lab stand | was moved, and to this day that channel is still deader'n | a doornail. Something about impedence was the cuplrit. |---> IMPEDENCE However, the phrase; 'something about the imedence' has thoughts ringing like a bell. At the moment the channel crashed, it was horking some mighty strong sound signals into the stereosonic sound stream. Most noticable indeed. And then crackle, hiss, fade, the fabulous sound ended. At the moment, the left hand speaker, still in its enclosure, but the back baffle and the little tweeter removed, is sitting perched on the little cardboard box and is used to produce background listening music from time to time. Even with this simple-most settup I can get tympanies thundering away with deep bodied resonant tones in the sound picture, with just a few minutes of time spent adjusting some of the sonic devices around the environment, mostly the adjusted devices are the six-sided paper cutouts mounted vertically straight upright on a tripod, plus one or both of the clocks with paper cutouts taped to the second hands, and set on the floor nearby to the raised speaker enclosure. The best array for the clocks seems to be in finding a hot spot on the floor for one of the clock disrupters then finding another in a straight line running from the clock, through the enclosure's driver, to another position on the opposite side of the enclosure, about the same distance away, on the floor. The tripod uprights work best at long distances, most of them around the corner and up and down the corridor into other rooms, plus behind the dining room in the kitchen. I forgot to mention that the whole of the SANYO testing has taken place in the dining room, otherwise used as a computer work area. Everyone who hears this simple setup, after I have had a chance to play with it first for a few minutes to coax out more goodstuff, assumes they are listening to a good quality stereo set, even though it consists entirely of a MONO channel, playing through a single 5 inch driver, in a wooden box enclosure with the solid back baffle removed to be a total open air resonator, and no excitement whatsover via any tweeter (the tweeter is gone leaving only a hole in the front baffle). The high end, cymbols for instance, are being enlarged entirely by room tuning with sonic devices. ----------------------------------------- FIDELITY I should mention that fidelity has been a bit of a problem with this setup. Good fidelity is hard to get, to put it bluntly. However there is one sonic device whose embodiment has simply been to combine two parts in a unique way, and it helps noticably so that the overall stereo sonic effect is deemed successful as reported by witnesses in the above paragraph. This 'fidelity' device is a large tripod, with small equalateral tringle openings cut in its three sides, and originally used as one of three tripods to support horizontally a dinner plate sized six-sided paper cutout. I forgot to mention that tripods consist of three paper triangles taped together, each triangle of a 120 degree angle and two 30 degree angles. There were several tripod sizes tried, small to large, the large also having an equalateral triangle cut into each side piece. All of the tripod sizes seem to work as supports for the upright paper cutouts, however the large size seems to have more to offer overall in boosting the sound picture. A second tripod idea earlier tried, to support cutouts dinner plate style, has a flat surface with three tripod legs, made by cutting three small thin angular strips of art paper cut in a V shape with a 60 degree angle at the 'V', then taped together, with the 'V' angles then folded flat, to result in three horizontal 60 degree corner angles, for a handy tiny table-like flat surface device, original used as flat topped tripod supports. An open equalateral triangle results in the center of the flat surface of such little tripods, and one of these set upside down over the apex of one of the large tripods (so that the three legs stick upward in the air at 60 degree angles), seems to have an ingredient that music fidelity likes. Without at least one of these combination devices in the dining room area, fidelity is a moot point, there is a great deal of ambiant distortion in all ranges of the sound stream. With one of these devices in place in a suitable hot spot, most of the fidelity disrupting distortion simply vanishes. But, it takes COAXING at somewhat tedious levels to get the fidelity stablized, enough to handle people moving around in the environment, for instance. These assembled fidelity boosters look kinky but they work. They do not look like anything describable in analgogy, and in fact look like they should destroy any attempt at gaining fidelity. Well, perhaps there is an analogy. Picture a typical hydro transmission tower. But instead of being a 4 sided tripod it is 3 sided and is covered by stiff paper, with three forks which support the hydro wires sticking out and up in the air at 60 degree angles. See what I mean about kinky. ----------------------------------------- SNOWFLAKE DESIGNS One other change has to be mentioned. First of all, all of the original filed cartwheel beads and snowflakes have been put away, no longer used, except for the 'ferris wheel'. Plus one of the giant snowflakes is still in use. It consists of 31 filed cartwheel beads glued together in a six-sided starflake, with thin brass wires strung around two of the hexagram circumpherences, plus wires interweaving through the center area in a Star of David pattern. This starflake sitting out in the air on a horizontal stiff wire support rotates on the turntable of an old Philips portable record player and constantly turns at 16 rpm. The effect is subtle but noticable. For instance regards the old TV set, when rotating the starflake opens up the sound, somewhat like cupping your hands behind your ears when in the presence of a normal stereo set, the ear cupping tends to open up the sound and focus its properties more. The same is true but much more subtly so for the slowly rotating starflake. An intuitive assumption is that such a starflake, rotating intermittantly rather than fluidly, around two or even three independant axis, will offer more in the way of enhancements at several levels. Obviously, more sophisticated tests such as intermittant multi axis rotations will have to wait until bucks are available to engineer some way to achieve such rotations. The surmize is that motion itself breaks up the buildup of destructive standing waves, and that intermittant motion rather than fluid, prevents the buildup of secondary standing waves after the fact. ----------------------------------------- EXPENSES SUMMARY View the fact that the whole of this project from start (in August of 1991) to the present has come in at a budget somewhere under $700. For instance the 30 year old Philips Portable record player came from a yard sale two years ago for $5.00. The single biggest expense was the original Fisher 8400 Getto Blaster for $369.95 Canadian, whose sound at home was so BAD it triggered the entirety of the project. Other expenses were mainly bags of cartwheel and other beads in the $3.00 range per bag. Plus art paper at prices ranged from $3.00 to $15.00 per sheet, used to make paper mobiles, then dinner plate star shapes, then finally the paper cutouts of several smaller sizes. Several bottles of hobby strength crazy glue added to the total cost. Plus an exacto knife and a couple of packages of blades. A few small battery operated DC motors were tried in an attempt to spin snowflakes at variable speeds. These cost from about $4.00 to $15.00. Some motors came from the guts of junked walkman style tape recorders. One used AC vacumn cleaner motor was recommended by a specialist for use with a chandelier reostat, but the result of that was a spinning snowflake vanishing from sight the very instant the reostat was turned to minimum speed. The dissolving was so complete that only 2 of 13 snowflakes were recovered in the kitchen where the test took place. The rest were gone in a poof so complete it was as if banished by an imp who used one quick loud clatter to make them vanish. Who knows where they went. I was lucky I did not get hit by fragments. So much for the consciousness of specialists who said it would work perfectly. A dozen LP's were picked up for 50 cents each along the way. And several dozen tape cassettes rummaged from bargain bins and clearance sales at an average price of, say, $2.50 each, complete the out of pocket expenses. The thin brass wire came from a spool originally purchased in 1986 in an attempt to make hi tech flashing jewellry operated by digital watch batteries to be flogged for sale in the disco bars of Hull across the river from Ottawa. That project yielded less than its costs. The stiff copper wire used to make stands and frames were from 3 spools left over from a loudspeaker designing project in the early 80's, which was someone else's project but to which I lent a participating hand. The copper wire was used to make chokes that were bonded to the backs of the magnets of woofers in new design prototypes that worked spectacularly in introducing the nature of 'airframe' or 'airframing' - the .--> ability of sound to carry a very long way from the sound source. | | (This project was shelved at the end of 1985 due | to inability to go into production due to the fact | that the 'quote' world's greatest accustic theoretist | headquarted in a National Research Council sound lab | thought the concept of 'airframing' was 'twaddle' and | so would not let the speaker designs into the lab for | certification tests). --> The rest of the project's objects came from typical household clutter. For instance thread, and later dental floss were used to tie certain things together for tests. Ruler, compass, etc., all lying around in the household clutter. Plyers, screw drivers, typical to any house. Laboratory stands came from research lab selloffs at the flea markets in the early 80's. And hand made mike stands cited during the period of paper mobile tests were made at home in the early 80's by other hands. It is not that the challenge was to dirt cheap a project from miserly instincts. The miserly expenses were dictated solely by the injunction that there was no money otherwise to spend. That's it for now. In Love and Service R.S Livingstone. October 14, 1994 ----------------------------- SNOWFLAKE SONICS IN SOUND ----------------------------- NEWSONIC UPDATE ------------------------------------------------- It is now June 6, 1995, at 7 minutes to 1 in the afternoon. Nothing new has been learned since UPDATE.2, last news dated at the end, at October 14, 1994, but something new is suspected. First, some background. Sonic experiments in the home have continued but only intermittantly, since the last UPDATE dated OCTOBER 14, 1994. There have been gaps, up to 5 months, between times of play lasting a few days or a week or so. The times of play have been simply to pass some time enjoyably, and to test an idea or so, whenever an interesting new idea has come to mind, sonically. The old $5.00 clock radio with the intermittantly shorting power cord first put to use on Somerset Avenue East in the summer of 1992, was hauled out of retirement in storage on the floor in the upstairs room and hung from a laboratory stand in the dining room, cluttered into a corner beside one of the computers, in front of the six tiered stand of glass and brass used to store computer backup disks. The clock radio hangs there now, its power cord hanging over it, it has not been used for several weeks. What was done is that it was hung suspended by a sturdy elastic band, from a cross arm support consisting of a two foot section of copper pipe, the kind of 1/2 inch diameter pipe used for ordinary household plumbing leading from the hot water tank in the days after lead and before plastic black common piping. This old clock radio, as earlier reported circ. 1992, has only one small tweeter of about 2 inches in diameter so inherently cannot produce stereo. Nevertheless, this device hanging suspended vertically in the air by the elastic band, was used to gradually coax a semblence of stereo sonics, plus an approach toward some bass, by setting up sonic tuning and disrupter devices throughout the tiny dining room area. At one point, at least 10 such devices of graduated height, were set in a straight line radiating away from the suspended clock radio, the smallest device closest to the radio, then later, the largest device closest to the radio. In the main, a flow channel was created by standing a number of art paper sonic cutouts upright in a line extending away from the radio, along the plywood door being used for the main computer's work table. With this flow tube, and other devices gradually placed in sonic hot spots around the dining room, a much stronger sound with a far wider range in the sound stream was eventually coaxed out of this home made system. No rush to the bank to cash in, however. The sound all along was harsh, and stidently piercing in the high end to say the least. Most of the sound range had hard barks instead of pure and correct resonances. The point is that starting from a near non-existent signal of any reasonable kind from the old little clock radio, a new sound was coaxed that was distinguished into cymbols and high hat at the top end, and the lower end was dropped enough that you could hear the bass drum starting to appear, even tho it was only a faint pok pok signal with little resonance, but discernable tone on occasion. It was very hard to get because the bass was either there or it wasn't. When it was there you knew there was bass without question being coaxed out of an impossible situation. On the other hand, overwhelming stereo presence was strong enough pervading the whole main floor of the house that it fooled several people into thinking they were hearing a loud cheap getto blaster stereo when they stepped in the front door. All of this from a tiny old mono clock radio that hardly did more than buzz when working on its own without room tuning. Good enough for a ball game but useless for Guy Lumbardo. ------------------------------ Some History One thing I forgot to mention is that the radio tests actually started as a consequence of stereo earphone tests