Sake Used to Make Wooden Speakers 271
geeber writes "And you thought Sake was only good with Sushi? Well, think again! IEEE Spectrum has an article on how JVC has used sake to enable making speaker cones out of wood. Wood has a wide frequency response which makes it desirable as a material for speaker cones. However Toshikatsu Kuwahata worked for 20 years trying to make the cones out of wood without cracking. Finally he discovered that soaking the wood in sake (but not whiskey) made the wood pliable enough to form into a speaker cone. So let's raise our glasses and toast those clever engineers as we crank up the volume!"
Audiophile applications (Score:-1, Informative)
High end manufacturers already use titanium for tweeters and epoxy-treated paper for woofers. The question here would be whether the wood could be manufactured with enough consistency in sonic properties as to ensure reliably good sound quality. The problem with most wood is that the grain varies, and hence the propagation of sound through the driver cone.
All you ever wanted to know... (Score:4, Informative)
The Guinness of sake, maybe?
What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile App (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder when we'll see wood-cone based speakers filter into the world of hi-fi, if ever.
RTFA....
This year, JVC introduced its first wood-cone speaker product based on Imamura's process
and
The system ships in May, at a suggested retail price of US $550. Back in Maebashi, Japan, his mission accomplished, Kuwahata has announced his retirement.
sigh....
Re:In response to the inevitable... (Score:3, Informative)
Twenty years for this? (Score:2, Informative)
Why not ammonia? (Score:5, Informative)
BTM
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:5, Informative)
These are audiophile speakers:
http://www.wilsonaudio.com
Re:Kanpai! (Score:2, Informative)
(o)sake wo motte kitte kudasai.
or just
sake kudasai!
Let's have our gratuitous / pretentious use of Japanese at least be accurate, ne?
Speaker materials (Score:5, Informative)
Speaker cones have to low resonance or at least a very narrow frequency range they resonate in. With a narrow resonating range, you can just put a low-pass/high-pass filter on it so it never receives the resonating frequencies - they get sent to another speaker with a different resonant frequency.
Metal tweeters have become very popular recently. Any really light, but tough metal is good. Alumin(i)um and titanium are the most commonly used, but there are some more exotic ones like Focal/JMLabs beryllium tweeters. The problem with metal cones is that they act like tuning forks - a really narrow resonant frequency range, but if they hit it they really resonate. My B&W 603s have aluminium woofers - which I just love the sound of. They cut them off pretty low though.
Kevlar (yes, the bullet proof vest material) is also a popular material at the moment. B&W and Wharfdale are two companies that make Kevlar based drivers. B&W have some interesting documents on their web site [bwspeakers.com] on what makes it such a good material.
Wooden cones would have a nice wide frequency range. Think about how wood sounds when you knock it with your knuckles - a nice dull thud. Yes, I'm ignoring all the musical instruments made of wood. I'm talking about your normal block of wood. They already make the vast majority of speaker cabinets out of wood precisely for the low-resonant properties that it exhibits.
This is interesting news in the world of hi-fi.
Re:"without cracking" (Score:5, Informative)
Making a speaker cone is not merely 'bending wood'. First the cone has to be very light, so the wood is very thin. There are lots of ways of bending nearly any thin wood. Second the cone has to be extremely dense/solid/inflexible. There is currently, as of this article, only one way to make a thin sheet of appropiate woods into the proper shape with all the desired properties.
Besides, when's the last time you did something cool and someone dismissed it by relating a similar but non-applicable technology invented years ago? The fool is not the person who did the work. This doesn't even begin to cover all the fun 'geeky' things one might accomplish (such as a modern 8-bit computer realized in relays) for which a cheaper/better/faster/etc solution already exists.
Less talking - more walking.
-Adam
Re:Speaker materials (Score:5, Informative)
Everything from paper to polypropylene to Kevlar
Speaker cones have to low resonance or at least a very narrow frequency range they resonate in.This depends on a lot of things. A speaker driver cone by itself has a particular resonance frequency. The sharpness (or 'Q') of the resonance is dependent on the mass of the cone, and the stiffness of the surround.
However, once you put the speaker driver into an enclosure of finite volume (like a box), the resonance changes. The amount of the resonance change, and the new Q depends on the driver parameters, and the box parameters (size, port dimensions, stuffing, etc). For some low-frequency speaker designs (notably the band-pass designs popularized by Bose and boomcars) you want the resonance - that's how you get your output. Other designs (like my own, see my web page if you're interested), try to minimize the Q while still designing for an extended bass response. It's all about give and take.
Generally you try to stay away from resonances for mid-range and high-frequency speakers, but much of the time the resonance occurs outside of the frequency range of interest, so it's not a problem. (I suppose it could be a problem if the cross-over design is borked.)
What can be a problem is ugly breakup modes that occur when the speaker driver stops moving as a piston, and starts flexing. This flexing causes sound waves that add and cancel at certain frequencies, resulting in nasty sounds.
