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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!"
The Guinness of sake, maybe?
The Army reading list
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.
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...
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.
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
(o)sake wo motte kitte kudasai.
or just
sake kudasai!
Let's have our gratuitous / pretentious use of Japanese at least be accurate, ne?
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!
but a little historical research might have saved him a decade or two.
Making a speaker cone is not merely 'bending wood'. First the cone has to be very light, so the wood is very thin. There are lots of ways of bending nearly any thin wood. Second the cone has to be extremely dense/solid/inflexible. There is currently, as of this article, only one way to make a thin sheet of appropiate woods into the proper shape with all the desired properties.
Besides, when's the last time you did something cool and someone dismissed it by relating a similar but non-applicable technology invented years ago? The fool is not the person who did the work. This doesn't even begin to cover all the fun 'geeky' things one might accomplish (such as a modern 8-bit computer realized in relays) for which a cheaper/better/faster/etc solution already exists.
Less talking - more walking.
-Adam
Nope, certainly not TRADITIONAL german beers. Such beers conform to so-called purity standard (whatever it's in german) which defines the few ingredients allowed to be used for beers (water, hop, malt, yeast?). And surprisingly enough, that centuries old list does not contain rice (or corn for that matter). :-)
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
You are absolutely correct. Btw, this used to be a law (untill the EU ruined it), so all german beers are made this way (despite beeing able to make it with cheaper ingredients). Also, norwegian beer is made the same way (they had the same purity laws, in norwegian it's called "renhetsloven", but it got ruined too by the EU). So although it's allowed to make bastard beers in Norway and Germany, it's not done at all. That's why german and norwegian beers are superior.
PS! your list of ingredients are correct, but yeast was not initially allowed, because they didn't know about it's role in the process.
I am also a luthier. Saying that we use water to bend the sides of a guitar is innacurate. We use the steam that comes out of the saturated wood when we use a bending iron.
after the wood has cooled down and dried it stays rigid.
what was needed here is long-term flexability, something that water doesn't afford.
Sake is made in roughly the same process as wine, so the alcohol content cannot rise above around 6%, due to the toxicity of alcohol to the yeast, so drying out the wood with the alcohol probley isn't a big problem.
back to luthiery now. The sides of a guitar do not really need to flex, neither does the back. Their function is to amplify the resonance of the soundboard, which is why traditionally the back and sides of a guitar will be made out of a stable, rather stiff wood such as rosewood, mahogany, walnut, or if you like a bright sound, maple. The structural requirements of a guitar's back and sides and a loudspeaker are vastly different. You could possibly make the analogy that a guitars soundboard is like a loudspeaker (which would be a bit of a stretch considering the transient is thousands of times higher in a loudspeaker), in which case the back and sides would be the speakers enclosure, which again, do not have to be flexable.
you may know a lot about the design and construction of guitars, but compare apples to apples.
Such beers conform to so-called purity standard (whatever it's in german)
In "official" German it is called the "Reinheitsgebot".
A translation of the original is netted here.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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.