that began one day in the spring of 1995, quietly plugging in a pair of stereo earphones into the Fisher 8400 Getto Blaster sitting on the floor out of the way of my feet beside my main computer, (the one into which I am typing this file), expecting some decent listening while working away the wee hours till morning on the computer developing and expanding our Virus Alert anti virus program. The Blaster's enclosures and speakers are entirely in parts, even the screws taped to empty shells upstairs in the storage room. Six little speakers from the two shells are gathering dust up there in the upper room. All that existed sitting on the floor in the dining room beside my feet, was the consul. Into it, one day, when the earphones plug, and the rest that ensues is the following: So earphones it was, the only way to play the Getto Blaster. Easy listening did not happen. At once it was heard that muffles and distortions through the sound of tapes, and the FM, was anticipating fidelity and big booms of bass, which were not happening. But that was me, someone else may have been as happy as a bug in a rug with the earphones. But not me. My appetite was big booming bass and complete seas of hearing through all philharmonic ranges of any big modern band pop orchestra. Not with the expensive earphones. Neither was happening, in fact drums were only just indicated down there, with no tones or reverbs or roomy resonances, for instance. And fracturing of sound throughout, if you listened, the earphones were not reproducing all of the signal. Clarity was being spoiled by many kinds of subliminal distortions was the final summary to the sound hurrying the hairs that hear in the ears connected to nerve ends. So I dug out a few sonic tuning devices which had been lying around unused for over half a year and began to play a bit. It did not take long to learn the the EARPHONES could be sonically tuned. I was actually surprised. First, a hexagonal shaped pencil shoved in above each ear lifted the earphones to where echoes started at the same time the whole fidelity began to drop sharply. Then various tuning devices set up on the work table, began to reconstruct sound until the echoes started to amplify and become the whole new sound of the earphones. It did not take long, just a couple of days of puttering around in spare time, to have those big roomy boomy bass tones, including rocking Bottom Bass beats of the bass drum and everything. And far more distinction in the philharmonic ranges of full stereo. Tuning was touchy. Nearly inaudible high frequency leaks of sound from the earphones were being re-enforced in rejuvinating ways to come back into the immediate resonance areas of the earphones and ear canals to my inner ear hairs. But like I say, tuning was touchy, in fact tuning was just about constant all the time during listening, to keep the good stuff coaxed in place and to contantly try for improvements. The ear phones in use were a pair of KOSS PRO 75 bought new and now about six years old, never used since except for a few minutes at a time on rare occasion. The earphones proved awkward in the end, you were plugged to the Getto Blaster consol and even answering the phone was an act of several steps before getting ready to pick up the reciever in an instant. Sweaty also, and the cartiledge of the ears hurt after a while wearing them. Hence gave birth to the idea of trying the clock radio to see if IT COULD provide the background listening I wanted. It couldn't, too strident and bright, and major effects only produced when at highest volume. But those clock radio tests gave birth to the challege of trying to cook up pleasure out of the 28 inch RCA stereo TV (now being rented via monthly payment until owned), at least for background music (from the living room around two corners further away) if nothing else. ------------------------------ Which brings us to the main new story. Late in the fall of 1994, the 24 year old QUASAR TV featured throughout UPDATE 2 had met a sad demise when an attempt was made by no other that yours truly to twist one of its plastic set change screws in the back with a long screw driver. Attempts to turn the plastic screw were not working so more pressure was applied by the heavy hand of guess who, and suddenly the screw pushed in and the worst happened, the TV's entirety vanished in a paff. No sound. No picture. No nothing. It had, to all extents and purposes, kicked the bucket. An emergency trip to a local electronics repair shop deemed that it could be repaired for about $150 bucks, so the short circuit was not fatal. But whoa. Wait. Why not modernize. So a brand new 28 inch RCA stereo TV was carted home from an area dealer and set up. From the very first second this brand new TV was set up in the living room where the old QUASAR used to be, it was obvious that this new TV's sound system was no joy. There was no bass whatsoever, and you could not hear a distinction between cymbols and violins in the high end, the whole of the high end was one merged piss of screechy sound above a certain point. Some emergency room tuning with sonic devices in certain hot spots in the living room created a compromise in which bass could be heard at times resonant but mostly fractured and broken up. The high end was cleared enough to be able to tell that one screetch was a cymbol, and another was violins. And so the TV was left like this, from December through until near the end of May. In the whole time a bass drum in the sound stream was not heard, except in rare instances where the sound was particularly clean from a broadcast or movie and a vague weak thump could be detected by listening for it. The worst during this was that the sound tracks of such weekly epics as Star Trek Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, was hard to take in any way friendly. Wincing was the reaction the whole time. It was impossible to turn it up to more than about 2/3 toward max. When the aforementioned experiments with the clock radio in the dining room reached a point of no return, frustration returned, and so the hunger creeped around the corner into the living room and slinked toward the RCA TV. Two weeks have passed and now there is something N E W to report. ------------------------------ Continued At first things progressed slowly. For nearly two weeks a number of different tuning device arrays were tried with little result, until a particular combination suddenly provided enough stability in the aweful sound of the TV to allow a couple of quick advances. First, two giant plastic hand made starflakes were mounted upright by climping them into spread apart darts comprising part of the configure of the cutout six sided shapes earlier described briefly in UPDATE 2, cut from a geometric snowflake matrix of different sizes. This simple embodiment of the giant starflakes attached like faceplates to two of the uprights, did in fact stablize part of the sound stream. Both of the giant starflakes had met demises and had been trashed for some time. One had been mounted on a crude upright plastic stand and was being driven to slowly turn by the electric motor of an old Westex wall clock got from the Salvation Army store for a couple of bucks and the motor itself, plugged into the wall, was held in place, gripped to the plastic stand, by elastic bands. The plastic stand had originally been used to dispense 3-d camera brochures at a video store in the west side of Ottawa. A giant starflake in which ultra thin jewellry brass wire had been wrapped and woven around the Starflakes interfaces in several hexagonal and Star of David shapes, had been tied into the center hexagonal opening of one of the larger stiff art paper geometric cutouts, and the whole of this two-part assembly had been tied to the second hand of the Westex wall clock motor by thread. This assembly had been set up on a stack of Encyclopedea Britannica books against the living room's rear wall, in the corner by the patio door. It had been sitting there winding slowing away one revolution per minute for over a year until a gust of wind through the patio door sent the thing flying to the floor, the giant starflake a crumbled mess of fragments held tegether by the now mashed up brass wires. Oh boy. The whole thing was gathered up in both hands and stuck into a kitchen cupboard were it stayed slowly gathering dust for over half a year. The other giant starflake, which was also strung with thin brass jewellery wire to make a different test prototype nearly three years before, had been left to run sitting upright on a copper wire stand on the turntable of the old Philips portable bought for 5.00 dollars in the summer of 1992 from a yard sale across the street on Summerset Avenue East in Ottawa. It was 30 years old or thereabouts, and had a DUAL turntable. This turntable was running at 16 rpm and ran day and night the whole time for nearly two years here at this house, the giant starflake swinging around and around through the air night and day, until suddenly one day last fall the turntable simply stopped, frozen solid, not a wiggle or jive would its platter move. So that was the end of that. The old Philips portable was retired to the storage room upstairs, and the giant starflake sat by itself on the square glass end table which had been in use all along, and lasted for a few weeks until my elbow caught it and the device trashed to the floor, crumpled and broken up, seemingly beyond repair it looked so hopelessly trashed. ------------------------------ Continued When I first started getting a passion to play with the RCA TV's sound system to see what might come of it (in mid May) it was quickly realized that I needed something else besides what was at hand to cope with the aweful conditions of the TV set's built in generated sound. It seems the entirety of the sound system was engineered to produce some clarity in the male human voice, and to hell with everything else. There is in fact no speaker ports. The generators are behind solid plastics at the corners at the base of the TV with horizontal straight groves in the plastic. Behind, there seems to be drivers of some kind, of about 3 inches diameter. The entire cabinate of the TV is enclosed, with no openings anywhere not even to let out heat, not a single vent, not even a tiny screw hole, exists in this perfectly manufactured cabinate, manufactored in Mexico. There are no numbers to identify this model. At the top left are the words: RCA Stereo Monitor and at the lower left are the words: COLORTAAK PLUS . Its remote tuner is made in Mexico. I dug out the two trashed giant starflakes and had an idea. It turned out correct, that the trashing was not fatal, the flakes could be pressed down on a sheet of carboard back into their original positions and straight pins used to pin down loose parts against the tensions of the brass wires so that the original image could be restored with crazy glue. Only two mild instances of having to rotate and untangle a piece occurred so actually it was much easier than I originally thought, to repair both items. As soon as they had dried enough to be sturdy, after a day, I just for the heck of it stuck each into the face of a cutout geometric shape and mounted each upright, gripped in the apex of triangle stands made of the same stiff art paper and earlier described in UPDATE 2. These upright triangles consist of two 30 degree and one 120 angle, with two small equalateral triangles cut in the sides, and three of these triangles are taped together with scoth tape to form an upright stand in the form of a standup paper tripod, very convenient. When the two upright cutouts, now each with a giant starflake faceplate, where moved slowly together on a table in the far rear corner of the living room diagonally opposite the RCA TV, suddenly a change in the whole sound quality in the room was heard. It was not any sudden swell of illuminating sound or any such thing, it was just that the fracturing and constant breaking in the sound of the TV suddenly diminished and there was MORE sound coming from the TV. It was found that the two faceplates facing each other and about 5 inches apart standing like stop signs with one's back to the TV, had the best effect. They were left on the table untouched for a couple of weeks, standing upright as far as possible opposite the TV on the diagonal far side of the living room. Now, for the first time, I had some sound to play with. A couple of days later one rapid idea after another, tried and failed, led to one that worked. For the first time I had some bass drum, and could also tell at least what instruments were playing in the high end. This came about by dangling a large multicolored plastic slinky in the doorway to the kitchen, and suspending in the coils a large paper cutout, a smaller paper cutout, and a 3rd giant starflake (the one that had originally been used to turn by the Westex Clock motor. The second starflake used as a faceplate embodiment was not hussied up with brass jewellry wiring). Needless to say, the passions motivating these tests reached overdrive. An idea which had been in mind quietly for a couple of years gained place in the present. I hustled by foot across the main drive to the White Rose Nursury and Crafts Store and bought a driver for a pendulum clock for $25.00, plus GST and taxes. Now, it turns out, this pendulum driver barely exists as a real device, made in the orient, it is barely able to drive the pendulum that came with it and only when the clock motor is in a perfect position to work. I was hoping for and expecting something with enough grunt to swing heavy bar bells through the air but this is not the case with that weightless battery-operated motor. I have a large geometric paper cutout climped to the shaft of the pendulum, and a smaller cutout taped to the end of the pendulum shaft, and the round nearly weightless brass colored paper pendulum itself sits out of the way up in a kitchen cupboard. The pendulum itself didn't even weigh as much as a plastic button advertising who to vote for in the next federal election. Like I say, this motor was designed and tested using poof and piffle before it went to market. I have the device mounted above the doorway to the kitchen, a folded up garbage bag tie, and a small triangular piece of wood, both tied in place by brass jewellry