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World's Most Powerful Subwoofer
dponce80 writes "This $13,000 subwoofer, the TRW 17 from Eminent Technology is billed as the world's most powerful due to its ability to reproduce sounds with frequencies as low as 1Hz. Typical subwoofers bottom out at 20Hz, and while the human ear can barely hear below that point, it is still possible to feel the sound. This particular woofer does not have an enclosure, instead relying on a fan-like design, wafting a cone of modulated air into the room, and effectively turning it into a resonating box, in its entirety!"
COULD YOU REPEAT THAT?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And who is going to spend that much on a sub that's going to go out of the range of human hearing!?
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
in an low riding 84 Olds Cutlass with spinners on 20" wheels in your rearview mirror.
Can it blow a woman's clothing off?
Brown note!
I wonder if this will affect deaf people's ability to 'listen' to music at all. Having a wider range of frequencies should allow for more variations in vibrations, no?
Note: I have not yet read the article because the server seems to be dead.
Is this subwoofer even legal? International law bans transmitters which are capable of transmitting on the frequency of approx 6 or 7Hz because that's the resonant frequency of the human ribcage. Seems like this could be used as a pretty lethal weapon from the (short) description in the posting.
George Wright
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It just made its local debut outside my bedroom window...
I CANNOT HEAR YOU
now where am i going to get a rap superstar license
It's so powerful, it blew out Google's servers!
> ping www.yahoo.com
Ping statistics for 66.94.230.75:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
> ping www.google.com
Ping statistics for 66.102.7.104:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Quick, someone tell Howard Stern, so he can reenact that scene in "Private Parts" where he told that lady to sit on the subwoofer.
Sounds like the old arsequake concept has been resurrected. For those who can't be bothered to read the link, various armies have tried to find a bass frequency that, aimed at enemy soldiers, would cause them to involuntarily lose bowel control. Of course, as bass is omnidirectional, you need to make sure your own troops have earplugs or a full enema beforehand ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I felt a great disturbance in the Apartment Complex, as if millions of neighbors suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced by my giant subwoofer.
You must be confused...I think This is the Woofer you're looking for.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
That way you will end up with a haunted computer room!
Their webserver isn't as powerful as their subwoofer. Boom!
Low frequency sounds can cause involentary bowel movements. Why isn't this technology used in retirement nursing homes?
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
Site is down already but here is the Google cache link
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(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
You ain't heard LOUD 'til you heard me after a few taco bell buritos. Not only is it LF, and LOUD, but you get that smell factor, too! This may do justice, if only a mic could record to 1 Hz.
Have you not seen Ruthless People?
(Speaker Salesdroid)
Check it out!
Thirty feet of thigh-slapping, blood-pumping nuclear brain damage!
If you can't afford it, FINANCE IT!
And here's the best part: when you die, they can BURY you in it!
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Can anyone tell what volume of air would have 1:1 resonance at 1 Hz?
I found some frequencies where my bathroom has resonance (propabaly 1:2 harmonics), but I am sure it is much to small to have resonance at frequencies below a few Hz.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Check out the USB version: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/accessories/5de e/
The glass is half-full. With poison. And there are cracks in the glass. The dirty, dirty glass.
this is actually really cool to experience. I'm looking forward to when this kind of thing is available for the rest of us. also the website sucks.
I'm trying to think of a good joke to top that one, but for the love of me, I can't. Nothing is so personal and so true to me as that one sentence at this very instance. Roffle my very good waffle.
Posting with out proof reading since 2001.
I recently went to an art museum where there was a little piece of electronic equipment attached to a huge subwoofer that was moving at 1hz, slowing down to about .5hz, and back to 1hz again. If you put your hand up close to it, you could feel a slight breeze, but you couldn't hear a damn thing. It was created more for the visual effect of seeing the huge speaker cone moving in and out at a slow speed.
So a subwoofer with a 1hz capability is nothing to get excited about, you could do that with a wide variety of subwoofers. And achieving such a low, inaudible frequency sure as hell doesn't make it the world's most powerful subwoofer.
Moron!
Any audio equipment that doesn't require excavation just isn't powefull enough if you ask me.
Google Cache Link
Excuse me whilst I wipe the tears from my eyes.
Wait - those aren't tears! That's not my eye!
I read somewhere that Larry Ellison had the biggest subwoofer in the world, built into the bottom of his swimmingpool, to get a massive thing to attach to. Can anyone confirm that?
Although there are several patents already held in the field of military and defense-related technologies for ultra-high intensity infrasonic weapons capable of destroying concrete structures from a distance (it's rumored to be able to do far uglier things to the human body), and this since the early 50's, there are some other considerations to keep in mind when attempting to use such a monster subwoofer at home or in a small enclosed space.
Without taking the time to quote the exact sources, it is known (another urban legend?...) in the field of both professional studio and live sound that certain subsonic frequencies are likely to inflict severe punishment to the human body, from memory I seem to recall 3 Hz causing nausea, loss of equilibrium and balance, some other frequencies nearby incontinence or cardiac arrhythmia, and one in particular (??...) rumored to be fatal at certain elevated sound pressure levels. All of this between 1 Hz and 25 Hz. (someone please take the time to dig up the precise data and papers on this?...)
Further, it should be understood that most audio mastering engineers will severely filter out any frequencies below 25 Hz as a matter of habit from the old mastering vinyl days, but also as those sounds do 'cloud up' the 'bottom end' audio in final mixes, and possibly because some of them are aware of the inherent risks posed by having those stray frequencies played at very loud volumes in enclosed areas.
Although this piece of gear sounds like it could be terrific, it may also pose a very real threat to its users if operated improperly. So far, we're not even talking about the possibility of inflicted hearing damage from exposure.
YMMV, as always, and most certainly in this case, batteries definitely not included.
Google is down from my location as well. Ping shows a 100% loss. Yahoo and a couple of other sites I checked are still doing OK. I'm curious if it's just Google or if other sites are down as well?
yes yes, but can they blow women's clothes off?
This reminds me of a classic Stan Freberg skit - one of the "Herman Horne does Hi Fi" - where he lampoons Hi Fi hobbyists of the 50's - he's just described a full on sound system, but without speakers:
:)
Interviewer: But what about the speakers?
Horne: The whole house becomes a speaker, you move into the garage!
(snip a few lines)
Horne: As you and your wife sit of an evening, shivering in your garage....
Brilliant stuff - if you've never heard Freberg's "Herman Horne" skits, you absolutely HAVE to get them - it fits so well with modern hobyists/geeks/obsessive types:
Horne: They can sit there and watch their husband suffer with old equipment that has been obsolete for at least a week!
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Digital audio is filtered to remove all sounds below 20Hz before going onto CD, as that increases the dynamic range of remaining frequencies, so unless you have access to the original high bit rate studio recordings, you won't tell much difference.
foo mane padme hum
I'm in southern Arizona. Very strange.
...but we get a subwoofer that can shake your fillings out. Sigh. On the up-side, I'm sure I'll get a chance to report back to Slashdot as to what one of these things feel like once my college-age (and apparently half-deaf) neighbours procure one and do their damndest to shake apart this poorly-built condo complex.
In a world without walls, there is no need for Windows.
