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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
Can it blow a woman's clothing off?
Audiophiles. These people spend money on the strangest things.
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
Quick, someone tell Howard Stern, so he can reenact that scene in "Private Parts" where he told that lady to sit on the subwoofer.
Not without a real reason necessarily. I mean you may not be able to hear sub 20hz (most people can't hear below 30, especially as the age group gets older), but you can definitely feel it. The feeling of the lower frequencies can add a lot to the music, because it can add the real "boom" to certain things like cannon fire (used in on some classical concerts before you ask). Though I've never built a system sub 20hz (my current system peaks around 44hz and dips way down in the 30's) myself, I've heard a lower and they are really amazing. Just don't get going on kimber cables...
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 ;-)
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That way you will end up with a haunted computer room!
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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.
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The glass is half-full. With poison. And there are cracks in the glass. The dirty, dirty glass.
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.
Excuse me whilst I wipe the tears from my eyes.
Wait - those aren't tears! That's not my eye!
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.
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
...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!
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.
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.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
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.
The real question is...
Can it make someone blow you?
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All your bass are belong to us!
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
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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.
...do you get a subwoofer?
No because gold wears easily and is only good for home use as constant plugging and unplugging isnt' needed.
Silver on the other hand is best for studio use as it is much tougher and and tarnishes which isn't as much as a problem in the studio.
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
This thing will make a difference, but only if powered by an amp that goes at least to 11.
...if it goes up to 11.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
..the pentagon has quarantined all emus and classified their use as weapons.
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.
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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.
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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.
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like a $500 power cord
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Or almost any CD, really, as the digitization eliminates these 'unnecessary' bands in the quest for more space on the CD
Huh? CD audio is 44,100 samples per second, sixteen bits per sample. Period. No filtering of frequency bands is going to increase or decrease the amount of space used; CD audio consumes 88,200 bytes per second. Or is your contention that the encoding format by design eliminates some frequencies? Obviously, CD audio can't encode frequencies above 22,050 Hz (half the sample rate, per Nyquist's Theorem), but there is no lower limit.
Of course, the equipment used to acquire, process and digitize the original audio may not manage very low frequencies well, and most audio equipment is incapable of reproducing low frequency tones, but CD audio isn't inherently limited in the low frequency range, and there's no "compression" to be gained by filtering low frequencies out.
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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.
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.
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... 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
> 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.
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.
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.