wire wrapped around the pendulum motor, to offer some modicum of adjusting ability, and the whole thing sitting overhead in such a delicate state that it can sometimes take up to five minutes just to get the pendulum swinging, so inefficient and poorly made is this device, which cost $25.00 at the White Rose Nursury and Craft Store. Nonetheless it DOES WORK. What it does is sublimninally clean up the high end of the sound. You can hear things in there, that you simply cannot discern reliably when the pendulum is not swinging. Okay, we are now two parts through, this four-part disclosure. ------------------------------ Continued Some more devices were set up on the table diagonally across the room from the TV, some in front of the two faceplate devices which had the giant starflakes, and some devices alongside. Days passed playing with sound. Always the same problem. I seemed to touch on something good, then would loose it in an instant when just touching something or moving it by a micromeasure. In the main, it did not seem possible to stablize a reasonably powerful bass range and have a high end at the same time that was not a mindless sour screech or distortion at the worst end of irritants. I mean, the high end of this TV set was not much better then the high end of the clock radio when experimenting with it. Get the picture. A hand held portable FM for 15.00 bucks from Radio Shack, held in the hand out in the street and playing through its tiny speaker. That is about what the high end of this brand new 28 inch RCA stereo TV was like, only LOUDER, AND WORSE ! This was the way it was, straight out of the box from the dealer. Then a simple unused cutout device from three years previous suddenly took the tests into a new dimension, so to speak. Set on the round glass surface of the glass end table on which sits the TV, some strong stable bass was gained, and by placing one of the plastic snowflakes (consisting of 13 filed plastic wagon wheel beads glued together into a fractal Star of David and featured throughout the descriptions of the UPDATES 1 AND 2,), some stable discernment could be heard reliably in the high end FOR THE FIRST TIME. At last, something I could perhaps play with, to explore this TV set's high end. Fast track ahead in two hours of editing, at 3 AM, to add: For instance, here is an example of that discernment. This part of the story leaps ahead by a day then two days but it is revealing to mention it here, in conjuction with discussions about ability to discern high end data by simple tuning devices. A piece of music generated entirely by electronics was on, in which faint surging rushes could be heard as I played around with sonic tunings using, now, four of the above mentioned devices, sitting on the glass of the table top in front of the TV. Oh ho thought I, I am at this point generating an entirely artificial sound into the sound stream by tuning around, and so tuned the faint rushes entirely out of the sound stream. It was very easy to do, it took only seconds and the faint rushing sounds were gone completely. Until the end of the music came by and the faint rushing returned with a modest crescendo to be the entirety of sound that ended that recording. It turned out to be sounds of the rushing sea shore. So the next day, as tuning tests progressed in a different direction, and the channel was playing the same tape reel, I used the same devices to tune IN-THE-SOUND in such a way that surfs breaking on the sea shore, were unmistakable, during the same piece of music. (*,*) Now, don't go running to rewrite textbooks. The sound of the sea crescendos were not very clear or loud, just heard enough to be recognized. Go to *,* further in this UPDATE for more about these crescendoing rushes of the sea shore. Now, back to pick up the narrative, from two days earlier. Three more of these simple cutouts were quickly made, and so four were now on the glass table in front of the TV, with plastic snowflakes lying on the top of each. The cutout devices were simple enough, merely draw a hexagram, and around it another hexagram proportionately about 1/3 larger, (actually .366025403 times larger), and then cut the hexagram corner points about 3/4 the way in, and then fold the darts downward in equalateral triangles pointing down at as close to a 75 degree angle as you can get by hand. Stiff heavier grade art paper worked better than a flimsier grade, and the darts seemed better in an audiofile way folded to 75 degrees than to 60 degrees. Each resulting platform was a little under 4 inches across. Something was learned at once, once these simple table top platforms were made and put in place around the front of the TV set on the glass top table, the whole of the high end of the right hand speaker of the TV set was rattling. That speaker had been rattling the whole of the time since the day the TV had arrived in the house, but had not been consciously noticed, due to the ridiculous distortion the speakers otherwise imparted to the high end, until these new somic tests revealed the problem in stark detail. Now suddenly the rattle was totally self evident, isolated in the sound stream, rattling away any time any high frequency power hit the sound stream, for instance the violin or viola section of a movie's sound track, or supposed cymbol crashes, or most anything, the rattle was almost constant without a break. The right hand speaker was forked straight into the twilight one. And had been all along. For two days I couldn't get rid of it, tried everything, things in front of the speakers, nothing in front of the speakers or on the glass table, on the floor around the table, moving the TV forward, back, the table forward and back, coffee cups in the kitchen, shampoo bottles in the downstairs wash room, nothing worked. The rattle just persisted, at times not so loud and at other times totally crashing the sound and piece of mind. And then a single act quit it forever. In increasing the psychological range more and more outside of the square of influence which deemed to define the original problem I moved the TV set to jut out by about 3 inches overhanging the table to the right and the rattle quit. I walked away from the set then, and the rattle has not been heard since. A two day get-the-rattle saga was over. Okay, now it was back to basics. How to get the whole of the sound stablized into something listenable, by both building up the majors of the sound range top to bottom, stable in such a way that the sound did not crap out when most cords were struck, or vanish when anything was touched in the living room. At this point I had two slinkies in use. One was the large plastic toy slinky (mentioned above, dangling in the kitchen doorway) picked up on impulse one day at a dollar store, and now hanging stretched right out, dangling from a straight pin in the doorway to the kitchen, festooned with three sonic snowflake shaped objects pinnioned in an uneasy self-pinned grip in its coils which nearly reached the floor. The second was a small metal slinky of brass colored stiff wire, got on impulse one day from the cashout counter of a Giant Tiger discount store, also for a buck. It was stretched across the large standup darts of one of the largest paper cutout geometric objects made three years earlier, and the object (with the brass colored slinky stretched across it) was sitting on top of the cable vision TV converter which is sitting on the right top corner of the TV. (Like I say, some experiments had already started before I started doing these current updates). A second smaller similar cutout smaller in a direct proportion to the larger was carefully placed on top forming a kind of platform pyramid with large darts, their center areas cut loose sticking up in the air, a sonic construction which seemed to boost the bass end power of the sound stream but did not seem to do anything to control the constant breaking up and fracturing of the sound stream in general. Well, I decided to try some more slinkies. Easier said than done. The dollar store had none, neither of course did Giant Tiger. However the White Rose had a bin of kids toys, with two different slinky models, one a stretchable plastic coil that was heart shaped, and the other the same (same colors, same plastic, different manufacturer, same price with a second model) that was a six sided coil instead of round. Four of these had been trashed by the hands of kids so I got them for 50 cents each and bought five more at full price of $2.79 each, plus GST and taxes. The instant I opened up one of the heart shaped slinkies and held it dangling like a strange worm in the air, its two ends boinging slowly up and down, I heard a noticable change for the better in the sound stream in the room. It was instantly obvious. Soon enough, the other plastic slinkies were in different places, dangling here, dangling there, from straight pins from the fireplace, from straight pins stuck in the back of the easy chair, by straight pins from the side of the doorway to the kitchen, etc. Some quick changes took place over a four day period. The pyramidal array on top of the converter was removed and eventually landed on a shelf in the utility closet up the hall toward the front of the house. This pyramidal array on top of the TV converter had suddenly become a spoiler. One thing all along, is that I had been using the all day Musac styled music from channel 51 (in the Ottawa Region) which is reserved for House of Parliament live broadcasts. These days no broadcasts, so music goes on all day, good stuff, easy listening, jazz, big band, swing both modern renderings of old classics, and the old classics themselves for instance original Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, and dixiland. Also Frank Pourcel full orchestra, Spyro Gyro, and the 101 Strings Orchestra which I sometimes called the 1001 screeching strings when using two of their tapes for tests in the old Fisher Getto Blaster days. The point of this resume is that the sound source on this channel (channel 51) is a 100 percent MONO broadcast. The tuner which came with the RCA TV set has push button settings for stereo OFF, ON, and ENHANCED. When I have a good test up and running I can switch the stereo OFF then ON and hear not a single change in the stereo sound in the room. There is a slight augmentation of echo and sonic reverbs when switching to ENHANCED. On a channel broadcasting stereo you can hear barely a slight change in the sound quality when switching from stereo ON to OFF. And that is all. No one who has heard this latest round of tests involving the TV was aware that stereo was not in use, that the sound was a MONO sound source, when they heard my tests. (I forgot to mention that in the whole of this diatrabe starting from the moment I decided to take a tackle at the god awful sound of the RCA stereo TV, I have been playing with STEREO sound effects being generated (in the main) from a MONO sound source, using the pleasant to work with background music of channel 51. Now I have officially described it, and mentioned it, in the last two paragraphs). The whole thing about the characteristics of the sound, and the room tuning techniques used to coax the sound, changed in a matter of two days. When the following happened: .... .... since these were sonic stereo-seeming results, it was decided to try for something that was simply not being heard the whole time of the tests using the RCA stereo TV, and this was that there was no east west displacement of the sound whatsoever. There was plenty of stereo depth, no difficulty in obtaining images of sound originating deep in the background behind the back corner of the walls behind the TV, but nothing of an East-West lateral spread except for occasion curious spurious disembodied sounds coming from point sources to the far left but mostly the far right during the sound track of a modern big budget adventure or Sci Fi movie being broadcast in stereo. Once I thought the phone rang around the corner into the dining room but that turned out to be an off camera phone ringing in another room on the TV, and once a sudden loud hit of sound eminated from the kitchen for an instant straight off my right shoulder and across the room into the kitchen when I was sitting quietly watching TV. These effects are striking, so noticable they are, but I had been able to do nothing to encourage them to occur more. In fact I had given the possibility no priority. So, suddenly, there I was standing in the middle of the living room, thinking ... 