

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!"
Lucky bastards. (Score:5, Funny)
Obvious! (Score:5, Funny)
Sake! (Score:2, Funny)
the reverse is true (Score:2, Funny)
more lifelike when they talk in front of audiences.
Down a few cups of piss warm sour water and the most most wooden speaker is gonna be much more relaxed.
Re:Obvious! (Score:5, Funny)
Can't resist it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can't resist it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can't resist it (Score:3, Funny)
In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
"without cracking" (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, 20 years is a long time to work on a problem without cracking. Congratulations, Toshikatsu.
Re:"without cracking" (Score:5, Funny)
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
Temperature (Score:3, Interesting)
All you ever wanted to know... (Score:4, Informative)
The Guinness of sake, maybe?
Re:All you ever wanted to know... (Score:5, Funny)
Good. I can't stand underaged drinking.
Re:All you ever wanted to know... (Score:4, Funny)
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
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.
But how was it discovered? (Score:4, Funny)
fluent japanese speaker (Score:4, Funny)
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?
Not that I can find (Score:2)
Re:Quality? (Score:2)
Twenty years for this? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Twenty years for this? (Score:2)
Violins too (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, resonance is bad in speakers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Actually, resonance is bad in speakers (Score:3, Funny)
Funny, I wouldn't think that any alcohol would be associated with stiffness...
Re:Actually, resonance is bad in speakers (Score:2)
Never got a hot girl liquored up enough to say "yes" i'm guessing?
Hmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Why not ammonia? (Score:5, Informative)
BTM
Re:Why not ammonia? (Score:2)
Are you sure you are talking about making speakers.
A Bugg
Re:Why not ammonia? (Score:5, Funny)
I tried for a long time to think of a joke funnier than this quote.
I couldn't, so lets see it one more time.
Re:Why not ammonia? (Score:2)
I prefer to save the food and beverages until after I'm done with that.
Re:Why not ammonia? (Score:2, Funny)
In related (but pretty old) news.... (Score:2, Funny)
And now for you religious music fans... (Score:5, Funny)
After 20 years of saki on his expense reports... (Score:4, Funny)
Leaves a lot of questions... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Leaves a lot of questions... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 al
heh (Score:2)
Maybe it's the Sake (Score:2)
But wait! (Score:5, Funny)
They're a witch! Burn them, burn them!
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: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:Speaker materials (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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: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:Speaker materials (Score:2)
The "classic" single driver is the Lowther, which is extremely efficient, covers the range, and when used with the correct horn, produces beautiful music. I rarely
How is this NEWS? (Score:2, Funny)
Hmmm... Wooden speakers... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... Wooden speakers... (Score:3, Funny)
What I'm waiting for... (Score:4, Funny)
"Sir, do you know how fast you were going?"
"Well, I'm sure I wasn't speeding, officer."
"Sniff, sniff... Would you kindly step out of the vehicle, sir?"
"Oh, the smell! You see, my speakers are soaked with sake. You know, for the wood. Wooden speakers soaked in sake! I don't drink and drive. Seriously."
"Tell you what, sir, just step back here to my car..."
20 years without cracking a wood (Score:2, Funny)
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:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:5, Informative)
These are audiophile speakers:
http://www.wilsonaudio.com
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:2)
I'll bet nearly any music you can name would sound just as good with a $15 pair of headphones on a $600 flight to Hawai'i with the reamining $21,785.00 having gone to the charity of your choice...
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:2)
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.
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:2)
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:2)
Actually, I don't know what the cables were made of. I do suspect that much of the cost was to finance Transparent Audio's insane marketing budget...
Something I'm starting to learn about the audio cable industry is that you can have a fantastic and revolutionary technology, but if you don't have the marketing department or even if you price it in a sane fashion then it gets treated like a "budget" cable. Coming soon: the AGTech Refere
My Eyes!! (Score:2)
Those must be the single most ugly speakers I have ever seen.
What on earth made them to put that particular picture on the front page?
Not only does the form of the speaker resemble something out of a (very... veryveryvery) bad sci-fi movie, the shade of yellow just hurts my eyes.
On a closer look, I think I would only accept these [wilsonaudio.com] in my living room. Well.. That's a lot of bass atleast...
Oh.. This was both troll and a flamebait. Guess I should have post anonymously.
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
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:3)
To be fair, half the stories that Slashdot links to aren't available because of too much traffic. I agree that sometimes stupid comments get modded up, but at the same time, you eventually get sick of even trying to RTFA.
Re:What I love about slashdot (Was: Re:Audiophile (Score:2)
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:3, Funny)
I'm picturing a cross between a stratocaster [fender.com] and a Stradivarius [si.edu]...
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:2)
I'm picturing a cross between a stratocaster and a Stradivarius...
A Jordan [jordanmusic.com]?
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:2)
Power Metal: definition. Bands that dress like women, with hair spray and lace, but prefer not to be known as "hair band" or "butt rock".
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:2)
Both guitars were made by the same manufacturer.
One guitar was made from pieces of whole wood, and the other guitar's neck was made of a kind of pulp-wood.
Even with NO amplification at all, if you put your ear against the neck of the guitars while strumming chords on them, you noticed that the one carved out of a natural block of wood sounded much warmer and richer than the other.
Extending my analogy, I'd expect the sound coming out of wood-cone speakers to be
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:2)
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, true to hi-fi traditions, the best wood will bee the rarest tree on the planet soaked in the oldest and most expensive saki, thereby keeping high end speaker prices in the upper statosphere.
Wrong questions (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wrong questions (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:Audiophile applications (Score:5, Insightful)
Audiophile credulity (Score:2)
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
Re:Audiophile applications (Score:5, Funny)
They've been around for some time. They're called "paper cones"
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
Re:In response to the inevitable... (Score:3, Informative)
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: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?
Re:Kanpai! (Score:2)
Re:Kanpai! (Score:2)
No, I'm not Japanese. I'm just a gaijin trying to say "cheers."
Re:THE JIMMY O'LEARY PHENOMENON (Score:2)
Re:Rice, eh? (Score:3, Funny)
Three words. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I AM SO GLAD YOU GUYS ARE IN THIS THREAD (Score:2, Insightful)
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: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
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 (n
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.
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.
Re:so what if it's offtopic (Score:2)
Re:These speakers are for one thing... (Score:3, Funny)
Nah, put them in your rice burner.
Oh geeze (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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
Re:This has been done already (Score:2)
They're not overly fussy what they make pulp from, and there is probably a measureable amount of spruce in any pulp preparation including the average newsprint recycled paper.
Breakthrough technology indeed...
This one needs a realit