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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.
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".
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?
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 been confirmed that alcohol can loosen up the most wooden of individuals.
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
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.
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...
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.)
(o)sake wo motte kitte kudasai.
or just
sake kudasai!
Let's have our gratuitous / pretentious use of Japanese at least be accurate, ne?
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'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"
I can't wait to get some of these just to have a friend come over, look at them, and say "Cool! Amish speakers!"
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
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.
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.
"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."
I follwed that link from your post, but it says that I'm not allowed to visit their web site since I'm not old enough. Can someone here get me a fake ID so I can get in???
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Beer. Can. Chicken.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
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 will use those speakers specifically for watching anime.
Nah, put them in your rice burner.
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?
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
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
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.
No no no, Belgian beers are superior. That's why Interbrew is world's biggest (after the merger with Ambev). The whole world drinks Belgian beers: Stella, Hoegaerden, Leffe And we bought Becks, Labbatt's and Bass (and then got screwed by the EU and had to sell Bass because 'Scottish and Newcastle' was turning into a monopoly owning pubs ...)
And don't get me started on chocolade. For people in the USA/Japan/Other: You have heard of Godiva and/or Neuhaus? Barry Callebaut (in Canada, near Calgary)? Suchard (now 'Milka')?
Maybe he should cut back on the sake a bit i say.
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.
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.
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..."
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...