'I've got to see if I can get a left to right stereo spread from this mono sound source called channel 51'. The same would be said for a stereo sound source. In general, stereo broadcast on this RCA TV had little to none actual real stereo spread, most of the sound was concentrated in a tunnel running back from the TV into the wall. You simply did not look to the left, then the right, when major sound effects impacted from big budget movie's sound tracks into the living room. To explore the sound for spread, meant dissolving the two faceplate embodiments earlier set up in the far opposite corner of the living room, with giant starflakes climped to the front of upright geometric paper cutouts. The two starflakes were newly mounted on stands made of a single strand of stiff copper wire each, bent to suit in simple ways to make stands that could hold up a starflake jutting out upright in space. Within the next 24 hours many things changed. At this point, all single plastic snowflakes had been removed from the living room environment, and at the moment, three cheap pulsed clock motors which have paper tripods taped to their second hands so the tripods are swinging, feet up in the air, around and around at a rate of one pulse per second, 60 pulses per minute, in an equalateral triangle configuration on the livingroom floor in front of the TV, stationed about 40 inches apart from each other. These pulse clock driven tripods work to break up destructive bass level standing waves. For instance in stereo in mono tests with the now defunct 25 year old Quasar TV and its single small tweeter for its sound system, it was not possible to get bass without rattles without one of the pulsed clock tripods being carefully positioned on the floor to the left wall close in near under the Quasar TV. In this position only, the rattles caused by bass waves stopped impacting destructively on the returns against the Quasar TV's single speaker, which was at the bottom of the cabinate on the right side of the TV, opposite to where the pulsed clock tripod driver was stationed. With this single cure, it was possible to play with real big bass resonating into the sound stream from that old Quasar TV, which I was able to coax into existence. But, back to the present. There are six sonic paper cutouts of different sizes standing in a row to form a flow tube focused directly to the point of center of the RCA stereo TV's sound, from the far diagonally opposite corner of the living room on the table there. Four other devices are set alongside, focused toward the TV for maximum effect, sitting alongside for lack of room to continue in a straight line in the main flow tube. One of these, a device earlier called the 'Ferris Wheel' in the UPDATES, is also on the table. It consists of six of the fractal 13 bit hand-made Stars of David called 'snowflakes' each snowflake set midpoint in the radian of a large hexagram made of stiff copper wire, 78 stars in all, with jeweller's thin brass threaded through the snowflakes to wrap around the outer perimeters of each of the six points comprising a snowflake, so that there are six independent hexagon shaped windings around the 'Ferris Wheel'. In total it looks not unlike a miniature ferris wheel that stands about 15 inches tall, its shaft thrust into a sponge-filled center hole of a 3 inch long metal hydro extender which itself is bonded by crazy glue and baking soda to a cardboard hexagram for extra secure base support. The sponge was dampenend, then the copper wire shaft thrust in, then the sponge dried, to comprise a totally acceptable upright support for the Ferris Wheel. The Ferris Wheel has been in constant use somewhere in the environment, since the interesting day it was first put together a little over 3 years ago. In effect, this device imparts an ingredient which seems to be essential in overcoming a flat muffled texture to any sound otherwise generated by a mono sound system. Just three other devices are in the living room (instead of more than a dozen other devices that were in place just two days prior). Two are the giant starflakes with hexagon windings around the perimeter, as earlier described wound with very thin jewellry brass wire and resurrected from disasters. The third is one of the surviving Bird Cages first put together when STEREO in MONO sound tests first got underway in earnest using the Fisher getto blaster back in the spring of 1992. It was one of two originals, made by bending stiff copper wire in a hexagonal shape with single plastic hand filed snowflakes threaded in place by dabs of silicon gell in hexagonal matrix around the wire perifery. A second smaller hexagram was set in the center of the larger hexagram, it properly festooned with an array of smaller sized plastic snowflakes, and both pieces wrapped with masking tape to stay together and the shafts of both stuck into a piece of sponge stuck into the center of a six sided metal hydro extender by which the whole apparatus could be stood upright on a table. The device could also be stood on the spinning wheel of the guts of a walkman cassette player whose naked tape driver was being powered by a plug-in charger and variable speed allowed by a reostat wired into the circuit. The whole apparatus was called a 'Bird Cage'. This one had met an inelegant demise one day when elastic bands had been used to suspend in an exact position within it, one of the fractal plastic Stars of David (made of 13 plastic snowflakes glued together) and suddenly like a bird cage morphing in a modern sci fi movie, the whole of this apparatus just suddenly began to bend and collapse, the whole of it slowly being pulled together and snuffed up by the elastic bands. A very dumb moment to watch all of that work morph itself slowly out of existence right before your eyes. The second bird cage got trashed beyond redemption in moves between homes back in the summer of 1992, I think, I can't clearly remember. Anyway, there is no sign of it. Two days ago, in rooting through a box of tangled clutter comprising all of the copper wire stands used in 1992, plus a host of other small bent copper wire hexagonal shapes, I happened to notice that within the tangle in the carboard carton was one of the Bird Cages all bent up but essentially still intact, so I hauled it out, bent it around here and there until both the inner and outer hexagonal shapes had been restored and discovered that after 3 years the residual dabs of silicon gell still had enough stick to hold most of the plastic snowflakes in their proper places. So I hustled this resurrected bird cage downstairs and discovered that as simple as it was, when set up in a suitable hot spot in the living room, it worked well to noticably open up the sonic spaces in between the sounds in the sound stream coming from the RCA TV. It does work. It sounds more stereoscopically authentic when the Bird Cage is sitting there tuned to the ultimate iota of micromeasure placement, doing its thing. So this is sitting on a square glass end table near the wall to the right away from the TV. The other giant starflake with thin brass 'telephone' wires wrapped around its perimeters is up on the far corner of the fireplace oak mantlepiece along the left wall away from the TV. These two objects hanging upright and focused edge-on to the TV itself are doing very well to open up and clarify purity of sonic sound occupying space throughout the sound range from the TV. It was then found in short order that although the heart shaped slinkies had a more noticable effect in the sound stream, the hexagonal slinkies had a purer sound, so the heart shaped slinkies have all been moved long distance to other places beyond the living room in the main floor of the house. Secondly, a couple of days earlier it had been found that the plastic slinkies had changed the nature of the dispersions by the introduction of their presence in the sound stream to such an extent, that the circular plastic slinky dangling in the kitchen doorway was removed and dissolved completely, and then the four, then three, then two, then the last flat standup paper cutout platforms embodied both with, and without, plastic snowflakes lying on top, were removed from the circular glass table surface directly in front of the TV. They had become spoilers. And finally, a hexagram slinky, coiled in a circle on top of the converter, was removed, leaving just one item left in the vacinity of the TV: two haxagram slinkies, both formed in a circle, and one on top of the other, are sitting on the glass end table in the middle between the two corners of the TV where the solidly encased 'so-called' speakers are, the coils of the two slinkies intermeshing, the upper circular coil tilted upward at about a 30 degree angle and it facing inward almost touching the bottom of the TV screen. The reason for this last paragraph (the many removals over a two day period) is that it has always been found in these experiments that as new tests start up from scratch and more and more objects come into the picture, many objects can start by sitting up close to the speakers of any particular sound source being used for an experiment. But as the fidelity begins to progress, those objects which originally seemed to enhance the sound, suddenly start to reverse and become spoilers. This is true in particular for any objects placed right in the vacinity of, or even right by, a sound generating speaker. Eventually such objects become distorters, and the final sound inevitably arrives at its best with sonic tuners much further away, and fewer of them. ------------------------------ Summary At this point there is finally PEACE in the sound of the RCA stereo TV. It is easy and enjoyable to listen to. Powerful audiofile fidelity it is not. But, easily listenable with no strain to hear all parts of the music in it. The high end is clean, though still a bit weak in power. A full orchestra big band such as Frank Pourcel or the Electric Lights orchestra playing swing, have orchestra parts which hang and reverb in the sound stream, pulsing back and forth and echoing back and forth across a magnified stereo sound stage. But true stereo it still is not. Even though sound image has expanded left to right, with descernments briefly present between a blow of sound more over there, then over here, the here and there is only a few feet across, and there is no pinpoint specific sound source sitting here with another over there all by themselves, for instance two trumpets recorded at either side of a wide orchestra, their lateral displacement in stereo imaging is not obviously met. In this current embodiment, cupping the ears and listening, in either mono or stereo mode from any channel of the TV, results in an abprupt cancellation of much sound, contrary to what normally happens when the hands are cupped to the ears in the presence of ordinary stereo loudspeakers. In summary, the nine plastic toy slinkies have worked, better than anything expected, to finally bring peace into the sound stream. Three hexagonal slinkies are in the living room (two in front of the TV as already reported, a third sitting on the work table in the opposite corner of the room). A heart shaped slinky messed up by kids and so was one of those got for 50 cents is in the kitchen. Another heart shaped slinky sits on my computer work table in the dining room two feet away from my hands at the keyboard. Two others are on the other work table in the dining room which has the BBS and InterNet computer. Another is on a shelf in the utility cupboard further up the hall. And two others are on the stairs to the second floor at the front of the hall. I am going to get some more of the hexagonal slinkies and play with them to see if further audiophile and/or stereo separation, and/or Bottom Bass, is possible using them. I also want to try two or three more cheap synchronous pulsed clock motors with different kinds of paper geometry taped to the second hands, for, one thing is certain; bass of any kind does not seem possible without something intermittantly moving, to break up destructive standing waves. It seems the size of the disrupter, and the amount of motion per move, can be small, as long as the disrupter is conducive to the fractal geometric harmonics of six sided angles and related geometry patterns. With the old 24 inch QUASAR mono TV, the totally destructive rattle occurred constantly in its sound stream at any modest to loud volume, until a cheap pulsed clock battery operated motor was rigged with a paper tripod taped to the second hand with its feet sticking up in the air, and placed in one exact location on the floor to the left almost under the TV. In this place only, the destructive standing waves causing the rattle were ended. The clock motor ended up raised by about an inch and a half on a wooden shell from a small orniment box, to increase its Bottom Bass enhancing effect on the old 24 year old QUASAR mono TV. But, that is old history, mentioned to reveal more insight at this present time, since the old QUASAR mono TV no longer functions after I poked a long thin screw driver one twist too hard into one of its back screws, and is sitting out of the way in the basement. ------------------------------ Finally Which brings us F I N A L L Y to the something N E W which has been learned. Something interesting is going on with the deeper bass of the system, as the experiment now currently sits, as of today, June 6, 1995, early in the afternoon. It is this. The deeper ranges are there, and can be easily coaxed out mainly by simply touching the edge of one of the coiled hexagram slinkies, or one or another of the other tuning devices. Just a feather light touch is enough to trigger resonance harmonics such that deeper broader bass abruptly begins to well into the sound stream taking about 3 seconds to gell, and stays as amplified, stablized. One thing that has not yet been gained in this current embodiment is what is called 'Bottom Bass' in former experiments using the Fisher getto blaster, and later the 24 year old QUASAR TV. BOTTOM BASS is where you can hear reverbs and echoes surrounding the bass drum itself, as if it is sitting there out in the open on stage and being struck rythmically by the drummer pounding away on it with a foot pedal. The room seems to rebound either loudly or softly - it doesn't matter - by the power of the bass drum, the resonances coming from an octave lower that opens up, as if in a ground swell, below the beat of the bass drum itself. Big stereo systems have such bottom bass automatically. It occurs as somewhat of a miracle when such bottom bass suddenly opens up in the middle of the racket of a real cheap small sound system, after weeks or even months of trial and error testing. In the current sound experiment, you can hear the bass drum clearly down below the sound of the accustic or electric bass being played by another musician. But the bass drum sound is without tonals, it is like what you might hear by pounding on a bass drum tightened up with masking tape or muffled with a pillow, take away the muffler substance and there is a lower tone - another, lower, much deeper octave of sound - that echoes and reverberates with rebounds in the sound stream, particularly if the drummer is beating the hell out of the drum kit. Ginger Baker banging away like a madman on two different bass drums in a cassette tape of the 60's era band called 'Cream' which also had Eric Clampton, is a case in point, regards BOTTOM BASS. After testing this tape for hours at a time, over days, finally, suddenly, one day, back in the fall of 1991, a new octave of sound opened up in the bass range of the drums, much to my amazed surprise, to where it became directly possible to tell without question which tub was being thumped by the legs of the skinny Baker at full power of his human strength on the bass pedals. This gain into the lower octave first took place after five months had passed doing sound tests with a Fisher getto blaster, just prior to tests which started to explore Stereo from Mono sound source effects in January of 1992. It was the kind of BOTTOM BASS resonant