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Sake Used to Make Wooden Speakers
geeber writes "And you thought Sake was only good with Sushi? Well, think again! IEEE Spectrum has an article on how JVC has used sake to enable making speaker cones out of wood. Wood has a wide frequency response which makes it desirable as a material for speaker cones. However Toshikatsu Kuwahata worked for 20 years trying to make the cones out of wood without cracking. Finally he discovered that soaking the wood in sake (but not whiskey) made the wood pliable enough to form into a speaker cone. So let's raise our glasses and toast those clever engineers as we crank up the volume!"
Hell, sake enables me to make all kinds of things, most of them accessory fluids for my American Standard, but I sure as hell don't get any stinkin' Slashdot articles about them, now, do I. Harrumph.
Drink enough sake and you will not see any cracks.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Man 5 minuites with me in that workshop and he would be out of business, bring on the rice wine and rice speakers.
Faith_Healer -- The antethsis to almost everything, and the worlds worst speller.
Hmmm... Perhaps a use has finally been discovered for Budweiser...
So I guess the sound really does give you wood.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
In other news researchers are using wasabi to implement "Super Bass".
When I listen to these I feel extreme relaxation so 'sake' it to me! Oh jeez, I couldn't resist. How about a Bond if Austin isn't your bag?
These speakers are best listened to at the precise temperature of ninety-eight degrees fahrenheit.
I also reply below your current threshold.
I will use those speakers specifically for watching anime.
It only seems appropriate.
The coolest voice ever.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
---
Mom
(posing anonymously for obvious reasons)
Houses made out of wood?
Wow, 20 years is a long time to work on a problem without cracking. Congratulations, Toshikatsu.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
'whats the point of this? why would i want this? isn't it easier to just get normal speakers?' That question's gonna come up inevitably in this thread (it always does). The simple answer, that has been used time and time again, is 'because we can.'
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
now.. was that Hot or Cold sake?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
The Guinness of sake, maybe?
The Army reading list
20 years of effort and it's still not working. Time to get drunk. [after a few bottles] heeey woooody, you wanty some sake tooooo?
Drink enough sake and you become excellent karate fighter too! :-)
I wonder when we'll see wood-cone based speakers filter into the world of hi-fi, if ever.
RTFA....
This year, JVC introduced its first wood-cone speaker product based on Imamura's process
and
The system ships in May, at a suggested retail price of US $550. Back in Maebashi, Japan, his mission accomplished, Kuwahata has announced his retirement.
sigh....
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Considering people claim to be able to tell the difference between a Stratovarius (spelling?) and an inferior wooden violin, I'm sure phonophiles will be able to tell the difference between a wooden and titanium speaker (well, will at least be sucked up to by sales droids to open their wallets and pay for the wooden ones).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Make sure your home is termite free. Or you just might find holes in your speakers. Damn those things, I hope they choke on a splinter!
Life is not for the lazy.
After licking too many speakers, they'll start singing karaoke..?
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
The article mentions that "But wood, Kuwahata knew, has qualities that could make it a superior choice for sound reproduction. For one thing, sound propagates very quickly through wood, which means that the speaker can produce a wide range of frequencies. Wood also has an internal damping effect, which leads to a smoother frequency response."
However, it doesn't tell us how they actually sound as compared to other speakers. Is there any comparison data out there?
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Of course, true to hi-fi traditions, the best wood will bee the rarest tree on the planet soaked in the oldest and most expensive saki, thereby keeping high end speaker prices in the upper statosphere.
For Audiophiles the questions isn't how they sound, it's how much they cost and how they flavor the sound. If this takes off in the land on 'Electrons flow better if you hook a cable up one way, but if you reverse it it sounds worse' expect to see fights breaking out on what brand of Sake is best for this application.
Hmmm... I remember seeing something on TV showing the Inuits building canoes out of wooden planks that were made pliable with boiling hot seal oil. That was at least 20 years ago. If only the subject of the story had watched the same program I did back then...
A similar trick was apparently "used" by Stradivarius in making violins, in that inadvertent soaking in brine in combination with the usual varnishes applied creates a good sound. More info further down on this page. I've listened to a talk by Nagyvary in which one of his violins was played, and it's truly stunning to hear (I used to play the violin before I found out I was better at coding :)
I hear their next move is to replace titanium tweeters with spicy rolls.
