Sake Used to Make Wooden Speakers

geeber writes "And you thought Sake was only good with Sushi? Well, think again! IEEE Spectrum has an article on how JVC has used sake to enable making speaker cones out of wood. Wood has a wide frequency response which makes it desirable as a material for speaker cones. However Toshikatsu Kuwahata worked for 20 years trying to make the cones out of wood without cracking. Finally he discovered that soaking the wood in sake (but not whiskey) made the wood pliable enough to form into a speaker cone. So let's raise our glasses and toast those clever engineers as we crank up the volume!"

Re:Audiophile applications

[JanneM]

As anyone who has had a brush with the world of hi-fi knows, if the material or process just sounds exotic enough and is expensive enough, it will sell very well no matter what the actual benefits may be.

Leaves a lot of questions...

[CNERD]

Wouldn't the wood have to be rather thick/dense/heavy to not want to crack under the pressure (thereby making the speaker ineffecient)? Wouldn't thin wood respond the same as our 20 year old paper cones?

Actually, resonance is bad in speakers

[tentimestwenty]

The resonance of wood soaked in brine or sake may help a Stradivarius, but in a speaker cone the only two factors that make a good one are lightness and stiffness. Any kind of resonance introduces a sound of its own that isn't present in the recording. Hi-fi types refer to this as coloration. If the JVC guys have been working on wood cones for 20 years it's because it is relatively inert, strong and light, not because it adds a particular sonic character of its own. It's very hard to build something that has no negative effect due to its form, yet creates a large positive secondary effect - a basic law of nature and the fundamentals of engineering.

Re:I AM SO GLAD YOU GUYS ARE IN THIS THREAD

[EvilAlien]

Just because large numbers of people choose it doesn't mean its not shitty beer, and as you (+1 Sarcasm) point out, it also doesn't mean it is shitty beer.

Gotta break it to ya though, Bud is urine in a fancy can and your self-righteous anti-elitism doesn't change that fact... yes FACT, dammit. Bud = shit is a fact, as provable as... erm... other facts.

Re:Leaves a lot of questions...

[DirkGently]

Maybe not. Not meaning to sound condescending, but paper is made out of itty bitty chunks of wood glued together. What's stronger, a house made out of stone or one made out of sand? Sand is just little chunks of rock, after all. Even if you were to compare cement to rock (which is a pretty good analogy), I'd still put my money on a nice slab of granite.

The "saki process" evidently allows the wood to be reformed without the cracking, and then the sealer keeps it from cracking due to moisture. It probably also adds a certain amount of strength.

Oh geeze

[spoco2]

Why do people write these things, just because they've had some experience in a similar field? Suddenly they think that they know better than someone who has been working in the area of speaker cone manufacturing for 20 years.

Have you ever built a speaker cone? Do you know what properties a speaker cone needs? Are they the same as what the body of a guitar needs?

Did your guitar sides need to flex anywhere near the amount these speaker cones need to? No, you needed the timber to be flexible temporarily and then go back to being hard and rigid.

DIFFERENT needs entirely from speaker cones which need to be able to handle being constantly vibrated at all sorts of frequencies.

If you had spent your time building speaker cones from wood using water then fine, maybe your comment would have some weight, but you didn't and you're speaking about something you obviously don't know enough about.

Do you think he never tried water? Do you think that maybe it's not just initial flexibility that is required? Does water make the wood flexible forever?

Re:Speaker materials

[JBMcB]

Wooden cones would have a nice wide frequency range.

There is a whole school of thought in audio engineering, mostly driven by the Japaneese, that a single, crossover-less driver is the way to go in speaker design. The closest thing you can get to a single-driver full-range speaker right now is either an electrostatic, which dosen't go very low. There are many single-driver designs out there, but I haven't seen any that hit the trifecta of high sensitivity (for your 10W Single Ended Triode tube amp, of course :), low distortion, and 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.

Actually, the vast majority of speaker cabinets are made out of MDF, or Medium Desnsity Fiberboard, or what most subflooring is made out of these days. MDF is just wood dust compressed back together to make a denser, more uniform material. You can get hardwood that's just as dense, but it's much more expensive to start with, and getting a lot of it without knots or other irregularities is *really* expensive.

The really high end speakers use exotic materials like Corian or granite. Expensive countertop materials seem to be all the rage. The ultra-high-end Wilson Audio speakers mount the tweeters and midranges on a Corian-like material, or so I've heard. The denser the material == the higher the resonant frequency == the less likely it is to resonate, enough for you to hear at lest.

Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile

[Anonymous Coward]

Right....If your system is kinda like $100000 worth, how can you use $100 wires for it...no way....You buy $30000 wires, which are in reality worth no more than $100, but have I nice manufacturer tags written all over them ;-) so that you can show off to your fellow audiophilles.

Re:Americans already drink much rice!

[raodin]

"It [rice] provides a balance necessary to Budweiser's trademark 'drinkability.'"

I can see why they put "drinkability" in quotes.. wouldn't want to get smacked for false advertising.

Re:so what if it's offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, norwegian beer is made the same way (they had the same purity laws, in norwegian it's called "renhetsloven", but it got ruined too by the EU).

How did EU manage to mess with a non-EU country's laws?