power that allowed you to picture both bass drums being rocked by the mighty socks of the bass pedals. Now, I am exaggerating slightly in the kind of sound this bottom bass represented, it was in fact thin rather than an all consumming din, and was VERY hard to keep stablized. None the less, that lower overtone octave, herein called the Bottom Bass, was there in the getto blaster, and later in the old 24 year old Quasar TV. I was able to coax some bottom bass, intermittantly, as if opening a door to a new room, back in 1992 and throughout 1993, using a tape of Santana in which drums are the featured instruments. These just cited were striking arrivals of Bottom Bass, which was otherwise often around but not forever constant in just about any tape or radio station tried, off and on then off again until last fall when the QUASAR TV was blown out of the world of my environment, by trying to adjust a screw in its back and something short circuited in a single paff. No picture. No sound. Nothing, the Quasar TV had instantly become bitsareno. All of these earlier tests and experiments are detailed throughout the Sound1.txt and Sound2.txt updates. In summary, today, as this is being written, no Bottom Bass echoes are being heard and none have been heard so far, from this RCA stereo TV now under the microscope. Earlier, last week, there was a period of a few minutes off and on during the day when some bottom bass was detected but this was in the midst of total squallor of the whole mid and upper ranges of the sound stream, before the rattling right hand speaker was detected. In fact I cannot remember exactly what kind of room tuning embodiment was in place that day, except that the four flat objects sitting on the glass table top in front of the TV were there. And of course there were no slinkies except the original two, one the circular kind dangling from the kitchen door and festooned with paper geometric cutouts and one starflake. In fact I do remember that it seemed a chance tuning of these dangling festoons is what brought the faint bottom bass briefly into the picture for a few minutes. The main problem with the festoons is that they would not stay in place, they gradually wound progressing downward around the open coils of the dangling slinky, and had to be frequently re-adjusted. As for the rest of the bass range, specifically, that which comes from a musician playing the lowest notes of an accustic or electric bass, something VERY INTERESTING is going on. Some of the NOTE of each sound of the bass is MISSING. The lower bass actually rattles loudly with a deep throaty growl, rather than fully resonating musically. Picture the difference as the sound of a Harley Davis motorcycle chopper roaring off into the night. That motor noise is almost a rattle even though deep and powerful, but definately lacks all the timbres and pitches needed to make that roar and rattle a music. In my sound experiment as it currently sits, you can hear the lowest notes of bass instruments as clear as seeing day, in fact you can feel your feet vibrate and at times hear a window rattle. But that's all there is. This includes the lowest notes of a piano, you can know the obvious note played in the scale, and nothing is wrong musically from that point of view, but concider it pulled in with no harmonics in between so it sounds like the low loud throttle of a cement truck rumbling by that rattles the windows. Something is clearly missing in each note of the lower tones. Which is why I have said something N E W has been learned. What is new is that something is M I S S I N G. The question is, WHAT, and WHY ? Two candidates are occupying the leading theory contenders at the present time, in the inner collections in my private thoughts about the matter, at this moment. One is that digitalizing of the sound signals eminating from the cablevision broadcaster is taking short cuts through the bass range to save on the writing of software, so that only the dominant spikes of the bass range are being digitalized and the myriad cross harmonics found in the analogue signal are being discarded, with the assumption that room resonances can restore some of the missing harmonics in ways the ordinary listener listening to ordinary TV would not notice. I can notice with absolute clarity because I have been able to work around the signal coming from the TV, to create an entirely new sound stream by turning the whole living room into a speaker enclosure, (in which I am walking around within it), and in which the sound from the TV itself is merely a generating source - almost like 2 voice coils without cones but with something, dome or flat cover, covering the top to act as a vibrating diaphram expected to drive an ordinary loudspeaker enclosure to set the sound resonances into motion within the entire environment of the livingroom itself. In which case if any part of the digitalized signal is missing in the broadcast, even though originally recorded by analogue means at the recording studio or into the original mike, I may not be able to recover the missing information, if it has in fact been deliberately erased from the sound signal. So that the mysterious bass I am now getting is in effect as if a Harley Davison chopper motorcycle was used to create the bass notes in a recording studio, different notes being achieved by revving the Harley Davison or Yamaha to different RPMs. (Note that in this discussion 'lower bass' is not the same as 'Bottom Bass'. 'Lower bass' is what you get going to the bottom of an accustic bass fiddle. It is not as low nor as head-room resonant as the deeper pounding of a bass drum). The second leading theory candidate is that the little two inch diameter tweeters comprising the sound generators for the RCA stereo TV's sound, simply are not capable of resonating in any way conducive to producing the full note tonals of the lower bass sound. In this assumption it is assumed that if the signal for cross harmonic tonals can be kicked by re-enforcing resonances operating in the room, then those lower tonal full notes would happen. But they are not. So the conjectured reason behind this absence might be said to be that the maximum total fail safe limit of the speakers has been reached and they are simply incapable of vibrating in a certain range, even if the range is in higher harmonic frequencies that can cascade downward in cross harmonics to produce the true lower full tonal resonances to sound true to form, for the lowest notes of an accoustic bass or electric version, when properly re-excited by the end environment. This (second) theoretical candidate seems to run counter intuitive to the contention I have been making all along, that anything recorded by just a single microphone in an original environment can be reproduced after the fact by sonic principles that operate entirely outside the properties of ordinary loudspeaker designs and present day accoustic theory limitations which for centuries have engineered around the physics of standing wave propigations, forward and back, with a bit of physics given to scattering of the forward and rebounding standing waves. Moire patterns comprised entirely of hexagram and fractal Star of David geometries matrixed upon interlinking principles, which saturate a room, and all of its atomic environments, and are recombinantly resonant from all favored angles to form a resulting sound stream in an environment, are not at all in those old historic physics but comprise the whole of the sonic pictures regards principles which form in my mind when thinking about sound at the moment. (For instance, start with a snowflake gained by careful capture as it falls gently to Earth, scan for the purpose of recreating a 3d image of the flake, except large, say 11 inches across from longest point through center to point. and make the recreation out of something porous, such as paper mache', except use what is possible, solid plastic if that is the way it has to be done. This is 100% in favor of sound exciter. Do another snowflake, and another. Crudely, these three in the room will work to demonstrate fundamental principles of true sonic propigation). In an enlarged view; an original bass tone or noise even if in a seeming impossible embodiment, for instance as a high pitched, almost indescernable, trace in replay, (for instance by a single 12 inch woofer hanging suspended in the open, vertically above the floor by an elastic band); can be coaxed into existence as a full deep toned bass resonance by sonic tuning devices stationed around the near and far range environment that surrounds the woofer hanging by an elastic band in the open air. This has been in fact tested, and is described at length in UPDATES further above in this file. The 'second leading theory candidate' therefore assumes in some way, that an open air dangling woofer is by nature capable of producing a sonic vibration that holds in its 'genetic blueprint' a potential to rejuvinate the full sonic responses of the original bass sounds. However, the speakers used in the RCA stereo TV are not capable of producing any 'seed' resonance in its 'genetic blueprint' therefore the full tonal resonances of the bass notes are absent. I hope I have explained the newly learned 'conundrum' in a clear enough way that someone else can read and understand. As is the case with all of this experimenting over the past 4 years, principles and properties are described after being observed and in some cases (lacking a photograph in front of your face) descriptions of actual scenes and embodiments is lacking perfection due to the sheer tedium of trying to describe images by words to the nth degree of detail and exactitude. Photographic records have been kept of all important states of these experiments over the last four years, with only two rolls of film missing which contain the original flow tube tests initiated in the later spring of 1992 prior to moving to temporary digs on Somerset Street East in Ottawa. ------------------------------ Append June 7, 1995. Once again, all of these experiments move toward the question: 'How Can An Archangel Project Into a Room'? The principles of sonic projection and constant imaging from one state of vibration or information to another, points ever more to the possibility that mighty sonic energies Cosmically controlled by higher thought and willed by higher consciousness, are parts of the answer. These sonic principles, which are also similar to principles of light but in which the 3rd dimensional snags of Relativity theory are absent, may be that which is affording a matrix or platform upon which such images can stand or form or precipitate. Similar analogous vibratory principles underscore the crystaline structures of all atomic matrixes and lattices, even snowflakes that fall through the air on cold days. The carrier medium by which energy is moved or excited to form the images from one higher dimension to another, is another question. The answer is not abundantly clear by understanding the sonics. It is similar to knowing about a building such as Canada's Parliament Building, or the US of America's White House. Without knowing what these buildings (or matrixes) are for, the activities of thought and consciousness comprising the energy movements of government cannot be inferred from either structures. The same can be said for the Pentagram building in the United States. Someone who didn't know about the military might think it was a world's headquarters for black magic and paganism due to its large five sided shape. And witness the raging ongoing academic and hopeful debates regards the Great Pyramid in Egypt. What the structure's intricacies are for, other than as a tomb, are still being contested by archeologists with no one yet stepping forth with a self evident answer. Except some of the inner shafts pointed once straight to the major stars comprising the Orion cluster, which is intriguing indeed. And the smaller pyramids built in the vacinity of the Great one, match the pattern of those stars, it has recently been demonstrated by certain scientific thinkers. It is easy to accept that these self evident facets are part of the greater purpose behind the original intents of the pyramids. The above paragraph is mentioned, because there is without doubt a larger scope and purpose to the projection of Archangels into a room. In order for us to become part of the environments from which these Archangels come, we need to know more, far more, than how to put together a stereo set to play someone's favorite Rock music, if sonic principles are part of the greater answer. That's it for now. More confessions may follow. In Love and Service R.S Livingstone. June 7, 1995. ------------------------------ Questions June 7, 1995 Three more hexagram shaped slinkies have been bought from the nearby White Rose Nursury and Crafts supermarket, and have been placed as coils on the living room floor, one behind each of the turning clock pulsed tiny paper tripods, to form another equalateral triangle of slighty larger radius. More bass. In fact, ahem, yes, no, yes, yes, no, some BOTTOM BASS can be heard coming and going with the TV tuned to the western all music channel. This channel broadcasts in stereo. Something odd here. No growl in the lower bass. The growl reported at length in the topic named 'Finally' above, is not growling. The bass at the moment is full sound resonant and pure all the way down to the bottom. What is this, something different between the signals of the two different TV channels, the easy listening of channel 51, and the full blown western of channel 43 ? Can't say, in fact at the moment can't test because channel 51 went off the air with snow and a static blast that caused me to levitate a full foot in the air from shock, so to speak, since I was standing directly in front of the TV testing something at high volume and concentrating at more than 200 percent when the static crash occurred. Somebody threw a switch, or hit a power pole. Who knows, ahah now I know it was lightning, storms are moving through the area, anyway, someone is here now so I have to wait until tomorrow to test if: A: Is the bass growl really gone, and so was resolved by adding three more hexagram shaped plastic slinkies into the system, or was it intermittant all along, and so would be a cause sourced by