Imagine a Beowoofer Cluster of these!
Now if only Google could stay up. If you're online at the time of this post, you'd know what I mean[t].
As regular viewers of the excellent MTV educational show "Pimp My Ride" will already be informed Xzibit and colleagues recently installed a 12,000 Watt subwoofer in one of their patient's vehicules. The subwoofer itself is here: http://www.cardomain.com/sku/MTXT992244.
Despite being a WASP I must add that the car post-transformation was "phat".
John.
Is there a wav I can download as a sample of what this thing can do??
This is the first article: http://www.sonicflare.com/archives/eminent-tech-tr w-17-the-most-powerful-subwoofer-in-the-world.php
Google has been down for forty minutes and counting over here. Is there any precedent for Google going offline for this long? I'd search on Google to find out, but they're not working at the moment. :)
Can anyone recommend a site that has a live report of major site outages?
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Low frequency resonation is known to do severe structural damage. I once had a crack in one of my walls that reached from the floor to the ceiling because a) i lived right next to an airfield with low flying aircraft and b) because my speakers were overly bassy already, if we drop even lower, what the hell?? will the pets start going mad and house's falling down? :P
Not only you don't hear those frequency they actually feel like vibration, very low vibration, disturbing vibrations. Plus since EVERYTHING you happen to listen to has been recorded on gear thats doesn't reproduce frequencies below 20HZ, and even then, it's perfectly and uterly useless, for 13000$...
I've worked in studios, I've been consultant for studios and even built some, many project and home studios and 3 commercial studios (no commercial studio is built alone so count me part of a team on those). No studio, none, is equiped to deal with such low frequency for obvious reasons, comfort and audibility being the 2 most obvious, so even if your subwoofer reproduces frquencies below 20hz you will never know it.
I know, what the hell. All of a sudden Google stopped working. Some other IPs work, but not that one. I could change my hosts file, but I don't want to. The thing is, without changing the hosts file, I can't login to like search history, because it tries to redirect to that one address. Also, Gmail and Maps aren't work for me either. Grr.
Correct me if I am wrong but power is measured in Watts...and usually for speakers and subwoofers, you need to look at RMS Power Consumption. For example, the Creative Gigaworks 750 pumps out 750 Watts RMS in total - it is billed as the most powerful computer speaker set.
The article mentions that the subwoofer can bottom out at 1Hz, which is certainly amazing, but let's get our terminology right here - this is frequency range, not power.
Indeed. The only way to play common audio through them would be generating new harmonic content from the 20hz+ material (like an aural exciter). I'm not quite sure if that would work well at all.
Looks a bit like this:
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6017302.WKU.&OS=PN/6017302&RS=PN/ 6017302/
United States Patent 6,017,302
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
They went off for 15 minutes a while back I believe, but that was because their DNS went down, and had to wait for the records to propogate.
The real question is...
Can it make someone blow you?
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
All your bass are belong to us!
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
According to this Italian site... this is the The biggest Horn SUBWOOFER of the WORLD:
http://www.geocities.com/royal_device/
The world most powerful with less distorsion and with SUB HORN built under the Audio Room floor.
I've created an CD of a signwave sweep between 100hz and 1hz and played it back in my car. at the low low end you can see the sub breathing in and out as it gets to the low end. You can no longer hear it but you can see it.
check out this: http://www.eminent-tech.com/tonearm.html
That tonearm sells for something like $2,500. It features a captive air bearing -- there's no "ball bearing" in there. I think it has an airpump so that the thing rides on a cushion of air, like an air hockey puck.
Here's a system that is similar (in some ways) but works with water as the fluid: http://www.kugel.com/
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
I bet that Hotblack's subwoofer is much much more powerful.
Apparently, the editor (samzenpus) doesn't know the difference between the POWER and the FREQUENCY of a speaker.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Even my headphones go lower than that, and my subwoofer is certainly more capable. When did Slashdot become an advertising portal for electronics, anyway?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
http://maps.google.ca/
http://www.google.ca/
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
No Idea but this is somewhat unsettling.
Very few things can make google go offline for that long.
I'm trying to find out whether there has been some major catastrophe that brought google down, but I CAN'T because google news is down.
Now I can have the phatist phucking Escalade in the hood!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note
If Cartman can do it, surely the military can.
This would be great for crowd control, lets see those hippies try and protest when their pants are full of crap.
Let the brown note jokes begin! But then again, some of us know the truth already.
Phew. Emergency over. Google's back up.
No indication of what caused it yet.
It won't make you deaf, it will simply rattle your colon and make you poop.
The bass actually emits from sophisticated organic poo resonance.
I won't bore you with the details. It's technical. It uses a lot of molecules, crystals, and beams and stuff.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Most digital audio is not filtered below 20 Hz. That's a myth that persists for a variety of reasons. In the days of vinyl, audio was consistently high-pass filtered because even with the standard RIAA equalization, deep bass produced excessively large grooves. Microphones are sometimes filtered to remove rumble, but in cases where the lowest frequencies are important, such as movie soundtracks, the lowest frequencies are generally preserved, subject to limitations of the equipment, such as AC coupling capacitors. Placing a filter at 20 Hz also has potentially audible drawbacks since the phase shift of the filter will easily extend an octave higher (40 Hz).
I have built a woofer that produces sound at zero hertz! It operates on very little power, too.
But what if you press the mega-bass button on them?
Finally!
A stereo system for the little elephant that lives behind the chair in my living room. I'm sure he will enjoy it and trumpet his admiration(just ask my wife about that).
the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver, which I attended. Bruce Thigpen, hardly a newcomer to high end audio and a bright designer, described the product and demonstrated it using a frequency generator. 10 Hz at 110 dB caused the mirror on the wall to move 1/2" back and forth, and at 5 Hz the door into the room had to be held shut by his associate. From that brief demo I could tell that listening to that kind of stuff long enough could make you sick to your stomach, not to mention possibly cause hearing damage. Yet everyone who heard it was amazed. Thigpen explained why his subwoofer is much more linear than other approaches. It isn't the world's most powerful subwoofer, but it may be the best. Expensive? You bet. Practical? Maybe not, but that never stopped an audiophile. It's this kind of craziness that inspires greatness, though. Gimme a matched pair when I hit the lotto. Bravo, Bruce!
...do you get a subwoofer?
I'm the guy who originally dug up the Eminent over at http://www.sonicflare.com/ before I wrote the companion article on ohgizmo.com (which looks dead from a quick and painless /. death...).
I'm a blogger, not an engineer, so I really have no idea what I'm talking about (par for course, right) but I did talk to the creator Bruce Thigpen a few days ago about his crazy invention:
Yes, it's real. Yes, you can "hear" it below 20hz. No, it doesn't blow women's clothes off...yet.
The way the TRW 17 (Thigpen Rotary Woofer model #17) works is the fan spins at a constant speed but the fins themselves rotate back and forth to change the frequency. Also, you don't just set this up in your living room and crank up the volume. It has to be installed in an adjacent space like your attic or basement which then becomes the actual subwoofer enclosure, firing through a chainsawed hole into your main listening room.