Every good balsa wood butcher knows that adding ammonium hydroxide to water and boiling it and then soaking the wood in it makes the wood very pliable. This has the added benefit of 1. It's cheaper. 2. More fun because you get to drink the sake while you play with your wood.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
It's funny, because I think I've been duped into following goatse.cx redirects and whatnot more often than I RTFA.
This Slashdot culture can't be healthy.
True story.
Sumimasen. Sake o kudasai.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
...it's been confirmed that alcohol can loosen up the most wooden of individuals.
Slashdot editors only put goatse and tubgirl links in the articles on April 1st.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Yes, if religious music is what spins your wheels, now you can have wooden speakers made with... what else but Christ's Sake :-)
Aside from the differing sonic qualities of the wood, I wonder how it will hold up to temperature and humidity. Even if the speakers sound great, they have to be able to be used for more than a few months.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this be chic in audiophile circles. The irony of expensive wood sounding great but cheap paper being crap would be could be very appealing to members of the Golden Ear Club.
Uh, I did read the article. But the speakers they're making look like they're aimed at the "Executive desk stereo" market, not the audio market.
These are audiophile speakers:
http://www.wilsonaudio.com
This
Actually, they don't even do that, they just post stupid articles that aren't funny and hope that the commentors with save them... and they always do.
True story.
As anyone who has had a brush with the world of hi-fi knows, if the material or process just sounds exotic enough and is expensive enough, it will sell very well no matter what the actual benefits may be.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Who needs fancy wood speaker cones when sales droids can already sell a set of piece of shit $2.50 paper cone speakers for $3000+? (yes, I'm talking about Bose). However, I wouldn't trash the idea that audiophiles can tell the difference between cone materials. I'm no audiophile, but I've listened to enough mid- to high-range systems that I can tell what sounds good to me and what doesn't.
If Bose systems sound good to you, and you don't mind paying 3 to 5 times more than necessary, then enjoy! My own shitty Definitive satellite system set me back less than $1000, and sounds just as good to me as a friend's $3000 Lifestyle system from Bose (both suffer from being satellite speakers rather than full-range, but at least I saved $2000 with my purchase).
Considering people claim to be able to tell the difference between a Stratovarius (spelling?) and an inferior wooden violin
I'm picturing a cross between a stratocaster and a Stradivarius...
If you can afford true audiophine equipement, your entire city can be climate controlled.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
He had to show some kind of results.
Wouldn't the wood have to be rather thick/dense/heavy to not want to crack under the pressure (thereby making the speaker ineffecient)? Wouldn't thin wood respond the same as our 20 year old paper cones?
High end manufacturers already use titanium for tweeters and epoxy-treated paper for woofers. The question here would be whether the wood could be manufactured with enough consistency in sonic properties as to ensure reliably good sound quality.
I don't know about wood, but I've heard titanium tweeters get dissed on quite a bit for being too fatiguing (shrill, brittle), and a popular alternative (which are purported to sound more pleasant) are silk-dome tweeters -- so certainly organic materials are in the running.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Sake is also used to make wooden speakers
more lifelike when they talk in front of audiences.
Down a few cups of piss warm sour water and the most most wooden speaker is gonna be much more relaxed.
Budweiser, the king of rice beers.
(It's a flash page, so I can't link to the ingredients directly. Make up an age over 21, click on the Beer menu item, then "All About the Beer" at the bottom, then the "Making It" choice on the top left, then Ingredients.)
for good time's Sake
--I am Sun Tzu of the Borg. Resistance is feudal.
JVC is making good quality speakers now? Damn, I must be behind in the times. Time to trade in my Triangles I guess.
Hah Bose, I cannot believe people actually spend money on that absolute junk. Granted I'm not high end audiophile, I use Triangle speakers and my whole system is about $5K setup. It's amazing when I walk through a store and hear their top of the line speakers that cost more then I paid and they sound like absolute shit.
Isnt he the guy from that old Emerson Lake and Palmer song?
Jimothy Leary's dead. Oh no no no. He's outside... drinkin' gin.
I prefer to have my wood and my sake separately...
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
but what does Gilbert Godfrey have to do with wooden speakers?
If they're made of wood, then scientifically speaking they must weigh the same as a duck. And therefore:
They're a witch! Burn them, burn them!