the TV signal, rather than by intrinsic limitations in the sound system being engineered by hand-made parts in this room tuned sonic resonances experiment ? B: Are traces of Bottom Base also occurring in the mono broadcasts of channel 51, ? ------------------------------ Answer (to A:) June 8, 1995, 11:15 AM. Here is the answer to question A: . There is no growl in the bass on channel 51. It turns out that the growl reported on June 6 as something N E W was due to the fact that the lower bass that day was developing as an exaggeration of resonant vibrations of the TV's cabinate. It was a solid matter vibration that had been engineered as part of the TV designer's overall concept of how to get more sound for that TV model, in this case, shell resonances in the solid matter of the thin plastic totally enclosed designer case for the TV had vibrations that were being rejuvinated and amplified by my tinkerings with sonic sensitive hand made tuning objects. ------------------------------ Footnote 1 Some of the lower frequency amplication undoubtedly occurred by vibration transfer from the TV case to the glass tabletop and through to the four solid matter geometric tuning objects that were sitting there. The whole chain of command involved vibes of solid matter clicked in to synonymous atomic matter lattices more densly packed, and all clinging together and connected in tranferred excitation through several links in the chain, before propigating forth through the air. That 'growl' vibration had been artificially set in motion by apparatuses of my experiment and had nothing to do with the original perfect signals in the sound stream. In this case human hands and a bit of physics produced an artificial sound not in the original, the artificially induced sound happened to be most noticable, in this case, called the 'growl'. I do not think the growl had anything to do with cancellation of bass waves into half waves, since through these experiments the result of mutual destruction in the sound stream has always between a squeezed up sound, weird and often swimming distortions, muffled, flat, snuffed up, and sometimes a collapse into chaos to where the sound just fades almost entirely away to nothing. A 'snuff' has happened a few times in the living room playing with the RCA stereo TV. In fact, this morning, when I first turned on the TV and cranked up the volume, you should of heard the strange stinking noise I heard at once. I was immediately walking around scratching sudden itches from static that took over the vibrations eminating from my brain and effecting my hair. You get the picture. My head was in fact itchy in many places as I walked around deep in thought, wondering what the heck had happened. No panic. No despair. Just exponentially multiplied bewilderment. And my hand fingering its way through my hair again and again as I walked around trying to figure out what was wrong. You want to know what was most interesting? At the moment I cranked up the volume, I had not the slightest idea what could have happened to the sound. Where did it go? A new emotion was introduced at that moment, complete bafflement. I had no idea at all as to what could be producing such a weird alien product. It turned out that the previous night, the TV playing at low volume, I had adjusted a device sitting on a shelf in the kitchen to coax more sense into the low volume sound. In walking around mystified I noticed that the device was sitting with its face off-tuned in a way that I would not normally have it, so I turned it about its axis by a small rotation (about 50 perhaps 54 degrees) and the strange weird snuff just faded away. Then I noticed that a second piece which had been attached had fallen to the kitchen floor. So I picked the second piece up and put it back in place and with but a couple of minor adjustments to tune it, back came the open resonant sounds I had been expecting when I first cranked up the volume. Just that single off-tuned device had triggered a collapse into chaos of the sound stream at loud volume. It had soured the cream completely. And the missing second piece had taken away most of the low resonances. The chance occurrance of this happening at all was so co-incidental you might think it has gotta be some God looking in from upstairs, altering the system in just the right way, to teach some new principles or properties previously unpercieved. In this case, crackerjack timing on just a single small tuning device was enough to produce all of that chaos. I couldn't do anything right now to bring back that chaos. Even moving the tuning device previously the cause, has hardly any effect at all in the sound stream, now. LUCKY STRIKE, to say the least. The elephant and the butterfly's wing in the theories of chaos certainly has vitality, proof positive as just described in the above. Such collapses (and trashes) are par for the course, though today's strange mystification (this morning) was the worst to date. These I figure have always been the result of destructive cancellations that can be set up by the various tuning devices and have never been wanted, although, useful to explore, at times, to enlarge the learning curve. Bass cancellation is strictly a matter of course. The bass, or lower bass, or Bottom Bass, is either there, or it is not, today. It is now detectable in the music of channel 51, the mono station I use most of the time. A tiny micromeasure touch to one or two of the hexagram shaped slinkies, for instance, at this moment, can bring in about a third more resonance strength and energy into the sound stream, just by that merest of touches. Such resonance gains work at all frequencies including the very high end, but most of all noticable in the low end unless keenly listening to high end stuff. So, the summary is, yes, the TV cabinate and associated solid matter contacts happened to inherently vibrate with a sonic low frequency G R O W L in an effect something like the class of motorcycles that bikers call 'choppers'. The 'chopper's' growl is inherent in the materials generating it, and being artificial to those materials, are not in the original recorded analogue or digital sound signal. The artificial 'growl' can be amplified to dominate the sound stream, or to be not dampened but suppressed out, to have little effect, or to be heard not at all, by sensitive sonic tuning of the whole larger environment. ------------------------------------ Footnote 1-A Another example of theory of chaos vrs perfection now comes to mind. In the dining room one of the aforementioned small platform devices hand made of stiff art paper, with a plastic Star of David snowflake laying on it, sits roughly a foot away from my left elbow on some papers piled on top of the dot matrix printer. This afternoon while typing, a lyrical jazz piece of music came up on channel 51 to which I started listening while typing but found the high end (cymbols and high hat) too pissy and distorted with feeble crackles to be imaged, so simply reached out and made a micromeasure adjustment to the platform, moved it about a 16th of an inch, and around the corner about three seconds later came all of the high end, clearly audible. Weak of course. But all there. Hmm, I noticed, did not think those platforms could have such an effect, especially so far away. But certainly that platform did jump the sound when torqued into the point of center of its hot spot. I figure this is perhaps the smallest move ever made, with the greatest positive effect, so far in these experiments. Interesting that both demonstrations of chaos vrs perfection happened today, from two totally dissimilar causes. Like I say, something is going on that reveals things in unexpected ways. All I have to do is be alive and alert enough to observe them. Which is why I class myself as an observer, not merely a participator like most people who watch the process and take everything for granted including other participator's incorrect dogma without questioning. I percieve more than ever that these sonic actions are in principles also a fundamental part of Upstairs in Reality, formerly called Heaven, now called Interdimensional Cosmic Law, the stuff of Reality, once called Heaven. ------------------------------ Answer (to B:) Here is the answer to Question B: Bottom Bass is detectable in the music of channel 51. It is no major miracle, in fact it is hardly a fact. Nonetheless the sound is 'bottoming' mainly depending on where I stand in the living room to listen. Today the sound stream is VERY head in the vice. This is true in the main for most all of the experiments conducted so far using the RCA stereo TV currently under the microscope. Certain spots in the living room have by far the best sound. Further, the sound tends to take place just in the living room itself, with very little, and at times hardly no at all 'airframing' to other parts of the house. Of course sound can be heard throughout this home's domain, but at the moment, stepping out of the living room, the sound range and liveliness abruptly drops. Within the living room, certain places to stand have the best overall fidelity and power and range. I have no insights at the moment as to how to convert this experiment into a major 'airframe' superpower that will carry the sound throughout the house at high quality, long distancing outside the living room doorway. One day, near the start of the stereo TV sound tests, there was some dominant 'airframe', carrying through to the front of the house and out through the front door, because I went outside several times that day to listen. The sound took its major abrupt drop about half way up the sidewalk alongside the brick wall of the two car garage, outside. In fact to carry that far, the sound had to wrap itself intact through three right angle turns, as well as to project for a long distance up the hall corridor, still integretal, to the front of the house. Now THAT was 'airframing'. But it was by chance, not design. At this moment I have no idea what specifically caused that long distance 'airframing'. Furthermore, the sound that was airframing that day was pretty aweful, and it was the aweful sound itself that had me totally concerned back then. It was a momentary curiousity about the fact that it was 'airframing' that had me meandering in and out of the house for awhile, listening. So I didn't pay attention to details. I do not know why the sound was airframing. ------------------------------ Footnote 2 One thing that characterized the earlier experiments in May, reported further above using the old clock radio hanging vertically by an elastic band in the dining room by the computer: The small metal slinky (mentioned further above) when stretched across the large darts of one of the paper six sided cutouts (mentioned above) and set flat on the mahogony plywood door (work table for the computer) near the radio (held up in the air on a laboratory stand sitting on some objects on the floor alongside to the right to give it table level height) produced an intensified AIRFRAME effect that carried the experiment's sound throughout the house, and out the front door onto the sidewalk outside, when it (the resonator with the metal slinky) and other objects, were fine tuned with the right kind of 'diligent intelligence'. The higher 'airframing' came into effect the moment I put the cutout with metal slinky embodiment on a certain spot at the nearest corner of the table to the hanging radio. The effect more or less vanished its majors the moment the device was moved or removed, and returned when put back exactly back in place. So I KNEW that THIS slinky device was inducing major 'airframe'. The land lord came to the door to collect rent and at the front door thought a big new stereo was working. It wasn't, just the tiny little old clock radio with its single 2 inch speaker horking away in mono on an FM station. In the dining room itself the noise was very harsh and strident specifically speaking, but the harshness was mellowed once the sound propigated outside of the small room, There was hardly any drop in volume anywhere in the main floor of the house, except up front and around the opening into the office whose one wall lines the entrance hall and other wall lines the main hall to the back of the house, and a third wall separates the office from the living room. The airframe carried and wrapped the sound almost intact around the other corner (opposite the office doorway) right into the small shell of the main floor washroom which itself is through one more door alongside the utility room which houses the laundry machines. Through two doors, into a small, and smaller room, and still 'airframing' clear as a bell. Stereo, for sure, it was. It was like live sounds around the corner in another room, bass tones included. In fact the little clock radio has inherently far better sonic realities in its sound then does the 28 inch stereo TV, whose sound started off very muffled, even in full stereo broadcast, a condition which has now been mostly overcome by many hundreds of different room and environment tuning tests transpiring over the past few weeks in spare time. The main difference is in volume, the little clock radio only gives so much hork and can't go more on its own without help from me. On one day only I set up the clock radio on its dangle stand in the livingroom and gave the settup a working over trying myriads of tuning substances including cotton batting and a sea shell with a golden spiral and ended up with a very large sound, all in the upper range mind you, the bass drum in music was detectable as just a beat with no tones. At first, I cranked up the radio's volume to full power and had nothing but racket but gradually sound began to get coaxed out of the middle of it, plus more and more volume increasing by iotos. How much sound was only realized when the radio was at last shut off, and the whole thing vanished, leaving echos ringing in the ears for a long moment after. The sound was harsh and harky and not pleasant but there was plenty of it. The TV set, in contrast, when turned on a moment later, sounded like you would expect the radio instead, the TV's sound was totally muffled in comparison even though it was a stereo channel, and all of it came from the vacinity of the corner where sat the TV. In contrast, the radio, at