The TRW was demoed at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest a couple weeks ago and the reviewers from established audio publications were actually frightened as the walls started to pulse in and out at about 10Hz. Wimps. But the surprising discovery was the sound wasn't booming or nasty, just frighteningly "there." The TRW 17 is advertised with +/- 4dB of distortion which is awesome for any subwoofer, let alone one that covers 1Hz to 30Hz.
And here's the good news: Bruce told me there's a cheaper version in the works. Not cheap like free beer, but not 13 grand. Also, there is a car version in the works that, no doubt, has Luda all hot and bothered. A "normal" version is also planned -- normal like a subwoofer the size of a refrigerator but still better than converting the den into a boom machine.
So you know, no actual music was played at the RM audio fest. It was purely a proof of concept, though it's claimed to work perfectly for music and HT. I haven't talked to Bruce in a few days (no doubt rappers are all up in his biz after I posted it on Monday) but I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of the TRW 17 soon.
Pictures of installations and live reports: http://www.sonicflare.com/archives/eminent-tech-tr w-17-part-2.php
Josh
Generally, you're almost certainly correct. I do know there are a number of film DVDs where the sub track goes down even lower, however. Not that there's anything particularly interesting down there, but try the opening Earth-explosion in Titan A.E. for a rather noisy example - they've got bass rumble all the way down.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Check out this beast:
http://www.royaldevice.com/custom.htm
Time to remodel your basement?
here. Hopefully being /.'d won't cause problems for that page.
can it hit the poo note?
Any link or refercence to the "law" to which you refernce? Not a troll, just curious.
This thing will make a difference, but only if powered by an amp that goes at least to 11.
mod parent up - it's a funny spoof!
Subject says it all.
ALL drivers can produce 1Hz. Even the smallest tweeter. The question is how many DECIBELS at a certain DISTANCE it produces at that frequency.
That said, A LOT of music has frequencies below 20Hz, and if you don't reproduce them AT ALL, you're missing out on some of the FEEL of the music (you can't hear it, but you sure as hell can feel 10-15Hz).
That said, this is still a STUPID product.
I figured that if I CAPTIALIZED some of my WORDS, people might get a CLUE.
...if it goes up to 11.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Either these guys have solved the problem of fan noise that has plagued computers for years, or those 17" whirling blades (and the motor that drives then) are going to make a hell of a lot of white noise along with the brown. This certainly doesn't appear to be an audiophile device to me.
I'm interested in how the device actually works though, since the sound could be generated by reversing the speed of the fan every cycle, or by altering the angle of attack (which strikes me as a much better method since it invovles a lot less overcoming of inertia).
It's a pity there are not figures for how high a frequency this device can generate - I imagine it can't go very high at all, since switching from reducing the air pressure to increasing it (which has to be done every cycle) involves throwing a lot of mechanics and metal around. Maybe it can't get very far into the audio range at all, whic is why it's only been demoed with test tones?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Imagine the product liability suits from such a sub-woofer....
From the fan design, I would think that this device can only generate a single frequency. So it would be pretty useless for any audio/music application.
The most powerful subwoofer in the world is any average nuclear weapon. Human beings have never made anything that can strike a deeper or more powerful note.
But even that noise is really quite small. There is something more powerful. I speak only of the most powerful natural subwoofer.
The most powerful natural subwoofer in the world is currently the supervolcano in Yellowstone Park, or some other supervolcano. Take your pick. Yellowstone is the largest volcano known so it may well be potentially the loudest.
A different supervolcano blast -Summatra, 10,000 years ago- is responsible for the loudest noise ever heard by human ears, although there weren't that many humans around to hear it at the time, and those that did hear it probably wished they hadn't.
..the pentagon has quarantined all emus and classified their use as weapons.
"So far, we're not even talking about the possibility of inflicted hearing damage from exposure."
Hearing damage? You mean that stuff that already happens to people
who stand in the front row at Metallica concerts? (Well , when
they play their old stuff anyway , the new stuff would have trouble
damaging the hearing of a baby).
...now we can look forward to being stuck at stop lights by idiots with those in their cars.
You call that loud, pah
Take any sine generator (eg. Steinberg Wavelab has one) and generate a sine wave with a single frequency of 5hz, or 6hz, or 7hz, or anything you want.
It's actually fun finding the resonant frequency of your house/apartment/student's cardboard box. Don't do it too long or it WILL break stuff. You've been warned.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Part of music and information transfer is through bone conduction and resonance in the gelatinous materials of your body (e.g. the ones that have lots of fluid in them). This is why the disco sound (thumpa thumpa) was felt in places like your testicles, buttocks, breasts, and so on. You don't literally hear the sounds through cochlea-ear processes but you 'hear' them nonetheless. There's energy and information, even past the magical '1hz' point.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It's rare for an sound/recording/editing engineer to cut off low frequencies, after all this is where there's a lot of percussiveness (and the lowest note of the contra bassoon is actually lower than 30hz). Some used to use roll-off filters that 'shaped' the DC-20hz region, believing there was no information down there, but that's not true-- there is.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Subwoofer? That's no subwoofer, that's a superwoofer.
--
Waging war against fundamentalism is as likely to make the fundamentalists give up as 9/11 was likely to make the United States give up.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
After going through the "build your own speakers" phase in high-school (hey, it was the eighties), we decided that there still wasn't enough bass, no matter what cabinet design. We then built a (huge) servo-speaker which could go all the way down to DC.
You could definitely notice when it was switched in -- mostly because everything would fall off of shelves (and your neighbors shelves) and your rib-cage would ache after a while.
It made music sound a lot more fuller, though you had to tune it to the room for best effect, and depending on the size and shape of the room, you sometimes had to be sitting in the right spot (the node). It didn't have to be loud to be effective either.
Slashdot ran this story 1.5 years ago about this gigantic custom sub-woofer. I think it goes to 11.
Cerwin-Vega! (the exclamatio point is part of the name) made the 18" E-horn "Earthquake" subwoofer for theatres years ago. They produced enormous amounts of low frequency energy based on random noise below 30hz. They went boom, in a big way. Their SPL cold exceed 126db.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I can't believe the way that some people think it's OK to put in massive subwoofers in their home and car without the slightest thought to insulation. News flash dickwads: the rest of the neighbourhood does not want to hear your noise. And contrary to popular belief, subwoofer size is inversely proportional to penis size. Besides, if the rest of the neighbourhood was making the same noise levels with subwoofers of their own, it'd be pretty damn hard for anybody to enjoy their heavy bass.
Subwoofers above a certain power should only be allowed to be sold if they are installed in an insulated environment, and it should be the buyers responsibility to ensure their noise doesn't bother anyone. Something like this should never be sold commercially at all, seems how insulating it would require the construction of a concrete bunker or something. Some of you may argue it's your right to buy stuff like this, but what gives you the right to fill my home environment with your noise?
Contra Bassoon goes below 30hz, as does an 88 piano, and every pipe organ work its salt.
Percussion goes to >1hz although lots of energy happens all across the region you can hear or feel.
But their ability to reproduce sound below 30hz isn't new. Many speaker companies have boasted of their low frequency reproduction. What's interesting about this one is that it employs the room more efficiently into the experience. You see, you can't detect where low frequencies come from; this is why you don't need stereo subwoofers as your ears don't detect the stereo effect at such low frequencies. This removes the need for two subwoofers to achieve the 'stereo' or apparent locational effect of the sound at those frequencies.