You would be suprised at the different materials conventional speaker cones are made from. You've probably seen plastic and paper cones. Probably even a few different types of plastics.
Speaker cones have to low resonance or at least a very narrow frequency range they resonate in. With a narrow resonating range, you can just put a low-pass/high-pass filter on it so it never receives the resonating frequencies - they get sent to another speaker with a different resonant frequency.
Metal tweeters have become very popular recently. Any really light, but tough metal is good. Alumin(i)um and titanium are the most commonly used, but there are some more exotic ones like Focal/JMLabs beryllium tweeters. The problem with metal cones is that they act like tuning forks - a really narrow resonant frequency range, but if they hit it they really resonate. My B&W 603s have aluminium woofers - which I just love the sound of. They cut them off pretty low though.
Kevlar (yes, the bullet proof vest material) is also a popular material at the moment. B&W and Wharfdale are two companies that make Kevlar based drivers. B&W have some interesting documents on their web site on what makes it such a good material.
Wooden cones would have a nice wide frequency range. Think about how wood sounds when you knock it with your knuckles - a nice dull thud. Yes, I'm ignoring all the musical instruments made of wood. I'm talking about your normal block of wood. They already make the vast majority of speaker cabinets out of wood precisely for the low-resonant properties that it exhibits.
This is interesting news in the world of hi-fi.
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
I had a friend who owned two electric guitars.
Both guitars were made by the same manufacturer.
One guitar was made from pieces of whole wood, and the other guitar's neck was made of a kind of pulp-wood.
Even with NO amplification at all, if you put your ear against the neck of the guitars while strumming chords on them, you noticed that the one carved out of a natural block of wood sounded much warmer and richer than the other.
Extending my analogy, I'd expect the sound coming out of wood-cone speakers to be much more natural sounding that sound coming out of a pulp-paper cone...
Of course people say cone made from composite materials should give an ever MORE realistic sound, since the have even lower latency and add less coloration.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I've known for YEARS that alcohol makes music sound better! Where's MY article?
----- "Oh, Stewardess! I speak l33t!"
They've been around for some time. They're called "paper cones"
Inuit is plural. One is Inuk.
He's probably drinking a lot of it too: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/apr0 4/0404tool01.jpg
I can't wait to get some of these just to have a friend come over, look at them, and say "Cool! Amish speakers!"
Some mid-end vintage audiophile stuff can be had pretty inexpensively. A Marantz 2240 (what I use now) costs about $200, and sounds much better than any other reciever in that price range today.
"Hu, ho, ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Hu, ho ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Mario Paint! Whoaaa!"
I'm waiting for car audio applications so that the following conversation may be possible:
"Sir, do you know how fast you were going?"
"Well, I'm sure I wasn't speeding, officer."
"Sniff, sniff... Would you kindly step out of the vehicle, sir?"
"Oh, the smell! You see, my speakers are soaked with sake. You know, for the wood. Wooden speakers soaked in sake! I don't drink and drive. Seriously."
"Tell you what, sir, just step back here to my car..."
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Let's go clear cut some more trees to sell to Japan for more useless Walmart crap that will end up in the landfill...
This begs the question: Are minors allowed to own these speakers?
I'm sure Homer Simpson is offering to test "donut" speakers.
"Mmmmmmmmmmm.......donut speakers."
...but my wood is not getting any softer.
You use an Edison Triumph phonograph for your pix on this. It has a wooden horn. I have one.
The resonance of wood soaked in brine or sake may help a Stradivarius, but in a speaker cone the only two factors that make a good one are lightness and stiffness. Any kind of resonance introduces a sound of its own that isn't present in the recording. Hi-fi types refer to this as coloration. If the JVC guys have been working on wood cones for 20 years it's because it is relatively inert, strong and light, not because it adds a particular sonic character of its own. It's very hard to build something that has no negative effect due to its form, yet creates a large positive secondary effect - a basic law of nature and the fundamentals of engineering.
Parent: RTFA....
I wonder if when we'll see from these sort of posts next is a new mod modifier- "-1, Blithering idiot didn't read the article and posted a 'i wonder when we'll see ...' " comment.
oops now i've done it too.