the moment I gave up the experiment, had a surround sound that filled more than a third of the living room with sound image. It was not possible to tell that the little radio was the generator. I still remember the amount of sonic presence that came from that afternoon experiment using the little radio. I gave up the radio experiment when over an hour had passed and no noteable improvement had occurred to what was already at hand, an impasse had been reached and further effort seemed pointless. That was, um, probably a month ago, I can't remember exactly because back then I was not keeping track of time. It may have been in early April, spending an afternoon to bypass some boredom between intense sieges writing new codes for our antivirus software. By the way, has everybody noticed that time seems to be accelarating, the passing of time day to day and month to month seems to be travelling faster than anybody can ever remember. This year, 1995, is already half over and in normal spreads of remembered time the year would have hardly begun. Have you noticed ? Looking back is also different, events of six months ago seem a long way back, very distant, almost as if forgotten, because most all of any events which happen in physical body life are meaningless in terms of Truth in Reality. So attached meaning to events passed can be expected to diminish in impact as the rate of change accelarates into a new era for the people here on future Earth. ------------------------------ Footnote 3 Today, the whole of the bass end is loose and roomy, due to the new input of the 3 more hexagon shaped plastic slinkies bought yesterday. Hard bass this is not. It hangs loose and easily moves around into slurry echoings something like the way sound looses source and definition echoing round loosely in a large public indoor swimming pool. No comparison to the loud volumes such swimming pool sounds can have, I only mention pool sounds to create an analogy of what I mean by 'loose' and not 'hard'. I can easily make it 'hard' by a spat of careful tedious tuning throughout the main floor environment, but at the moment am lazy enough to dawdle in thoughts, about what might be coaxed out in the way of more of that 'roomy' stuff, particularly if it gets deeper with more lower amplified sounds, once I get around to it. One thing I suspect is that a big band or orchestra might sound more philharmonic, with full sections hanging and reverberating back and forth and spread out and around in the sound stream's bigger images, rather than all of an orchestra's sections being gathered up into one totality of sound compressed into a small area for each section. I have heard the sound image swim with philharmonic reverbs and long distance, long echo, hangs, in earlier experiments using the now defunct 25 year old single speaker QUASAR TV, and before that, the Fisher getto blaster to power open air resonance tests with speakers hanging in the open air by elastic bands, without any enclosures what so ever. These earlier tests from one to three years ago have been well documented in the first two files named Sound1.txt and Sound2.txt. Regards the new hexagram slinkies: There are now six in the room, looped to form slinky coils. Four are sitting on the floor in an equalateral array a few feet in front of the TV, two more are stacked together and sit on the round glass end table at mid point between the TV's speakers and nearly touching the TV screen. Another hexagram slinky that had been irreversably tangled by kids hands at the White Rose store is dangling from the inner cardboard tube of a spent roll of paper towl. The tube is an excellent spur of the moment stand to support the partially narled slinky, the tube standing on end on the table in the far corner of the living room, the slinky in fulcrum balance over the top of the cardboard tube, held in place at the narl, the two ends boinging up and down dangling slowly in the air whenever touched. ------------------------------ Quick observation Don't forget, I am talking here about a 100 percent MONO sound source. True Stereo sensing, ie., wide East to West separation of point sources of sound, is still not happening in any way that captures my attention. There is on occasion spurious detached point sources of sound that hang seemingly out of place quite far away from the main stage of the sound image, which is still located in a giant balloon of sound above and around and behind the TV itself sitting in a corner of the living room. The fundamental difference between a stereo and mono sound is that a mono sound would be entirely flat and muffled and would be in obvious location eminating from the front of each of the speakers of the TV. This is not the case. At this moment I cannot hear the sound source until standing stooped over with my face about a foot away from a speaker before I can hear the sound swing around and start coming from down there, my face poked right down at the base of the TV set, static electricity crackling the pores of my face. Otherwise, the sound is properly fully up in the air and reverbing with echoes that hang for seconds, and North/south quality (into the depths behind the TV) is producing birds and crickets that are heard far away into the night. Police car sirens and other street noises are also stereo real, as are for instance background sounds in a mall or public lobby of a large building. All of these sound effects are point source, and long distance, but extend primarily into the depths, without a wide East/West spread to fill out the final full stereo effects of real live imaging. ------------------------------ Conclusion to questions A: and B: So that settles the matter of intrinsic limitations. Room resonances, rejuvinated and amplified, contain the genetic 'seed' for full bass tonal resonponses. There seems to be no inherent limitation to the signal itself, driving the TV's speaker generators. The signal, even if digitally trunkated to cheapen the cost of the software, still has in it higher frequency cross harmonics that can cascade downward and into the open to reproduce original lower bass sounds. This does not mean neccessarily that THAT bass is true to original in all ways, if the digital signal has been trunkated along the way to my living room. But at least, there is no fundamental limiting principles which say a G R O W L HAS TO RESULT, when a signal is trunkated by digitation, or has a fatal absense of 'seed' responses in the genes comprising the materials and electricals comprising the construction of the sound source's generator. At least, not that I can prove one way or the other definatively, at this point. ------------------------------ Comment 1 Now confirmed, something long suspected over the past three weeks: positive re-enforcement of room tuned resonances can produce greater volume, in fact, greater by far. When the tests first started with the RCA stereo TV, I had to turn up the volume to maximum to have any sound worth working with. At top volume, I could hear things amongst the mess that could not be heard and explored otherwise. Pain, yes. Unpleasant, of course. Wince, most certainly indeed. All of the faults of bad sound including flat, and muffle. And weirdly twisted right out of proper timbre. For instance, picture a tiny tin whistle got from a Cracker Jack box substituting for the entire body of violins playing symphony. But it was necessary (at least I felt so) to work through such lame aiming toward something acceptable, by enduring the loud volume cacophany. I had noticed at times that the volume seemed louder at top setting than at other times, in fact was producing noticable tops having a minor abrupt volume increase, all along, by slight re-placements of a tuning object or even a touch of its edge. Also, however, at times I could not use the top volume and had to go to one click set lower (second top setting) because the top volume was too distorted. Typically, the top set of the volume was at least a 3rd louder than the volume two step below. Also, most of the volume came in at the upper 3 to 4 sets on the scale that appears across the bottom of the TV screen when the volume button is pressed. Bass sounds of any kind could not be heard or were just barely there higher up in pitch, until the volume was gained to the last 3 settings. At this moment, (the time is 10 to 1 PM in the afternoon) the volume is set to position 4 wound back on the scale and is plenty high enough for all around listening. It is about as high as it used to be at full volume just a couple of weeks ago. Turned higher and the volume gets a bit unpleasant at this moment. I have not gone around tuning everything, am just letting it play in the living room while I sit here typing in the dining room, thinking at about the same speed as I am able to comfortably type fault free so little to no editing or re-writing will be needed later. .... The point is I have just returned. At the end of the above paragraph I went around and touched the rims of 5 hexagon slinkies and got an immediate volume gain of about 15 percent, including more power in the energy hungry ranges of the lower bass. Did this to prove a point to myself, that I was not imagining the new range of inherent volumes available by sonic excitation, rather than solely by latent electrons in the silicon chips of the TV. P.s. Envision the actual scene at this moment.... This dining room is a room-name only for this house. In original design this little area was square where a family was supposed to squeeze together, elbows pulled in, around a table, dining sappy according to the ads that sell dining room furniture. In fact I have been using the entire of it for a computer work room since moving into this house. Dining with real meals it is not, this 'dining room' is committed to creative time place and space in the movement of consciousness. ------------------------------ Comment 2 One thing that has become abundantly clear in these tests in June is that there is a big difference between low volume, and high volume, room tuning. The two don't link in both directions. Ie., low volume room tuning to produce better listening effect does not carry through to better listening when the volume is cranked up. Sometimes the sound has been rather good when the volume is later cranked, but usually no, the high volume crank can be so distorted as to be meaningless, after some care has been taken to produce low volume listenability. On the other hand, high volume room tuning to the max can often carry through into good listening when the volume is turned right down to quiet listening levels that don't disturb others not watching TV. However, very quickly the LOW volume - HIGH volume connection can be dissolved by chance alterations and tunings by random household living, plus the unsupressable urge on my part to constantly room tune everything within sight and reach. For instance this TV setup operates by two changers, one from the TV which controls volume (and its default settings). The other comes with cablevision and is used only to change the channels. The channel changer can be stood on edge and focused like a miniature baffle to improve or reduce the sound stream. The focusing is delicate. Tapping the changer by fingertip is how it is done at the final, once a main baffle direction has been found on the square glass end table upon which it sits within hand's reach beside the easy chair. The TV's converter is abstract shaped something like a boat and cannot stand on edge sideways so it sits flat and it too can be focused, though with much less effect than the baffling of the channel changer. Here is the scene; a sci fi movie in progress, the special effects of its sound track not being fully realized, the right hand goes out and starts tapping and touching both changers, and lo ! more special effects in the movie's sound track. This goes on all the time with me at the moment, I just cannot keep my hands off the changers, or anything else that can be room tuned within reach, when watching TV and/or studying its sounds, which I do most of all when watching. Lets face it most of the dreg of modern TV itself is not worth the brain power to watch with undivided attention, or even, any attention at all. Nature shows and science demonstration shows plus UFO and the mysteries can catch my attention from time to time, but 14 minutes of commercials non stop during a big budget sci fi movie cannot. In the case of the 14 minute siege most of the commercials were sex hot lines and psychic 1-900 numbers. The sex sleaze is easy to handle, just fall asleep for a few seconds. The psychic hot lines are becoming an increasing puzzle since they seem to be proliferating, some are openly competing with each other. And the testimonials of gratified callers are becoming more and more vapid and idiotic catering to the three great evil grails of modern society; sex: money: and power: The plain fact is how can anyone's life be forever changed by phone calls costing only $300.00 dollars an hour. Well, I know how. ------------------------------ Interim 1 The hexagramal plastic slinkies (in conjuction with the other sonic tuning devices currently sitting around in strategic hot spots), have worked amazingly well to spread open the sound stream's full range, top to bottom, plus have cleared out the senseless mid and higher frequency distortions that have until now been making this small stereo TV's sound mostly pointless. All of this took place in just two days, once the slinkies were discovered to exist and could be bought ready to use, cheap. The slinkies (which had been long thought of in a hexagonal shape) came into the picture suddenly by good fortune and do indeed work. Thoughts of course are underway as to how to improve the slinky format, going back to days nearly four years before when tests using rectifiers comprising squares of metal bound in a row, indicated that lineal baffles of a right kind might work well in sonic projections and resonance engineering external to the sound source. The collection of small rectifiers I had available to use at the time had their own distortion and could not be used to coax fidelity out of any sonic test tried, they did do certain things to enhance more sonic presence but distorted the sound too much at the same time, I figure because of the square