Kevlar (yes, the bullet proof vest material) is also a popular material at the moment. B&W and Wharfdale are two companies that make Kevlar based drivers. B&W have some interesting documents on their web site [bwspeakers.com] on what makes it such a good material.Kevlar was a very popular material in the late 80's/early 90's. It has better moisture resistance than paper cones which helps durability. It's stronger than paper, but that doesn't make a large difference - most of the strength of a driver comes from the conical shape, not the material. Plus, you can corrugate the driver for additional strength. But the added strength does help to reduce the severity of break-up modes. It can't eliminate them however, because the modal behavior is a function of it's size and shape.
Wooden cones would have a nice wide frequency range.The "frequency range" of wooden (or other cones) is meaningless. A speaker cone is essentially a piston. If it stays rigid, we get well understood pistonic behavior, and all is well. If it breaks up, it sounds like crap. If the material is delicate, it will break. If the material is heavy, the resonance frequency is reduced, and you lose sensitivity. You're changing the mass and strength parameters, which I suppose can have an audible effect. This might be a breakthrough in manufacturing techniques, but this isn't a breakthrough in sound.
Re:All you ever wanted to know... (Score:5, Informative)
Sake is beer, not wine. That "rice wine" thing is a cultural misnomer that is now confusing even the Japanese. Beer does not age for more than a few months at best. Light beers, as rice beer by its very nature is, do not age at all really. They are best consumed as close to being poured from the keg as possible. One tries to keep beer if one needs to. From going bad. It is difficult in most cases.
The very link you provide notes that you can keep most sake for about 2 months. I'm not sure why you'd want to. It's like refusing to drink a Bud until it's past its sell by date. You buy it when you want it, and drink it. Like beer.
These aged sakes are being marketed because the customer has started demanding that their "wine" be properly aged, and frankly, it's driving the brewers nuts. Centuries of tradition and a lifetime of practice to produce the very best, fresh sake, and now they're being forced to put it in barrels and let it go to ruin before people will buy it. For a while they responded with a "customer education" campaign, and some of them report being verbally abused by customers who thought the brewers were trying to rip them off by insisting the fresh stuff was the good stuff.
But, they are businessmen. If that's what the customer insists upon, and is even willing to pay a premium price for, well, then I guess that's what the customer will be sold.
Maybe it will drive the price of fresh down so I can afford more of it. I like sake.
Now if I can only find a way to drive down the price of 25 year old cognac. I like that stuff too, but it's usually E&J for me.
KFG
Re:so what if it's offtopic (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, certainly not TRADITIONAL german beers. Such beers conform to so-called purity standard (whatever it's in german) which defines the few ingredients allowed to be used for beers (water, hop, malt, yeast?). And surprisingly enough, that centuries old list does not contain rice (or corn for that matter). :-)
Re:so what if it's offtopic (Score:3, Informative)
PS! your list of ingredients are correct, but yeast was not initially allowed, because they didn't know about it's role in the process.
Re:wow (Score:3, Informative)
after the wood has cooled down and dried it stays rigid.
what was needed here is long-term flexability, something that water doesn't afford.
Sake is made in roughly the same process as wine, so the alcohol content cannot rise above around 6%, due to the toxicity of alcohol to the yeast, so drying out the wood with the alcohol probley isn't a big problem.
back to luthiery now. The sides of a guitar do not really need to flex, neither does the back. Their function is to amplify the resonance of the soundboard, which is why traditionally the back and sides of a guitar will be made out of a stable, rather stiff wood such as rosewood, mahogany, walnut, or if you like a bright sound, maple. The structural requirements of a guitar's back and sides and a loudspeaker are vastly different. You could possibly make the analogy that a guitars soundboard is like a loudspeaker (which would be a bit of a stretch considering the transient is thousands of times higher in a loudspeaker), in which case the back and sides would be the speakers enclosure, which again, do not have to be flexable.
you may know a lot about the design and construction of guitars, but compare apples to apples.
Re:so what if it's offtopic (Score:4, Informative)
In "official" German it is called the "Reinheitsgebot".
A translation of the original is netted [rcn.com] here.
CC.
NSW has 5 ingredients (Score:4, Informative)
If one was to use gas to pressurise canned/bottled beer or to pump keg beer, it would have to be CO2 that was tapped by the brewery as a by-product of the brewing process & was thus also made from those same 5 ingredients, such brewer produced CO2 is thus commonly known as beer gas.
This created all sorts of problems when Guiness started appearing on tap in Oz during the late 70's. You see Australian pubs didn't have hand pumps (that aerated ales with nitrogen enriched air for a creamy head), meaning Guiness on tap had to be pressurised by gas containing a CO2/Nitrogen mixture, yet nitrogen was not a by-product of the manufacture of beer using the 5 allowed ingredients (water, barley, yeast, hops, sugar). So the govt had to legislate a amendment to the liquor act permiting the gassing of beer with gasses other than beer gas. It was also arround time that 'barley' was replaced with simply 'grain' in the permisable ingredients list, so more varied beers could be made.