This device appears to more readily couple the room's acoustic properties at low frequencies (which have long, long waves). This sort of coupling happens when you put a subwoofer in the corner of a room so as to use the walls as a more efficient 'horn' to propagate the sound to the room, hence your ears.
But the price, while not out of the range of the perfectionist/obsessive/compulsive/audiophile, is a bit high for its seemingly small benefit.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
In order to know more about this marvelous woofer, we'd need one of the following:
- a correct username and password
- the ability to type the correct hostname
- the assurance that the database server is running.
Or maybe that woofer needs some more bandwidth to really woof all of us!
(Read: slashdot effect)
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
As you pointed out, if you use several sources the soundwaves can reinforce or cancel eachother. To do a sweep from 1-25 Hz would mean you have to move your sources in accourdance with the frequency. Just a few points on the curve that you can calculate beforehand would be much simpler.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Check out this subwoofer...maybe it can't reproduce quite as low, but I guarantee that at the frequency those "ports" are tuned to it would be louder.
Have you seen my stapler?
The real challenge is improving the input, not the output. Audiophiles waste a lot of money on really high-grade amps and speakers just to buy cd's and dvd's recorded with industry standard mic's that don't come close to covering that range. There are very few recordings that use equipment that even come's close to the set up of a "real audiophile."
Why waste >$30,000 on you living room system if you're just going to pop-in a cd recorded with $150 worth of equipment? Or almost any CD, really, as the digitization eliminates these 'unnecessary' bands in the quest for more space on the CD (Which is not entirely unreasonable, given the quality of 99% of the systems on which they will be played and 99% of the ears that will listen to them).
Most of that "stuff you're missing" is really just distortion. Its just very expensive, 1334 distortion, for which "real audiophiles" will pay a great deal. Like caviar for other rich people. Or spoilers on Honda Civic's.
(BTW- IAAAE [I am an Audio Engineer])
Input power (rms) is not the same as output power. a lightbulb typically consumes 40 Watt. I can make more noise with any of my acoustic instuments than with a lightbulb.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Two quotes (adding nothing useful to this thread)
"Turn it up, turn it up!!!" (grandpa during the THX trailler at a movie)
Is it even on? I can't hear a thing: "It's whisper quiet" (Dr Nick making 'all that juice out of one bag of oranges')
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Interesting, according to the wikipedia article on mind control, low frequencies can alter a person's feelings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_control referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequen cy
Google search for 33Hz + orgasm
I put the link first so y'all don't try to call bullshit on me. I read it in an audio magazine (correction: wired magazine)a while back. The writer went for a ride along with some bassists who drove around town pushing a button and juicing girls. The driver was saying that part of the reason girls give 'im dirty looks is because they can feel the bass pushing their button.
As an aside, you may or may not know that serious car bass systems aren't set up to play music per se. They're setup to produce massive SPL, and because of that, they usually wire up a button (which they can press to unleash their thunder (and set off car alarms) while driving around town. For contests they use a remote control and replace windshields/windows/etc with inches of lexan which you can watch flex while the tones are being played.
All that said, high SPL's in the lower frequencies can cause your lung to spontaneously collapse.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Manowar the loudest band in the world certainly needs this to hail and kill!
Wheres the sound sample you insensitive clod
Thanks for the extra insight, but it still no clear to me how this thing works. At what speed does it rotate? does the rotation produce extra noise like a normal fan?
I suppose the trick is in modulating the angle of attack of the spinning fanblades. The resulting increase or decrease in lift are the tones you are trying to produce. But how do you get this change? Is the whole hub vibrating axially? (will cost relatively much input power because of the weight of the hub, but offers simple construction) or is each blade twisted induvidually? (much more involved construction but costs less amplifier power, output power comes from the motor that drives the fan).
Maybe there are even other ways to produce such an original speaker effect.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
nothing special, my subwoofer can do 0Hz..
But you could easily do your own recordings. I've played with electret mics and they go even *below* 1 Hz. I remember being able to see the pressure change in the room caused by someone opening/closing the door. Sure most people (and studios) filter out anything below ~20 Hz, but any 1$ electret microphone is still able to pick that up.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I could freakin' swear my neighbors already have at least two of these.
Waterfall graphic for the menu from "The Haunting" DVD:/ hauntingmenu.jpg
r ts/1646pci_fr_mr.jpg
http://www.svsubwoofers.com/images/Bassy%20scenes
Link to more waterfall graphics for a bunch of movies:
http://www.svsubwoofers.com/faq.htm#moviedemos
Link to more waterfall graphics for music:
http://www.svsubwoofers.com/faq.htm#musicdemos
Link to frequency response chart for my sub:
http://www.svsubwoofers.com/images/performancecha
Source material is available and drivers are available to reproduce freqs below 20 Hz. Not only is it available it makes a noticable difference in the movie watching experience. There is much less music available but it is out there.
Now inconsiderate people (once the technology filters down) will be able to subject everyone within a 200m radius instead of a 100m radius to the 100Hz section of whatever crappy music they are listening to.
If you own this subwoofer, you better be living at least a mile from your nearest neighbor or you may not hear the gunshots coming through your window.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I have some experience in pro audio recordng, and while I'm not a physicist, I don understand how sounds recorded on condensor / capacitor or dynamic mics (which essentially work like a standard speaker in reverse) will retain enough (if any) energy at this frequency level to make this piece of kit worthwhile. Granted, synthesised sound can be played through it, but in order for it to have any real application, we need a device that captures sound at the same frequency... such a thing could concievably use very similar technology, as far as i understand it.
Yes with modern music you have to be very strict, it might try to intimidate your neighbors if you do not respond quick enough.
Seriously, what are you talking about? This is not a lcd monitor. The lower the frequency, the more room for delay you get. A half cycle at 25 Hz takes a lot longer than a half cycle at 1kHz.
You have to use all kinds of tricks to make sure the woofer and tweeter are in phase, as you can hardly hear that. Anything beyond that is a crook swindling you out of your money, with the vistims being called audiophiles.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
While it's cool to have a woofer that can go down to 1 Hz and while it adds percusivness to the sound, I have to question why you'd want to use a subwoofer to deliever this.
Low frequency mechanical waves are carried much better through solid objects. If the goal is to produce a blast that you can feel in your chest, why not use transducers (shakers) mounted in chairs/walls/floors for the same effect using less power and more importantly, less money.
There are all sorts of reasons to shape sounds, and the use isn't empirical. If there's no information, then it cleans up the mix to use all kinds of equalization to cut noise, transients, and so on. But an overall mix can sound very AM Radio (e.g. bandwidth limited) if too much equalization is used. When I did masters, I'd use a 36db/octave slope starting at about 18hz, then check to see if there was something useful that I'd tamped down. Sometimes, there was useful percussiveness that was cut, and the only real way to detect that was by using a pretty loud playback with floor-mounted 3-ways or the best Sennheiser headphones that I had (which usually didn't help much at that freq).
