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!"
Temperature (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:3, Interesting)
Quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, it doesn't tell us how they actually sound as compared to other speakers. Is there any comparison data out there?
Wrong questions (Score:2, Interesting)
Violins too (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised to see this be chic in audiophile circles. The irony of expensive wood sounding great but cheap paper being crap would be could be very appealing to members of the Golden Ear Club.
Re:"without cracking" (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder why making a speaker cone was so much of a problem? Seems like this may just have been a pet project of his, but a little historical research might have saved him a decade or two.
Re:Wrong questions (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know about wood, but I've heard titanium tweeters get dissed on quite a bit for being too fatiguing (shrill, brittle), and a popular alternative (which are purported to sound more pleasant) are silk-dome tweeters -- so certainly organic materials are in the running.
Americans already drink much rice! (Score:2, Interesting)
Budweiser [budweiser.com], the king of rice beers.
(It's a flash page, so I can't link to the ingredients directly. Make up an age over 21, click on the Beer menu item, then "All About the Beer" at the bottom, then the "Making It" choice on the top left, then Ingredients.)
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:3, Interesting)
$550 wont even come close to buying me a center channel let alone a PAIR of low/Highend speakers
I Personally prefer a good set of ESL's, I just like the sound.
Three words. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:3, Interesting)
You think those speakers were good... I recently had the opportunity to audition the Kharma Exquisite 1D ($70,000 to $120,000 depending on upgrades), albeit in a sub-standard room. Now that was audio
Granted, the sources were a $15k CD/SACDAC and $75,000 turntable... complete with $30,000 speaker cables!
No I'm not kidding!
But man -- it sure sounded awesome. As in, mind-blowingly ear-opening good.
All I can say is -- if you think $15 headphones is as good as it gets, I both pity and envy you. The former because you haven't heard music reproduction at anything approaching good, and the latter because you don't lust after audio systems that cost as much as a house.
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, they tried whiskey, and it didn't work. I'm not at all sure why they thought it might. It's dilute alcohol, and if you aren't drinking it one dilute alcohol is pretty much another. Hey, I'll bet Vodka won't work either. Or gin.
Add whatever acids are in sake to whiskey and I'll bet it won't work either.
Sake is fermented rice water. Unlike a distilled alcohol it contains a lot of molecules in solution and very fine particulate matter that came from the rice.
In particular starches.
What do you want to bet that the wood has become infused with these rice starch molecules and micro particles, which act as a flexible binder for the wood fibers, creating a composite material thats kind of a wood like paper, or paper like wood?
KFG
Re:Speaker materials (Score:5, Interesting)
Now I have to relate a story that I witnessed as an employee of a hi-fi business in so-cal back in about 1960. The above statement hasn't always been true.
We had just received a pair of new Bozak B-305 speakers, and the store owner/manager was a bit of an audio engineer, with as golden a set of ears as mine were at the time.
He took just one of the two speaker cabinets apart, added some additional bracing struts from top to bottom, front to back, and side to side, then filled it up with about 5x as much of that expanded kraft paper deadening material as the box originally had. Lots of epoxy glue, and even a screw or 20 carefully laid in under the veneer on what started out as a 1" thick plywood box.
When the glue had cured and it was all back together, with the only external differences seen being a few screws in the back panel, that box sounded like a solid block of marble when tapped with a hammer. I mean it just clicked, no thump at all. The factory stock box still had a bonk to the sound when tapped with the hammer.
A fellow by the name of Cook had some experimental 78 rpm lp recordings out at the time, from unusual sources, like seismographic sounds of earthquakes in both real time, and sped up so they could be heard, also some persussion solo's on various instruments. The most impressive of these was a tympani solo, where at the end of each phrase of the music, the player released the pedal that tightened the skin, and you could, on the unmodified speaker, hear the squeek of the pedal as it was released, but that was the end of the sound.
Throwing the switch to the modified box, and replaying that section of the record (we were using a Withers variable capacitor cartridge in its own arm and turntable at the time, a great cartridge, unforch stereo the design couldn't do) the squeek of the pedal was heard just as clearly, but then the air pressure waves in the room told you that the now loose skin was still flapping for about 3 or 4 more bounces. Literally, the room was moving up and down according to your senses.
Both drivers were the special 'AL' models, and could throw the cones nearly 3/4" both ways from resting without botttoming, or generating any detectable 3rd harmonics from doing it. And they were somewhat more efficient than the soon to come on the market Acoustic Research bookshelf speakers that gave the world halfway decent, compact sound for the first time. We were using a Harmon Kardon amp, the first decent transistorized amp ever, and their magazine advs at the time called it a straight piece of wire with gain. 100 watts, response to almost DC, and was to DC if the input capacitor was shorted via a switch on the rear apron.
I've since experimented some on my own, but nothing that matched that for shear, stand the hair up on the back of your neck, realism.
It showed me that you can't make a speaker cabinet too solid. A couple inch thick slab of marble ought to work just fine for box walls.
Cheers, Gene
Re:so what if it's offtopic (Score:3, Interesting)
And don't get me started on chocolade. For people in the USA/Japan/Other: You have heard of Godiva and/or Neuhaus? Barry Callebaut (in Canada, near Calgary)? Suchard (now 'Milka')?
This is true, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The cultural tragedy you describe is real, but in fact there _is_ a tradition of 'real' aged sake, sake that is designed to be drunk old.
The practise of aging sake goes back to the middle ages. Generally, aged sake was more expensive (but probably revolting to modern taste). This only changed during the Meiji era as financial factors made it more cost effective to offload the stuff asap.
Old sake, whether aged or spoiled, can be called 'koshu' (often a negative term, but you see it on bottles these days), while sake intentionally aged can be called 'jukuseishu' or jukushu. I agree that this term is often stuck on sake which is actually just black and icky, but nevertheless there is a tradition of intentionally making sake like that.
The problem is that there is no (commonly known) term to describe how the sake is aged -- there are many ways of doing it which basically produce totally different drinks. So nobody knows what it 'should' taste like, or how dark it should get, which leaves a lot of room for idiots to pay a lot for rubbish.
making wood plastic (Score:2, Interesting)