-1, Blithering idiot didn't read the article and posted a "i wonder when we'll see" ... comment.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
When most audiophiles speak of Hi-Fi, they are not speaking of the best speakers money can buy at Best Buy, they are speaking to the fact that there are speaker manufacturers out there that sell at places that you drive past all the time but dont know about because, you have to be looking for the type of audio to know that they sell stuff there that you couldn't possibly afford.(not speaking of YOU specifically)
$550 wont even come close to buying me a center channel let alone a PAIR of low/Highend speakers
I Personally prefer a good set of ESL's, I just like the sound.
moo.
The second half of the article brings up an odd point... why would you want to use an LCD screen to light your room? Sounds like a fancy way of burning out pixels so you have to replace your TV sooner.
"What *I* love about slashdot is that there is no requirement that a poster must read the effing article before being modded up."
To be fair, half the stories that Slashdot links to aren't available because of too much traffic. I agree that sometimes stupid comments get modded up, but at the same time, you eventually get sick of even trying to RTFA.
"Derp de derp."
when i hear/read audiophile, i generally think of the high end crazies. while i'm an audio nerd, i've been to too many heavy metal shows to hear the differance between a 2 dollar extension cord and a hundred dollar extension cord. So, yeah, i was being overly broad. i mean, i have a 400 dollar turntable and expensive monoblock amps running up to nice speaker towers, but i'm playing a punk record i got for a quarter at the salvation army. ::shrug:: i stopped putting money into audio and started pissing it away on computer hardware.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Well, musical instruments like cellos and violins are produced with (at the high end of them) with enough consistency not to change in value across the board. Guitars are the same way. if the wood is selected before the speakers are made then it should be all set
Unless you just wanted to make and ELP reference and in some hidden way it's funnier, I feel compelled to point out that it's an old Moody Blues song. As I said, if it's funnier the other way, and I just ruined a joke that I didn't get, I apologize.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Since when did you Americans become experts at this? Leave it to us Australian and Kiwi professionals.
My TEAC speakers sound good enough for me. And I got the whole setup including receiver for not much more then $550.
The additional sound quality from "audiophile" speakers compared to a good set of cheap speakers really isn't worth the additional cost.
It's amazing how the subconscious mind can make that little bookshelf speaker sound so much better when you paid $1000 for it.
Those speakers look like set pieces/this weeks villan from doctor who.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I find it really weird that they have been working on this for about twenty years, because about twenty years ago my father, a retired chemist, told me how they'd for fun treat wood with something that isn't uncommon which would make it totally pliable and proceed to tie boards into knots. That substance was Ammonia.
$22,400.00 for a pair of speakers?
I'll bet nearly any music you can name would sound just as good with a $15 pair of headphones on a $600 flight to Hawai'i with the reamining $21,785.00 having gone to the charity of your choice...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Gotta break it to ya though, Bud is urine in a fancy can and your self-righteous anti-elitism doesn't change that fact... yes FACT, dammit. Bud = shit is a fact, as provable as... erm... other facts.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Beer. Can. Chicken.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Well, I built acoustic guitars for a living for many years, and how did we get the wood into those crazy shapes? Oh yeah...we bend the sides into those shapes. Like you could if you wanted to make a speaker, I guess.
And what magical chemical compound do we use to achieve this?
WATER.
I suppose you could use sake, but it's a waste of perfectly good liquor, not to mention that the alcohol will dry out the wood, making it somewhat more likely to crack. I'm assuming this was the problem with the wood cracking when using whisky.
Nice marketing, no science. Move along, nothing to see here.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
actually, budwiser (as well as most american style beers) is made primarily with a corn mash. rice is used more heavily in traditional german beers.
You will lose that bet. The funny thing about shit speakers is if you've never heard better ones, how do you have a frame of reference? I've heard $10,000 speakers and I must say: Holy shit. That was the best sound I have ever heard. No shit box pair of Sony headphones or even a nice Klipsch system could match it. I actually saw a pair (didn't hear them) that would self-attenuate by playing some low bass notes, listening to them with a built-in retractable microphone, and changing the dynamics to match the room contours. If you like sound, why not? I would if I had the money to blow.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Many years ago the PBS Nova program did a show on a physicist (Jack Fry) from the Univ of Wisconsin who thought he had figured out the secret of the old Italian violin makers. Short version is that a violin uses a sound post to transfer the sound from the top of the violin to the back. But the sound post is off center which means that the top and back don't vibrate evenly. Simple solution: reduce the thickness of part of the top and back to match the off-center sound post. Measurments on the old Cremora instruments indicate that they do indeed have this sort of asymmetry in the thickness of the top and back. There is a lot of debate over weather this is the whole story, though. Strads really do have a distinct warm sound that has yet to be reproduced in its entirety.