A lot of LF energy tends to bottom out traditional woofers, no matter how good their inner compliance is. Add low-level DC, then add a kick-drum thump, and the voice coil bottoms, maybe damaging the woofer in some way-- usually voice coil cracking or distortion. So, I rarely changed the filter, but had to re-slope it to make the impact as realistic as was rational.
The point of the post is to connote that the final mix will have a lot of energy in some genres in the LF range. Individual channel feeds are commonly shaped to suit the needs of the mix. But you don't want to rob the overall mix of information to suit the problems with one feed, re-mix, etc.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Heh - go to any vibration testing lab, and they've played with stuff at those frequencies and LOWER - I used to do vibration sweeps that ran from .5hz (yes 1/2 hz) to 2 Khz with an electrodynamic shaker (thing speaker with a metallic cone to which you could bolt your test fixtures and units under test) - our "normal" interface plate was a slab of aluminum plate 24" in diameter about 2.5" thick - and we could mount bigger -and my lab only had a SMALL shaker - it was a MERE 18 Kilowatts (and I'm NOT talking peak - that's RMS continuious) - water cooling is a "good thing"
What's real fun is going to a lab doing earthquake testing - those test tables are usually hydrolic powered, go from freqs measured in seconds/cycle usually up to around 30-40hz, but the "table" on some I've seen are 10 or 15 FEET square, and have throws measured in FEET. One lab that I knew that did that used to have to restrict certain tests to certain days, because there was a printing company about 500 yds away, and the shaker would actually create enough ground vibration to mess up any print jobs that were running (the presses would kick off in earthquake mode) Ever seen a rack cabinet full of gear mounted to a slab of metal, and then shaken back and forth, say 2-3 FEET at 20hz? And SURVIVE? I have - and is some of the testing required of gear going in Nuke plants.
I once asked them about riding the table - they said it would litterally break your legs to stand on the table - your bones would not be able to handle it
That's the same lab where I saw a telephone pole launched at 300 mph end on into a containment building door (hey, a tornado MIGHT pick up a pole and throw it into the door) yes - the pole bounced off the door - it was a VERY impressive bang - and they did NOT to it at the main lab - not enough room (think about how you do that test - get a telephone pole to fly like a giant arrow in free flight, at a pre determined, replicable speed - hint - High pressure N2, burst disks, and pipe are your friends)
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
The show Myth Busters already busted the "Brown Note" effect, at least at realistic speaker power levels. They setup a huge stack of amps around test subjects and hit them with everything from sub-5hz to 20 hz at insane power levels. There were no ill effects, no vomiting, no lung problems, etc. The US military and I'm sure others are playing with even higher power levels by using two sound transmitters at higher frequencies converging at a single point which creates some sort of harmonic at the ~ 5 hz frequency. Supposedly if you hit someone with outrageous power levels at a low frequency it will do something to them but I can find no publicly available research or documentation to prove that. But I can pretty well bet that there is no "International Law" involving anything to do with this. The only laws or regulations I could think of that could even have a reason to exist would be transmitting radio waves at extremely low frequencies since at least the US miliary uses extremely low frequency RF to communicate with its submarines.
A number of years back, Tom Danley of Intersonics (and later Servodrive) designed a rotary vane transducer for low frequency reproduction. If you check with USPTO, you'll find the patent. It worked wonderfuly. It was efficient, and it went down to 1-2Hz. Then it was sold to Phoenix Gold. Like they seems ot have a knack for, they took it, re-engineered it until it was so unreliable, and performed so poorly, that the PG Cyclone (Google is your friend) became a footnote in history.
It looks like someone noticed the patent expired. It also looks like they don't quite undertsand the technology. The original worked in about a 6cuft box. This one seems to need to be run as a ducted dipole? No thanks. I'll take Contrabasses any day.
-dave
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
So, the fan has collective pitch to control the tone. What about adding cyclic pitch control for surround sound :-) After that all you need is a tail rotor and you can ride your pimp.
I sold car stereo when this product came out about 6-7 years ago. It appears to be similar if not the same technology. It did have amazing lows.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
In the recording and movie industry, soundtracks are usually put together (mastered) by sound engineers. At this point, it is trivial to add pretty much anything to the soundtrack to produce a fuller sound. Even if something cannot be recorded with average recording gear, it will not prevent sound engineers from re-introducing their adaptation of the missing sounds in the finished product.
CD audio consumes 88,200 bytes per second.
Close, but off by a factor of two. There are 44100 samples per second, 2 channels, 2 bytes (16 bits) per sample. Total 176,400 bytes per second.
www.wavefront-av.com
Oh boy, I can just see that.
"Alright troops, drop your pants. Now remove your enema bag from its carrier. Grasp the flush bag firmly with the left hand in an all-round grip, and the irrigation tube in your right about 6 cm from the end...."
The Army has subjected me to all kinds of indignities, but at least it hasn't made me shove a hose up my ass yet. I'd rather it didn't.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Put in to a pinball game I have played ones where some put a car amp in one and had the sound to the max. Works good on games with deep sound.
Now my dreams of building an affordable brown note generator can be realized !
Neighbors throwing late-night, noisy pool parties, look out !
If you look at the response curve of that mike and others, you'll see there' s a rolloff, but a fast rise time in energy produces results nearly to DC, just not a lot of them. Cheap cardiods can have some awesome LF characteristics if that's what you need. You don't need it every day, or even month, but once in a while, LF is good info in a mix. Some of my samples, like door slams, munitions, and aperiodic sounds go really low, -5db at 6hz in one case. But I used to mix a wide variety of stuff.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Yeah, I've been getting a lot of complaints about my big woofer.
I think he's talking about low-pass filters being applied to audio signals before they reach your speakers, rather than equipment simply not being able to produce 20 Hz.
Anything below 7hz is detected by the human ear as a pressure change, not a sound. So making this very loud would be very painful.
On a side note, I'll buy one when I have the money. Never can have too much sub.
... can I fit one in my 1986 Honda Civic?
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
The THX specification used by most theatre prevent frequencies under 20Hz to be reproduced, amongst other. Titan A.E. was produced under the THX pm3 specifications, which is the small room (studio) equivalent of THX, it let studio operators have a good idea of the end result in a theatre. There is another reason that even Titan A.E. or any other movie does not have content below 20Hz, below 20Hz we are talking about movement and in movie theatres sound amplitude is high, bass are most often constant, such a movement, at this amplitude generated continuously could potentially affect the movie theatre structure, its dangerous, plain and simple.
What you heard was probably the mechanical rumble of a subwoofer moving during high amplitude passages, if also means the subwoofer was on the ground or somewhat connected to the movie theatre structure.
Does it go up to 11?
... WoW talk about one conclusion!
First the fact that your software generates low frequency is in NO way an indication of even your sound card being able to reproduce it. I have yet to see D/A converters working under 20Hz for a starter, then you would have to have a subwoofer able to reproduce it, the one mentionned in the article being the first one it seems. Not to mention you need the amplifier to reproduce something under 20Hz.
Realize that audio gear being able to work efficiently at 20Hz, is rare, expensive and usually geared toward studios, take a look at your gear spec, you'll see that most consummer, prosummer and semi-pro and even some pro gear start their frequency response range at 35Hz...
lol
http://www.phoenixgold.com/webfaq/cyclone.htm
Also its not the depth but the SPL that accounts for power. For each 3DB increase in volume you need double the power. Also as has been pointed out there are many subs that will go that low but the boomers who use them don't want the loss of power in the "higher" frequencies when you tune a sub that low.
