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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!"
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.
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
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
Then that's probably a good sake to avoid, because it's expensive, and what everyone 20 years ago would have called "ruined" sake.
Sake is beer, not wine. That "rice wine" thing is a cultural misnomer that is now confusing even the Japanese. Beer does not age for more than a few months at best. Light beers, as rice beer by its very nature is, do not age at all really. They are best consumed as close to being poured from the keg as possible. One tries to keep beer if one needs to. From going bad. It is difficult in most cases.
The very link you provide notes that you can keep most sake for about 2 months. I'm not sure why you'd want to. It's like refusing to drink a Bud until it's past its sell by date. You buy it when you want it, and drink it. Like beer.
These aged sakes are being marketed because the customer has started demanding that their "wine" be properly aged, and frankly, it's driving the brewers nuts. Centuries of tradition and a lifetime of practice to produce the very best, fresh sake, and now they're being forced to put it in barrels and let it go to ruin before people will buy it. For a while they responded with a "customer education" campaign, and some of them report being verbally abused by customers who thought the brewers were trying to rip them off by insisting the fresh stuff was the good stuff.
But, they are businessmen. If that's what the customer insists upon, and is even willing to pay a premium price for, well, then I guess that's what the customer will be sold.
Maybe it will drive the price of fresh down so I can afford more of it. I like sake.
Now if I can only find a way to drive down the price of 25 year old cognac. I like that stuff too, but it's usually E&J for me.
KFG
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