FreeSpeech.org
I can imagine listening Rock and Roll with a distinct odour of old booze.
And it doesn't hurt that the process involves all the cultural cachet of sake -- mysterious far east, ritual, tradition, etc. Imagine the storm of indifferent sniffs if the process were mere carving on a plain old machine router.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
No kidding.
:)
You think those speakers were good... I recently had the opportunity to audition the Kharma Exquisite 1D ($70,000 to $120,000 depending on upgrades), albeit in a sub-standard room. Now that was audio
Granted, the sources were a $15k CD/SACDAC and $75,000 turntable... complete with $30,000 speaker cables!
No I'm not kidding!
But man -- it sure sounded awesome. As in, mind-blowingly ear-opening good.
All I can say is -- if you think $15 headphones is as good as it gets, I both pity and envy you. The former because you haven't heard music reproduction at anything approaching good, and the latter because you don't lust after audio systems that cost as much as a house.
This
I'm picturing a cross between a stratocaster and a Stradivarius...
A Jordan?
no wonder its so thin and um tasteless^H^H^H^H drinkable
"The extra step of brewing Budweiser with rice is perhaps the most misunderstood step in our exclusive process. It provides a balance necessary to Budweiser's trademark "drinkability." It is an extra and more expensive part of the brewing process than using malt alone."
I can't see what wood will do better than paper, other than eventually warp and crack. After all, it has a grain.
I think I'll keep my Sound Labs for the ultimate fidelity and music listening experience.
Holy damn. I have never seen cables that cost that much... Were they platinum or like 99% Gold? Jesus Chirst in a chickenbasket, I could buy 15 of my cars with that. I say CD players don't belong in an (insane) enthusiast set up. Vinyl all the way!
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Just crank up the volume. You'll rattle them to death!
Karnal
I've had some speakers with wooden cones for a few years now.. See http://www.yamahamultimedia.com/yec/products/speak ers/yst_system35.asp
Why do people write these things, just because they've had some experience in a similar field? Suddenly they think that they know better than someone who has been working in the area of speaker cone manufacturing for 20 years.
Have you ever built a speaker cone? Do you know what properties a speaker cone needs? Are they the same as what the body of a guitar needs?
Did your guitar sides need to flex anywhere near the amount these speaker cones need to? No, you needed the timber to be flexible temporarily and then go back to being hard and rigid.
DIFFERENT needs entirely from speaker cones which need to be able to handle being constantly vibrated at all sorts of frequencies.
If you had spent your time building speaker cones from wood using water then fine, maybe your comment would have some weight, but you didn't and you're speaking about something you obviously don't know enough about.
Do you think he never tried water? Do you think that maybe it's not just initial flexibility that is required? Does water make the wood flexible forever?
As a matter of fact, my gut feel on this thing is that that's kinda what they've actually come up with. A better paper cone. At least in a sense.
Ok, they tried whiskey, and it didn't work. I'm not at all sure why they thought it might. It's dilute alcohol, and if you aren't drinking it one dilute alcohol is pretty much another. Hey, I'll bet Vodka won't work either. Or gin.
Add whatever acids are in sake to whiskey and I'll bet it won't work either.
Sake is fermented rice water. Unlike a distilled alcohol it contains a lot of molecules in solution and very fine particulate matter that came from the rice.
In particular starches.
What do you want to bet that the wood has become infused with these rice starch molecules and micro particles, which act as a flexible binder for the wood fibers, creating a composite material thats kind of a wood like paper, or paper like wood?
KFG
The Rockport Sirus III (the turntable) did indeed slaughter the Meitner.
Actually, I don't know what the cables were made of. I do suspect that much of the cost was to finance Transparent Audio's insane marketing budget...