> as low as 1Hz. Typical subwoofers bottom out at 20Hz, and while the
> human ear can barely hear below that point
Nobody can hear anything in frequencies that low. Even 20Hz is quite a stretch. A few people may be able to hear 20Hz, but those are very few. Its just like those tweeters you see advertized that can go as high as 50KHz, when only very few people, mainly very young girls, can hear as high as 20KHz.
> This particular woofer does not have an enclosure, instead relying on
> a fan-like design, wafting a cone of modulated air into the room, and
> effectively turning it into a resonating box, in its entirety!
Assuming the resonant frequency of the room is the same frequency of the sound being produced, that could work. But move to another room with a different resonant frequency, or try to produce other frequencies not in the room's resonant frequency range, and the sound quality deteriorates to crap.
How do they get "most powerful" from a frequecy spec? Power is measured in Watts, not Hz, right?
Besides, this is the worlds most powerful subwoofer.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
I'd like to hit you with a Dirac Delta, slap you with a sampling theorem, and then have Shannon kick your ass. Fourier will be here to escort your butt out of the room.
"remove all sounds below 20Hz before going onto CD, as that increases the dynamic range of remaining frequencies"
Uh, ok...show your math please.
Very interesting links! Thanks! I've been looking for stuff like this. I own that Organ Blaster CD (and many others with material down to 16hz or lower). Now all I need is a REL sub to hear it hehe (www.rel.net).
moo
At $13000, this is hardly prosumer grade.
http://shadowless.me
OK, that may be true but it is a bit unsightly. For something more attractive (and above ground), check out:
: www.avantgarde-usa.com/basshorns.html+&hl=en
The Avantgarde Basshorn -
http://www.avantgarde-usa.com/basshorns.html
The Google cache of above -
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:4iR7Uup3O1UJ
Love the main speakers too. Very spendy, however...........
What you experienced was real. Emus are one species of bird that has a subsonic "beat box" used to warn predators away.
Elephants can create simlar sounds through their feet. (Believe it or not!)
kewl, now I can pack it in the back, cruise down the street and really rice it up.
I guess while building all those studios, you haven't really considered a possibility of them dealing with classical music?
The lowest pipe of the pipe organ can produce frequencies as low as 16 Hz. Even if you don't hear those frequencies, the harmonics generated by them are what makes the sound of a pipe organ so enormous. Same goes for things like explosions, earthquakes and other special effects. So yeah, that sub may not be designed for your average project studio, but I would not be surprised if large concert halls, or even some movie theaters, are already pulling out their checkbooks.
http://shadowless.me
The diaphragm of the mic will be vibrated by whatever frequencies you throw at it. a large-diaphragm condenser will have no problem capturing freq's even as low as 1 Hz, and any speaker will have no problem reproducing them... the problem is, without such a powerful speaker as this, you won't be able to move enough air at those frequencies when you play back the recording. The frequencies will be there - just inaudible. They are always present in the raw recordings of low-frequency sounds, but usually get filtered out in the mix simply because 99% of equipment in the world won't be able to make the listener aware of those sounds. Again, let me reiterate that the equipment won't have any problems playing it - you just won't hear it. ("If a tree falls down in the forest" type of thing).
http://shadowless.me
Now you should be able to talk with the Elephants. Don't they communicate in the 1.25 - 1.75Hz range over long distances?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I don't this will sell out to Studios -- but it will sell to enthusiasts and entertainers.
.1Hz.
The effects of this sub-subwoofer could really add some thrills.
Even if music isn't shipped with audio below 20Hz, you can still add in a simple "bass assist" that looks at the frequencies between 40Hz and 20Hz and then "assists them" by pumping a complementary sound at 20Hz to
I would be concerned, however, about the health effects. I thought I read that the Germans has experimented with a sound weapon during WWII. A steady 8Hz frequency could cause human brains to rattle in our heads -- much the same way as yodeling splatters Martian brains.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
This thing is dumb for other reasons. You know what you call a 100 dB signal at 0 Hz? A stiff breeze. All this thing is doing is spinning the blades like a normal fan to give you your ability to work the fluid (air). Then, the spinning shaft is vibrated axially at whatever frequency to give you the "sound" at that frequency. Looking at the response curve here:
http://www.eminent-tech.com/graphics/RWimage2.jpg
You can see that at most frequencies, the signal is fairly noisy. But as it goes down to 0 Hz, it levels out very nicely. What's going on here? Is this a good thing? Not really. While claiming a flat response down to 0 Hz might sound cool, the effect is that you are proving what this thing really is: a fan. So the ability of this thing to perform as a speaker is dependent on two abilities: how well the fan can spin the blade (and how consistent), and how well the motor can vibrate the shaft axially. A normal speaker is only subject to the second ability, how well the speaker can vibrate the speaker cone axially. So I doubt adding another degree of complexity really helps this system to perform better than traditional systems.
Looking at the noise of the response of this thing in the 10 Hz to 20 Hz range, I'm not impressed. If you are really concerned about getting low frequencies down to around 9 Hz (or further depending on the design), check out infinite baffle (IB) subwoofers. They are custom built into the wall (floor, ceiling, etc) of your sound room with the back wave of the sound going into an infinite baffle (an adjacent room, outside, attic, basement, etc - something with a large volume), and the front wave going into your sound room. Some of these systems have been able to get flat responses down to the single-digit frequency range with very little noise. And if you do the work yourself by learning the technology, it's pretty cheap (and fun). Spend $600 on 4 15" speakers, $400 on the amps, $200 on other related electronic equipment and materials, and $100 on construction materials. And for 1/10th the cost, you can get something that performs better.
I tried some localized pages on Google's site (Taiwan, China, and Trinidad were the three that came to mind), but they didn't offer maps, I don't think. I guess I'm an idiot for not trying the English speaking TLDs like .ca and .co.uk. Oh well. Also, pinging google.ca gives me about 34 ms while google.com is 80. I should stick with you guys :).
There is a test facility down the street from here built by "TRW" (now part of Northrop Grummun) The test facility has the ability to reproduce the acustic signature of a large space lift boster, like an Atlas or the Space Shuttle. "Loud is not quite the word. A better word is "Destructive" The sound of the launch can literally rip stuff apart if it is not built right and hence the reason for the test chamber. The chamber is large enough to hold a typical satilite payload, which can be about the size of a stadard shipping container. So, my point is that there are good reasons to build powerfull subwoffers other thn reproduction of music. One other use was in a facility I vistited in Florida that housed several Abrams A1 tank simulaters. The sound was realistic (as judged by some US Army tank core peole) I would just say it was "way loud".
Actually, I didn't really hear anything. My sub isn't that good, and I missed it in the cinema. I was going off fft transforms of the raw DTS stream on the DVD. Thinking about it more, this might even just be compression artifacts.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
bugger. TLA Acronyms strike again.
Obviously there's no such thing as a Fast Fourier Transform Transform.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
"even some pro gear start their frequency response range at 35Hz..."
That's where the MEASUREMENT for the spec is defined.
