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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!"
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 :)
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.
Actually, that cable phenomena you speak of has nothing to do with which directions electrons "flow better" in. Generally, many audiophile cables have a separate shield that is connected at one end, and in order for it to introduce the least amount of noise possible it should be connected at the source end -- hence cable directionality. Also (and more debatably), if you see the trace on a time domain reflectometer of an audio cable (with said construction) connected wrong way round, then you'll be pretty horrified at the massive impedance artifacts.
This
Actually, the vast majority of speaker cabinets are made out of MDF, or Medium Desnsity Fiberboard,
Now I have to relate a story that I witnessed as an employee of a hi-fi business in so-cal back in about 1960. The above statement hasn't always been true.
We had just received a pair of new Bozak B-305 speakers, and the store owner/manager was a bit of an audio engineer, with as golden a set of ears as mine were at the time.
He took just one of the two speaker cabinets apart, added some additional bracing struts from top to bottom, front to back, and side to side, then filled it up with about 5x as much of that expanded kraft paper deadening material as the box originally had. Lots of epoxy glue, and even a screw or 20 carefully laid in under the veneer on what started out as a 1" thick plywood box.
When the glue had cured and it was all back together, with the only external differences seen being a few screws in the back panel, that box sounded like a solid block of marble when tapped with a hammer. I mean it just clicked, no thump at all. The factory stock box still had a bonk to the sound when tapped with the hammer.
A fellow by the name of Cook had some experimental 78 rpm lp recordings out at the time, from unusual sources, like seismographic sounds of earthquakes in both real time, and sped up so they could be heard, also some persussion solo's on various instruments. The most impressive of these was a tympani solo, where at the end of each phrase of the music, the player released the pedal that tightened the skin, and you could, on the unmodified speaker, hear the squeek of the pedal as it was released, but that was the end of the sound.
Throwing the switch to the modified box, and replaying that section of the record (we were using a Withers variable capacitor cartridge in its own arm and turntable at the time, a great cartridge, unforch stereo the design couldn't do) the squeek of the pedal was heard just as clearly, but then the air pressure waves in the room told you that the now loose skin was still flapping for about 3 or 4 more bounces. Literally, the room was moving up and down according to your senses.
Both drivers were the special 'AL' models, and could throw the cones nearly 3/4" both ways from resting without botttoming, or generating any detectable 3rd harmonics from doing it. And they were somewhat more efficient than the soon to come on the market Acoustic Research bookshelf speakers that gave the world halfway decent, compact sound for the first time. We were using a Harmon Kardon amp, the first decent transistorized amp ever, and their magazine advs at the time called it a straight piece of wire with gain. 100 watts, response to almost DC, and was to DC if the input capacitor was shorted via a switch on the rear apron.
I've since experimented some on my own, but nothing that matched that for shear, stand the hair up on the back of your neck, realism.
It showed me that you can't make a speaker cabinet too solid. A couple inch thick slab of marble ought to work just fine for box walls.
Cheers, Gene