Something I'm starting to learn about the audio cable industry is that you can have a fantastic and revolutionary technology, but if you don't have the marketing department or even if you price it in a sane fashion then it gets treated like a "budget" cable. Coming soon: the AGTech Reference series, featuring rhodium over copper connectors and an even more transparent, natural sound. Starting at $1000/m...
This
one more house hold item to chew for the termites.
this sig violates slashdot rules
It makes perfectly good drain cleaner.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
No wonder why he apeared in Hollywood Squares so many times, he needed the money to buy all of that sake.
But it would not be really meaningful. At this point they have only small speakers. In that category, it's highly subjective as you don't have a unit capable of producing a full range of sound and thus the better youcan fake it, the better you are. If and when they produce larger speakers we'll see listening test (largely BS unfortunately) and some useful emperical tests. I am somewhat doubtful of the actual utility of wood, as we already have quite excellent speaker materials, and I don't see it as offering an improvement in either price or performance.
As an example of something similar a company, I believe JVC, discovered how to deposit a diamond film on other materials some years ago. It was though to be the answer to the best tweeter one could get. As a practial matter, it proved that other materials (aluminium and titanium generally) proved more economical and better sounding.
The logo you use for music is an Edison Triumph phonograph. I have one with a wooden horn.
Or perhaps the quite talented power metal group Stratovarius?
http://www.stratovarius.com/
Eat the rich.
Mmm, 6% by volume is a strong beer (at least here in the UK), with alcohol resistant yeasts you can get wine with an alcohol content of 14-14.5% though most kick in at around 12-13%. Maybe you were giving a proof figure?
Maybe he should cut back on the sake a bit i say.
Ye gods!
Those must be the single most ugly speakers I have ever seen.
What on earth made them to put that particular picture on the front page?
Not only does the form of the speaker resemble something out of a (very... veryveryvery) bad sci-fi movie, the shade of yellow just hurts my eyes.
On a closer look, I think I would only accept these in my living room. Well.. That's a lot of bass atleast...
Oh.. This was both troll and a flamebait. Guess I should have post anonymously.
Bot Assisted Blogging
The cultural tragedy you describe is real, but in fact there _is_ a tradition of 'real' aged sake, sake that is designed to be drunk old.
The practise of aging sake goes back to the middle ages. Generally, aged sake was more expensive (but probably revolting to modern taste). This only changed during the Meiji era as financial factors made it more cost effective to offload the stuff asap.
Old sake, whether aged or spoiled, can be called 'koshu' (often a negative term, but you see it on bottles these days), while sake intentionally aged can be called 'jukuseishu' or jukushu. I agree that this term is often stuck on sake which is actually just black and icky, but nevertheless there is a tradition of intentionally making sake like that.
The problem is that there is no (commonly known) term to describe how the sake is aged -- there are many ways of doing it which basically produce totally different drinks. So nobody knows what it 'should' taste like, or how dark it should get, which leaves a lot of room for idiots to pay a lot for rubbish.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Right....If your system is kinda like $100000 worth, how can you use $100 wires for it...no way....You buy $30000 wires, which are in reality worth no more than $100, but have I nice manufacturer tags written all over them ;-) so that you can show off to your fellow audiophilles.
I am no audiophile, but I have never found a set of Japanese speakers (of even moderately high quality) that were any good. They're (the Japanese) whole approach to speakers just doesn't seem to work to my ears/cultural programming. I don't believe that I am totally alone on this front.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Power Metal: definition. Bands that dress like women, with hair spray and lace, but prefer not to be known as "hair band" or "butt rock".
Like what I said? You might like my music
What? So your cable filters out noise, but yet "the advanced technology behind the Nitrogens means that they start rolling off treble and cutting detail only if the signal has reached a frequency millions times higher than the human ear can hear".
Typical "audiophile" bullshit.
Think about it, if I worked with them, I could make home reeking of sake and tell the wife it's an occupational hazard!!!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
yeah, because those martin acoutsics from the 30's/40's (see here) are really beginning to go downhill now...
and if you see me strut, remind me of what left this outlaw torn...
You're just white ghetto niggers and your bling bling has seriously gone too far. Don't come whining if your society is going the way of the dodo if you'd rather blow that much money on two damn loudspeakers and their respective cabling. There is a fine line between luxury and decadence. And you've crossed it at least 300 miles ago.