The equipment MAY or MAY NOT have useable performance below that.
And that 20 Hz filter. That's NOT an issue in the Analog domain.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
but you can also beach whales with our new sub-woofer!
I think I recall it, that wide-grooved LP, and a few others.
Yes, high-pass filters were de riguer to cut down on complaints. But you'd be amazed at re-masters and some of the Japanese and Deutche Grammaphon recordings I've got. While it's unnecessary to sit on the cartridge, they go low, on transients.
A nice steep filter is a good precaution against voice coil fractures or preventing them from shooting 50m into an audience. Several companies made bass boost/recovery electronics that had low-end boosts and high-end bandpass or low-reject filters. These were good ideas. And there's little detection of distortion at very low frequencies. Only parasitic oscillations are detectable as above-fundamental freqs.
But I waffle between the British Purist/audiophile approach and the more rational budget-with-deafened-ears approach. Budget wins now more than ever.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Do some room treatment, starting with a big enough room to actually hold a couple of periods of a big sound wave. Eliminate early reflections. Don't have walls parallel to each other. Put fiberglass bass traps in the corners and anywhere else that reflects. It may be counterintuitive to non-audio types, but *trapping* bass waves, that is, stopping them from reflecting back to the point source or the listener, will *increase* the bass response in the room. One of these expensive woofers in a bad room won't give the bass response of a mundane speaker in a well-treated room.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Of the consoles I've used, they used open-ended DACs with only slight pull-up resistors and had 20-20K within a db. Overall system was 5-27K +2/-1, not counting tape. Tape was another disaster altogether.
An 18' horn... probably Cerwin-Vega...? C-horn? E-horn? That's a bunch of bass, buddy.
I don't know about Hollywood in general in terms of their spec, but it would be tough to believe that they didn't want lower freq energy recorded. My experience is southern and in NYC. But I'll probably catch hell for responding to an AC. Oh well.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
A recording studio generally tries to eliminate any and all reflections. A concert hall tries to have certain kinds of reflections that are desirable.
Concert halls and studios have totally different design characteristics, although if I had a nice, old mahogony timber church to work with, I'd embrace its sonic characteristics. In a plaster house or office building, you have to try to eliminate the room, unless the room is really huge.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Uh, ok...show your math please.
There is a limited amount of energy that a linear PCM signal can hold without clipping. Removing energy below 20 Hz makes room for signals in a more audible part of the spectrum. For example, if you have a 5 Hz sinusoid and a 3000 Hz sinusoid of equal amplitude, they can't exceed -6 dBFS without clipping. But if you remove the 5 Hz sinusoid, you can push the 3000 Hz to full scale (0 dBFS). In practice, a lot of recordings from microphones will have a DC offset (stuff below 0.1 Hz) and rumble (stuff below about 15 Hz) which can be dispensed with during mixing to make more room for other sound.
You would have to build a device which was capable of oscillating at the required frequency which meets three criteria:
For the non-scientist, this loosely translates into: You've got to be able to hear what you want and because it's so faint in comparison, not hear anything you don't want to hear.
All this is simple enough in theory, but in practice it is actually very hard.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...on behalf of junglists everywhere.
BOH!!!
I have yet to see D/A converters working under 20Hz for a starter
The chip itself should be good down to DC. However, the output is usually capacitively coupled to eliminate the DC component. Increasing the size of these capacitors will move the low-frequency cutoff to a lower frequency.
What you need to do is move a far, far larger column of air. There has been work on using electrical sparks to generate pulses of sound which you can then modulate. This is not mechanical, so you get better efficiency on converting to sound. It also has far better response, would be capable of handling larger amounts of energy, and the weather systems have been demonstrating a very large-scale subwoofer for billions of years.
In all seriousness, I do believe that if you built your own "lightning generator", with diaphram, on the order of perhaps a few hundred meters high, it would be possible to make an extremely good sub-20 Hz subwoofer. Finding something to play that would make use of it (other than early Metallica hits) would be hard, though.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Also, Phoenix Gold has had the "cyclone" available for years.
I was in a car audio shop once and asked the guy what the hell the cyclone was and he replied, "They use that thing to call elephants in Africa, You don't want that" You need a lot of space for the enclosure and it is likened to being "punched in the kidneys" when played.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
By response, I think he means that the bass speaker needs to be able to reset itself and recharge its capacitors before the next beat. If it doesn't, then you're losing effectiveness.
What's this about tweeters being in phase? Just as long as you're not introducing a delay in the circuits, right?
Ah,
Careful with that volume switch turned up to 11.
Your liver might turn into a thick red goo...
...while looking at the big guy in front of me who I just insulted. :)
I'm curious if it's just Google or if other sites are down as well?
www.google.com and talk.google.com both died for me. Then I went to sleep.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
So, this subwoofer can create sound waves down to 1Hz, but how big of a room do you need to create such a standing wave? I'm guessing most people don't have a room to produce even a 20Hz standing wave.
I guess that's when the shit REALLY hits the fan! ~m
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
this brings new meaning to rattling one's teeth out.
Great. This subwoofer can faithfully reproduce the waveforms used by infrasonic weapons! To quote the Fortean Times: " According to the Working Paper on Infrasound Weapons produced by Hungary for the United Nations in 1978, the frequency that is thought to be most dangerous to humans is between 7 and 8Hz. This is the resonant frequency of flesh and, theoretically, it can rupture internal organs if loud enough. Seven hertz is also the average frequency of the brain's alpha rhythms; thus this frequency has been described as dangerous but also relaxing. Whether exposure to such infrasound can trigger epileptic seizures, as some fear, remains unclear; experimental data on exposure to such frequencies gives a variety of results." Yes, and infrasound can theoretically cause incontinence too, but I'm not sure what frequency works for that -- didn't the Mythbusters disprove that the infrasound incontinence myth?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The sound() help topic in Borland C++ referred to a story in Australia where a factory emitted 5Hz noise, killing all the chickens in a nearby farm because that's the chicken skull resonancy frequency. ;-)
I guess more than one kept the desire of trying their chicken killer appsy
Got Pike?
Yes! You win.
Its too bad the mods don't seem to get the reference
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Could someone please explain that one to me.
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
I've proposed using a Doppler-shifting process to produce phase-cancellation binaural beats several octaves below the original notes, which should produce similar effects while keeping the signals in the "normal" range (20Hz+) of the amps and speakers. It's similar to playing an octave on a fretless bass and bending one of the notes up a bit.
Why do you think the deaf like Rap and RnB? They can feel that music much more than Pop, generally. My Sign Language instructor (who was deaf from birth) was telling us all about the bands he likes (Snoop, Dre, etc.).
-Valiss
I really hope my white trash neighbors don't read Slashdot. I have to listen to too many hours of their bass-thumpin' Top 40 Hip-Hop crap a day as it is.
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
The wavelenght of say 10Hz sound, or about 30m is too large to fit in ahouse. So the only way to experience 10Hz "sounds" inside a house is to pressurise/depressurise the whole house in the right rhythm.
So the claimed configuration: in the attic, with the back of the device into the attic, and the front into the rest of the house is one of the rare configurations that CAN work.
Opening a window will spoil the effect quite a bit: Lots of pressure will escape at 10Hz through an open window.
Wether or not the device will produce irritating overtones in the audible range remains to be seen....
Note also that, even if our ears could pick up sounds around the 20Hz mark, we would be unlikely to hear them if listening in an ordinary room. At high power, we might feel the air moving at that frequency but the sound wave would simply be too long to propagate. Consider v=fl (using l for lambda here) where v is the speed of sound, f is the frequency of the sound and l is the sound's wavelength. Assuming that v=330m/s (a reasonably good approximation) and f=20Hz (as alluded to, above), we arrive at l = 330/20 = 16.5m, which is a wee bit longer than any axis of a room likely to be employed for computer use.
Systems admin, drinker, musician and all-round bastard. "Now we see the violence inherent in the sysadmin."
i found a dealer in europe which has it cheaper than the manufacturer directly
2 0Tobadill%20Woofer%20Eminent%20Technology%20Model% 2017%20EURO15666.htm
here http://kb-carhifi.com/shop/shop/Carly%20Benedikt%
Posted this somewhere else, copied in cause I don't feel like typing it all up again:
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"I was reading around online earlier today on a tech website and ran across a post about 33hz (a frequency of sound) and women having orgasms. The thought of using sound for pleasureable sensations had never occurred to me. Instantly I was once again envying women for their wonderful ratio of low input (handsfree vibrator) to pleasure. Obviously in this case, the girl would sit on top of my subwoofer. But what about for a guy?
Well my sound system is a Logitech z5500. Its subwoofer is 187 Watts, has a 10" driver, and is has INCREDIBLE bass. If you love music I'd highly recommend picking this up (well also for the reason of this thread lol), as its usually $275-300. Here it is:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002WPSBC/002-3
So I thought: "How in the world I could get some stimulation without the direct speaker->clothing->genitals contact that women can have (through sitting...gosh I am jealous...good car sound system..._fun_ driving...)?" Well I came up with an idea...that hole in the side of the subwoofer is there to ensure no bass gets muffled. When you turn up the volume on a song with bass and put your hand by the hole, you can feel a TON of air moving with the beats...as is the nature of bass.
So I'll need a good song, or better, a program that simply produces bass, and tons of it. So I googled some and found AudioTester:
http://www.audiotester.de/
After playing around with my sound system and the program, I found anything from 20-30 hertz to be optimal...The actual range of the system is 33 hertz, but it does go lower, it just needs more power to do so. I chose 26 (although 23 might have been better).
Well sticking myself in there of course didn't work...vibrating air doesn't do anything. So I kept thinking...I usually use some soft clothing (like pajamas) when I masturbate (great results)...so why don't I wrap myself up as usual and try that way? While I couldn't absorb the air vibrations by myself, the clothing did the trick and picked up all the vibrations and transfered them to me. Even better, I was able to catch all the bass coming out of the whole and muffle it, which greatly decreased the noise (not much sound from the diaphram on the face of the speaker). I was able to do this without cranking it up that high at all, which was good, considering I'm in a dorm room and didn't want people interrupting me.
IT WORKS! I've found an effortless way to enjoy myself! Hurray for sound systems! Not only were the vibrations transfered to my shaft, but with all the cloth quickly contacting/leaving my skin as a result of the pulsating air, the sensation was awesome! I don't know how long it took me, but it was rather quick. I'm so excited now! You other guys should go get this system, some pajamas and have some fun! I think it would work for you women as well...either sitting on top of the subwoofer or turning it on its side and sitting on the hole/maybe using a tshirt as a diaphram to pick up of the vibrations, get some momentum/force, and hit you.
I'll have to come up with a way to make the bass pulsate for more effect, maybe replace the bass of a good song with this 23hz stuff and turn down the rest so that the volume level is proportional.
Let me know if anyone else tries this!
"
All this thing is doing is spinning the blades like a normal fan to give you your ability to work the fluid (air). Then, the spinning shaft is vibrated axially at whatever frequency to give you the "sound" at that frequency.
Nope. If you'd do a little more research you'll find that it uses variable pitch blades, like on a helicopter or fancy plane prop. The blades spin and the pitch of the blades is adjusted to control the velocity and direction of the breeze. So the fan blade can very quickly adjust the pressure in the room.
It's a cool (and not new) idea, and I'll be curious to see how well they can get it to work. I'm sure there are numerous technical challenges. I look forward to reviews of the system playing something other than test tones, and the final retail price.
Luftkanone. Developed at Talstation Lofer, Germany, during WWII. Developer: Dr. Richard Wallauscheck.
"...design consisted of a parabolic reflector, 3.2 meters in diameter, having a short tube which was the combustion chamber or sound generator, extending to the rear from the vertex of the parabola. The chamber was fed at the rear by two coaxial nozzles, the outer nozzle emitting methane, and the central nozzle oxygen. The length of the chamber was one-quarter the wavelength of the sound in air. Upon initiation, the first shock wave was reflected back from the openend of the chamber and initiated the second explosion. The frequency was from 800 to 1500 impulses per second.
The main lobe of the sound intensity pattern had a 65 degree angle of opening, and at 60 meters' distance on the axis a pressure of 1000 microbars had been measured. No physiological experiments were conducted, but it was estimated that at such a pressure it would take from 30 to 40 seconds to kill a man. At greater ranges, perhaps up to 300 meters, the effect, although not lethal, would be very painful and would probably disable a man for an appreciable length of time. Vision would be affected, and low-level exposures would cause point sources of light to appear as lines." [1]
References:
[1] _Secret Weapons of the Third Reich_ by Leslie E. Simon (USA, ret)
WE, Inc., Publishers (c)1971
[2] _The Guns 1939-45_ by Ian V. Hogg
Ballentine Books Inc. (c)1970
[3] _Lost Victories_ by Erich von Manstein
[4] _German Secret Weapons of World War 2_ by I. V. Hogg
ARCO Publishing Company, Inc. (c)1970
http://www.hagelkorn.com/Germany/Luftkanone/luftka none.htm
At what frequency does infrasound become a problem? I'd hate to get my groove on, only to find that my organs had shut down, that I was sporting feelings of dread, fear, anxiety, anger, and depression, and that my bowels were releasing (brown note).
Well, the vibrating shaft was my guess at how it worked. But, pitching the blades at 20 or 30 Hz? That's a freaking mechanical nightmare backwards way of producing sound. I still stand by my observation that the noise in the signal is pretty bad, and the fact that you are still getting around 100 dB at 0 Hz can't be a good indication of how this thing actually sounds.
"World's Most Powerful Subwoofer"
And the ugliest one to boot!
I am an audio engineer...
Once the sound gets around 100Hz and below you don't hear it as much as you "feel" or "sense" it. If you have a 5.1 surround system in your house with a sub, the sub will be crossed over anywhere from 90Hz to 150Hz meaning only those frequencies are sent to it to be reproduced.
Libertas in infinitum
Your amp should have internal clip circuitry detection that prevents blown transducers.
...and yes IAAAE (I Am An Audio Engineer)
Also, it will be interesting to see what happens with SACD/DVD audio. With a greater dynamic range (CDs have 96dB and DVDs have 124dB) maybe things won't have to be squashed as much to raise the precieved loudness.
Libertas in infinitum