shapes of the lineal baffle arrays, mainly. The hexagon slinkies currently in use are faulted by being at arbitrary false angles due to the coiling, so faceting true to form to crystaline and cube and sphere latticing is not there. Also, the particular plastic material of the slinkies is probably inhibiting the possibilites of better resonances. As you can see, after all this time, the chance occurrence of hexagonal slinkies made in the orient has picked up a better reality over here in Canada, but all that is gained so far from them, is proof of principle, with inherently indicated more-to-be-found behind the scenes with better slinkies embodying truer properties. The fact that the slinkies sleazed into the experiment and changed the whole nature of the tests within two days, is a lucky strike. It is not that old dumbo here has been wasting time all along and slinkies were all that was needed to replace a four year period of research. The slinkies do not work on their own!. Witness the experiment at this moment. At this moment, there are nine different kinds of sonic devices single and in multiples, in use in this experiment, each which kind involves a different fundamental embodiment to coax resonances and harmonics into the sonic sound stream. The slinkies are just one of the nine different fundamentally dissimilar embodiments. Just one unifying theme connects all of the nine different embodiments, all incorporate the geometries of six sided geometry (in varying ways) with pointed Stars of David also intrinsic in most of the devices, except for the hexagram slinkies. Many of the devices further have fractal Star of Davids, fractal meaning that each point of the six sided star ends in a small star that is six sided. These 'fractals' comprise the constructs already identified as plastic 'snowflakes' and the much larger 'starflakes'. .... I have just done a quick count through the environment and counted 49 different devices that have been 'tuned' or 'focused' in sonic hot spots and as set up, comprise the current success of this experiment. Twelve of these are just slinkies, seven are hexagonal and are in the livingroom. The other slinkies are heart shaped and are stationed in hot spots scattered far away elsewhere in the main floor of the house. To put any one of the heart shaped slinkies in the livingroom results at once in spit and crackle and hiss in the sound stream, particularly in the higher end. This is what I mean when saying earlier that the heart shaped slinkies have more effect in the sound stream, but the hexagonal slinkies input a purer sound. Placing more hexagonal slinkies in the livingroom has resulted in the high end becoming at last clear enough to be fidelically audible, with some expanded volume included, for the very first time. As a case in point I last did some sonic tuning about 11 AM this morning, and have not altered the settup since, with the TV going all day and this evening. It is now pushing 2 AM and the TV has just been shut off. The sound is now good enough for easy listening without pain or strain, at both low and high volume. This has never happened before with this TV set, until today. The hexagram shaped slinkies work, and work well, to smooth out cross harmonic distortions throughout the sound range. But only when the slinkies are placed in strategic hot spots in the whole environment's sound stream. Anywhere else but in a hot area, and the slinkies can be extreme spoilers. One bad grab regards the slinkies is they subliminally vibrate out of focus causing sonics to subliminally diminish, rather than grabbing themselves into more intense hot spot focus. This is fact learned by finding that tapping a slinky will top the sound in a jump uphill, and a few minutes later a tap will jump the sound back uphill to the same place. In other words, the slinkies at this moment are not vibrating toward the point of center of total focus. They are escaping in the opposite direction by micromeasure amounts. One hypthetical picture conjectured about the anti-focus property, might be that in a sonic hot spot vibrations are strong enough to cause creep, but once out of the strong hot spot focus, the vibrations diminish to where creep is no longer possible. The creep stops when the vibrations end with the device arriving in a sonic zone that lacks excitement in the major sonic moire pattern filling the environment, it is a 'dull' zone. It may only be a micromeasure away, but it is vibrationally 'dull'. The original circular plastic slinky that used to hang boinging in a stretched out dangle nearly to the floor in the kitchen doorway with three sonic objects festooned to it, has been tossed in the utility shelves further up the hallway in a way that encouraged, not spoiled, the sound, and has not been moved or tuned since. ------------------------------ Interim 2 I forgot to mention something. The two kitchen cupboard doors under the sink are closed, otherwise: All of this current experimenting is baffled. That is, the kitchen cupboard doors are wide open so the wing plates of the doors effect the sound. With the cupboard doors closed the whole sound stream is flatter and nowhere as sonic in terms of spacial perceptions and echoes in the sounds. At the front of the hall, the door to the basement has also been opened to add more of a noticable sonic space effect into the sound stream. Touching the cupboard doors or adjusting them by a half inch or so can improve the result but this gets very tedious so they are just being left wide open sticking more or less straight out but at a slight angle toward the close. The angle turns out to be pretty much 30 degrees. Here, with a quick adjustment of a cupboard door at the best angle by eyeball, and walking away, the results are known to be better, generically. That was the sum total of the effort being put into room tuning the kitchen cupboard doors. Interesting that the best resulting angles are all, sitting right now, at approximately 30 degrees. Principles work! I have to mention that no attempt was ever made to angularize the cupboard doors to any exact physics principle, but it turns out that 'hearing' has resulted subliminally in these angles of the cupboard doors, and at the moment all are consistently set at about 30 degrees off from sticking straight out. So, the physics harmonics inherent in six sided and fractal Star of David geometries has been verified once again, by something as random and arbitrary as the kitchen cupboard doors effecting resulting room resonances in a sound stream's whole environment. The physics of the 30 degree angle has been brought out into the open without forethought, simply by listening for best effect by quick fast adjustments of one then another cupboard door over the past few days. In fact the doors are constantly being moved due to normal household living so are being adjusted by me all the time in quick afterthoughts. What brings me to write two extra paragraphs is today I happened to observe a consistency in the angles, and checking it out with a protractor found that yes, 30 degrees is the eyeballers these angles have all arrived at. These angles particularly effect the high end in a noticable way, helping to distinctify individual sound sources and cancelling irrational cross harmonic stridency of a piercing kind, incidentally. But also, they open up more presence of far away fainter point source echoings that are vital to truer stereo sonics. Oh, did I mention, this 28 inch RCA stereo TV was producing nothing but piercing irrational cross harmonic stridencies for its high end, when this experiment first started. The stridencies were a source of constant irritation and futile displeasure, until the gang of plastic hexagon slinkies finally brought some peace into the sound stream. This displeasure was not the kind of tiny last ioto missing that can lead an audiophile to fork $25,000 dollars for a pair of loudspeakers. The stridency in question is the big kind, the wind rattling a window in the middle of the night, the loud squeek that nobody can find in the front end of your prized automobile, the vibration of a fan duct in an airconditioning conduit in an office that robs your concentration or spoils your dinner in a high class restaurant. The TV set's native piercing strident and pissy high end with no definition mentionable, is typical of most modern TV sounds when it comes to stereo being generated by two small drivers behind a solid plastic casing with no ports or air holes of any kind, because it is solid. ------------------------------ Interim 3 A comment is in order regards the sound, per se. Back in the 60's when solid state amplifiers first started taking over from test tube versions, the solid state brands had a hard artificial sound compared to test tube amplifiers, even cheap ones that had test tubes, vrs the most expensive solid states. This sound experiment in the living room has a very artificial tonal quality throughout, except perhaps for bass ranges. This is a very noticable artificiality, so much so that it is really hard to tell what a true instrument really sounds like, for instance a saxaphone, or any female singer whose voice is high pitched. Stringed instruments are amongst the worst. I KNOW that what I am hearing in the livingroom is NOT what a violin or viola sounds like, for example. The violin sound I am getting is what might be produced by computer using only hand written software to simulate (not reproduce) a violin. The point here is that just a few days ago I was not getting ANY violin sounds except for high pitched piercing single sonic spikes substituting for a group of violin's sound body, with scattered openings popping around up to where you could tell violins were playing even if you had to endure screetch. However it seems that environmental sonic tuning with focused tuning devices can lead toward restoring more authentic sounds, in that the current sound system is a far cry toward the better for more authentic reproductions. Into the tests, before the plastic hexagram slinkies came into the picture, the high sound was abruptly artificial and hard across the board. With the slinkies in place, any sonic device tuning adjust can result in mellowing out of the sound, and drop the whole register of the sonic body toward lower octaves, thus harmonically purifying the whole body toward a more original authenticity. Gradually. Inexorably. Purer. Still sounds artificial, like a solid state amp, however. No claims otherwise. ------------------------------ Interim 4 The hexagon slinkies instantly solved some major problems, and lucky me that they did. In fact at the moment there is strong indications that the slinkies, slighty altered, can perform much better. At the moment four are sitting on the floor, each joined end to end to form a circular coil, like a fat caterpillar coiled head to anus when picked up. Picture pin cushions. Just by inserting my hand into the center, an opening less than an inch across, and expanding the coil with my fingers, I can hear a huge improvement in the fireball of the sound, and a major expansion in the power and volume of the whole of the sound stream's range. This is R E A L good stuff. Another configure works for the slinkies on the livingroom floor (which is carpeted). This is to slink the slinkies, that is, stand them on ends. If coming down the stairs this is the configure for the slinkies to keep coming on down the steps. In this configure the slinkies have a different effect which in some ways is a better deeper all around sound, but it tends to break up into fracturing within parts, during power spikes in the sound stream when a movie sound track is playing, for example. In other words, the sound though better in fidelity is not as stable when the plastic slinkies are stood in small tight inchworm arcs in 'slink' mode. I don't at this moment picture how I can enlarge the coiled slinkies without introducing an artificial spoiler into its center. But may think of a way. And also suspect that if I can enlarge it into a hexagon, rather than larger pure circle, wanted fidelity may be even more so gained. But, this is the gist of yet another twist, to wit: are hexagram clinkies er slinkies better used inherent with circular coil shape, or hexagon coil shape, thus further conducing the true hexagon shape of each ring in the coil. Obviously, this is a test that will have a definative result, one way or the other. Since no computer simulations are being used anywhere to predict by math model theory via someone's brain power and concepts, the test will be entirely physical, of the kind that is the most simple of all, 'let's try it and see'. The next thing now is to see if I can hatch some means to go after fidelity. I don't mean range, I mean truer, purer, and more authentic, sound. Here is an example of what I mean by authentic sound. The original sound track of the first STAR TREK movie was featuring many special effects, for instance most unusual menacing echoes of looming volumes of sounds in the theatre system for the movie. In particular near the beginning when the Klingons first appeared, there were strange strong powerful sound effects, which intentionally had deep menace in their overtones. These were thought by me to be engineered by technicians turning knobs and doing things in an electron factory that had nothing to do with musical instruments. I saw the movie four times and never once thought otherwise. Which changed later in one listen. It turns out that this STAR TREK movie's sound track; when heard on a powerful high quality audiofile stereo sound system; all of the sound track is being produced by instruments of a symphony orchestra played in novel ways. That was a big surprise, the first time I heard this. For example some of the special effects involved huge instrument 'hard' strikes echoing from far away. The far away power may have been electronically engineered, but the sound sources were instrumental, played by humans in a giant symphony orchestra. Well, a long term challenge for 'le moi' is to get such a symphonically correct reproduction from experiments, such as with my 28 inch RCA stereo TV. I don't pretend to boast that it 'will happen', just that I believe it is a pursuit worth going for, just in case it 'might happen'. - Finis - In Love and Service R.S Livingstone.