*One* home stereo can never attain the enjoyment of 200 holidays, 1000 prostitutes, 500 cars or in fact 5000 live concert tickets. For 100'000$, you could invite all your favorite musicians for your birthday party and may even have the fortune to sleep with the younger female ones of them.
If you got 100'000$ and the best you can imagine to spend it on is a home stereo for listening to music recorded in the last 20 years (the older ones have too bad quality media anyway), you should visit a) the local supermarket, b) the local etablissements, c) the local luxury car dealer (Ferrari may still be too expensive) or d) the local shrink. You need it. Seriously.
All your bass are belong to us
Wouldent the mosture levels in the wood cause it to rot?? I guess they could pickle the wood in sake!
Ohh my spleen
Ah, I'm a Kiwi and I don't "do" sheep! You insensitive clod.
I guess it's many years ago now but once
upon a time Swedish instrument maker
Georg Bolin (Andres Segovia used his guitars.)
made loudspeakers ("tonbord") of wood.
They didn't use cones and looked more like
guitars than traditional loudspeakers.
Re:"Beer does not age for more than a few months at best."
Just have to correct this...
Beer actually ages wonderfully (at least for a year or two). Store-bought beer may not age well, but if you enjoy medium to heavy beers, porter, stout: find someone who makes home-brew. Acquire a few bottles. Chill and drink one. Let it age in a dark place for a year. Chill a 2nd bottle, drink it, and marvel at the deep rich taste.
Real beer ages well; drinkable after a month or so, tasty at 6 months, usually wonderful after a year. I've never managed to keep any for 2 years; I keep promising to set aside a case, but always drink it too soon. For all I know, it keeps getting better!
Why not just hire live performances? You'd get no distortion from anything but the room.
Traditionally beer made in New South Wales could only be made from 5 ingredients - water, barley, hops, yeast & sugar. About 30 years ago 'barley' was replaced by 'grain' on the list. Sugar was on the list (ontop of the sugar in malted barley), because it decreases limitations on the brewer, plus up until about a hundred years ago, Australian brewers normally bottle conditioned their beer with a secondary fermentation by adding a teaspoon of cane sugar during bottling. Of the traditional regional brewers I think only Cooper's still does this, as opposed to simply bottling under pressurisation, which brings up a limitation of the ingredient list.
If one was to use gas to pressurise canned/bottled beer or to pump keg beer, it would have to be CO2 that was tapped by the brewery as a by-product of the brewing process & was thus also made from those same 5 ingredients, such brewer produced CO2 is thus commonly known as beer gas.
This created all sorts of problems when Guiness started appearing on tap in Oz during the late 70's. You see Australian pubs didn't have hand pumps (that aerated ales with nitrogen enriched air for a creamy head), meaning Guiness on tap had to be pressurised by gas containing a CO2/Nitrogen mixture, yet nitrogen was not a by-product of the manufacture of beer using the 5 allowed ingredients (water, barley, yeast, hops, sugar). So the govt had to legislate a amendment to the liquor act permiting the gassing of beer with gasses other than beer gas. It was also arround time that 'barley' was replaced with simply 'grain' in the permisable ingredients list, so more varied beers could be made.
It's gross. And I'm not a booze hater. I just hate sake. Sushi/Sashimi etc is yummy tho.
Eat at Joe's.
I know how you do this:
Drink enough Sake until you believe that the wood doesn't exist. Then you'll notice that it's not the wood that's bending, but yourself.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Lots of times drill bits spin out conical pieces of wood veneer. Couldn't you make a 10" cone cheese grater bit to prepare a conical laminate material?
Strads have traced the wood back to some wooden beams used n Italian Monasteries. The beams cam from ttrees that grew during the o called little Ice Age. This was a period of Long Winters in Europe and thereby a shortened gowing season. (The longer a growing season, the thicker a years rings are. The shorter the growing period, the thinner the rings and denser the wood.) When modern violins are made from similiar wood, they produce a sound very similiar. Go check out National Geographic.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I found another article in this months IEEE Spectrum to be of more interest. It sounds like science fiction stuff to me, not all what I am used to reading in Spectrum. Anyone ever heard of "electric rainmaking" before?
The auditors have some questions about his business expenses.
"There's been some very unusual expenses for this lab, would you care to explain..."
"Well, we've been buying the sake for... ummm... making speaker cones. yes,that's it! We've spent 20 years with our research budget on making speaker cones. Research gets really intense around spring break, and also about the time of our Christmas party, as you can see from our expenses profile..."
Generally most people can't hear the difference between a $200 speaker from Best Buy and a high quality speaker. And I am talking about good speakers not the "cargo cult" audiophile stuff.
A good pair of Genelec monitors paired with a good transparent Japanese solid state amp will get you much more accurate sound than some ridiculous $50,000 audiophile tube rig. That warm tube "coloration" that they love is normally called DISTORTION.
And you thought Sake was only good with Sushi?
The Japanese do not drink sake with sushi.
It is considered redudant, since sushi contains rice and sake is made from rice.
They drink beer with their sushi.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
I am aware of several techniques (such as bathing wood in amonia gas) that can make wood plastic enough to deform like this. The problem is that amonia (and similar treatments) are highly toxic. I would love to hear more about the technique. It should be applicable to model ship building, etc...
OK, what do wooden speakers have to do with animated Japanese porn? What a horrible post.
There are people for whom spending USD100K audio systems is no big deal.
If you're a multi billionaire, USD100K is less than 0.01% of your networth. Heck if your net-worth were USD100K 0.01% would be 10 bucks. If you're some kid with USD2K in the bank and you spent 10 bucks on your audio system - that's magnitudes more in comparison.
One of Larry Ellison's pickup lines is "Hi, can I buy you a car" (pun not intended).
Now if you only had USD100K (or 200K) and you spent 100K on an audio system then you're nuts.
But for the billionaires etc. Hey, go ahead spend pots of money so the rest of us can get some back. Doubt it benefits the economy as much if they just stick it in a bank. Sure the bank lends it out, but they expect the bank to give em some interest. And sometimes they just run out of good places to invest the money.
totally reminds me of the following joke:
The brewmasters of Guinness, Miller, and Budweiser were all at a brewmaster's convention, when the three decided to go out for a drink after a day of activities.
The Miller brewmaster elbowed up to the bar and ordered a Miller: "It's Miller Time!"
The Budweiser brewmaster elbowed up to the bar and ordered a Budweiser: "The King of Beers!"
The Guinness brewmaster elbowed up to the bar and ordered a Coke: "If you fellows aren't drinking, then neither am I!"
MORTAR COMBAT!
Nice troll.
What you're talking about is 80es metal.
Power Metal is a melodic style of metal, sometimes crossing into speed metal. Some of the more significant power metal bands are Blind Guardian, Rhapsody and Iced Earth.
You lose, but thank you for playing.
Eat the rich.
Budweiser really is pisswater, man. It sure as hell isn't the obvious choice for me. Given the choice I'll go for a Sam Adams, Bass, Heineken, or (GOD FORBID I GO FOR QUALITY!) Weihenstephaner every time.
Sure, though, if your only aim is to get drunk by drinking massive amounts of alcohol extremely quickly, Bud is great.
And in what fucking universe do you live in where Starbucks is CHEAP?
+++ATH0
"Woah dude, check you the whammy bar on the Stratovarius!"
Well, some beers do age well. It has less to do with being made of grain or fruit but more to do with the degree of alcohol. Hops do help keep the beer, but degree of alcohol is what's need for aging. And lees. You need yeast there.
Strong beers (9% by volume and up) include Belgian Tripels, "Barleywines," Imperial Stouts, some Baltic Porters, etc.
Distilled sake would certainly work and would keep well. After all, whiskey's really close to being distilled unhopped beer...
What part of beer don't you understand?
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
Sorry, it was breaking up. What was that?
"Finally he discovered that soaking the *noise* in sake (but not whiskey) made *more noise* pliable enough to *even more noise* cones..."
What the hell is he doing with those speakers!?!?
Make sure your home is termite free. Or you just might find holes in your speakers. Damn those things, I hope they choke on a splinter! ...or get drunk. And chew crazy patterns into your furnature.
is the beer purity act of 1516. Yummy beer for four hundred year. And your list is also correct, water, malt, hops, and yeast. Nothing else. I always LOL when I hear/see the Bud ads currently out. "we've been making beer for over a hundred years" and these tv ads of skinny mallrat dorks sitting in front of a Bud in various countries like anyone else is swilling that shit down, especially in Europe.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon