------------------------------------------------- RALPH'S HOME DEMO ------------------------------------------------- ........... ..................... The following is taken from the end of a novel called 'The Farstar Stories'. ..................... ........... ------------------------------------------------- Something I have noticed ...(NANCY HAS RECORDED FROM HER PRIVATE THOUGHTS SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY IN HER FARSTAR)... is an effect which can only be called, I guess, a Mono in Stereo effect. The interesting thing about THIS is that it occurs in many areas of perception. For instance, I have noticed that in playing around with stereoscopic effects in Farstar with one eye closed, it is clear that, when I get things J U S T right, there are major separations between colors, so much so that I can create a stereophonic image using such colors, which is obviously STEREO even with only one eye, a single all seeing eye, to see them. The difference is there though, you cannot perceive a sense of real space between the colors, with bits of dust or the surface texture of paper or such between the closeup and farther indepth parts. It is something like hearing stereo sound with one ear covered. But not quite. When Ralph had us over to demonstrate how he was getting STEREO from an old MONO TV set, the room and house was filled with echoing STEREO sound including the deep bass notes, all from one single 4 inch tweeter (that's what he said) in the old TV's cabinate, in spite of which, the way he had engineered a new technology sitting around the room in the form of six and twelve sided perfectly geometrical devices, big bass notes were vibrating the floor, I couldn't help but notice the significance of THIS, concidering the sound source was the old TV - everybody KNOWS what old original TV sets SOUNDED LIKE!, it was the world's worst criticism of high tech. But Ralph's demo was totally and completely DIFFERENT. You could hear that it was without doubt STEREO, produced entirely from a MONO sound source. Boy oh Boy was SLUGGO ever impressed. We could hear someone's footsteps in a subway station to the far left of the livingroom, and voices talking behind the TV set at the far other end of the room, and echos of a subway train rushing forward into the station, in a BATMAN cartoon. The separation between the voices and the footsteps was more than 25 feet, I noticed at once, concidering the deep depth beyond the corner behind the TV set, to the footsteps along the wall at the other end of the room. I quietly paced the distance when no one was looking to make double sure that at least 25 feet was the distance. But... the TEXTURE of the STEREO was different, cupping my hands over my ears and pointing the palms forward like clamshells made the whole thing sound IMMEDIATELY like full LIVE REAL STEREO, that's what I mean by TEXTURE. The sonic leap in STEREO effect by cupping my hands over my ears, is entirely the OPPOSITE of what happens when the hands are cupped and pointed forward over the ears when listening to true STEREO sound generated with two or more stereo channels and speakers. The hand cupping was something I discovered, when listening for different effects. "Hmmm, Sluggo said, trying it a few times. "What a difference", he remarked between sips from a Pepsi can. But Ralgh was suddenly yelping with joy the moment he tried it. "All these weeks and I was wondering WHERE the total STEREO presence WAS in my settup, and THERE IT WAS, ALL ALONG, just by CANCELLING OUT overabundant cross room interharmonic echoings", he shouted, listening so intently and so eager, his hands cupped over his ears, facing in this direction, that direction, walking rapidly through the whole house and coming back to stand in the doorway of the livingroom listening. "NO DOUBT"; he proclaimed; "there it is, REAL HONEST TO GOD STEREO, and ALL I am using is one single four inch TWEETER in the TV set to generate it, plus the 12 inch woofer to give it some kick", he said, pointing to it sitting propped upright in the open air on a small stand on the floor at the other end of the living room, facing the TV set. "Its resonances are kicking POWER into the sound stream", said Ralph talking in eager, his hands cupped over his ears like clamshells, his head tilt wrong, his voice changed with an out of character higher edge to it. Careful, don't overjoy yourself, or you might win the Nobel Prize, mutters Sluggo, sipping fizz from the bottom of the can of Pepsi, a long s l o o p finishing the sentence as the can gets winged with a k o n g into the fireplace. Everyone laughs. When we asked Ralph how he's done this, this STEREO, all he did was grin and eat a handful of giant cashews. I5 months of research, he uttered between crunches, and I've barely scratched the surface, he said. Then Sluggo accidently merely TOUCHED the 12 inch woofer that was sitting propped upright in the open air on a small stand on the floor at the opposite end of the room facing the old TV, hooked in series to its Mono amplifyer. The woofer fell over bouncing on the floor, poof, much of the stereo quality vanished in the instant. The woofer had been dangling in space suspended from a metal bar by a large blue elastic band which had once tied broccoli in 3 bunches from the super warehouse super grocery store, the fact of the heavy (the woofer) sitting out on the end of the metal rod, down six inches, boinging slightly up and down on the elastic band when touched, was why it was top heavy and toppled. Instantly Ralph was over, telling Sluggo not to worry, the whole thing was very fragile, trying to get the woofer to balance upright again, propped up from the rear by its magnet on a roll of carpet tape. After a long moment of fiddling and fuming Ralph got the thing to stay in place long enough for a quality stereo effect to come back into the sound stream. You can tell, you can TELL, this is a VERY delicate experiment. This time, Sluggo cautiously taps the edge of the woofer with a forefinger, and some sound disappeared, then wetting his finger in showing off with a bit of style, tapped the edge again and a whole new swoop of deep and clear bass ranges swells into the sound, even more than before after Ralph had re-established the knocked over assembly. "Wait a sec", said Sluggo, and tried it again, and lo and behold MORE power comes into the sound stream, with Sluggo walking around the room holding up his finger as if IT held the power, then saying to Ralph, "I don't know what yuh did to crank up the power but it wasn't my finger". Then it was my turn. One thing I noticed right away, you could not see the paper cone or center piston of the woofer moving so much as by even a tiny vibration. Yet in bending over and putting my ear close to it, I could hear a major volume level coming from it. And when touching the cone, the woofer abruply responded with a loud RASPPPP!! as the cone hammered hard against my fingertip. For some reason, the words 'impact vibrations' came to mind as I lept back in alarm and the RASP abruptly stopped again. So I tried just touching the rim itself, lost some sound with the slightest of lightest taps on the woofer's rim, then got the sound back with the lightest touch I could muster. I SWEAR the woofer did not move at all, so lightly did I touch it. But it obviously HAD moved minisculely enough to 'refocus the rejuvinating sound pattern matrix' said Ralph. THAT much difference could make or break the sound, nevertheless. I began to appreciate how truly delicate some things might actually be that are going on in Reality. When nobody was looking I moved a newspaper on the floor ever so slightly with my big toe and heard more improvement in the sound, then the improvement disappeared when I touched the newspaper again with my big toe. Ralph noticed, of course, watching me discretely. He came over and privately said you're the only other person who has ever caught on to the extent to which ROOM TUNING is needed to get this sound, he said. But, he said, I think devices can be designed that can get around the problem of room tuning, he said privately to me sweeping his arm around to show the geometrical devices already set up around the room. "These are crude prototypes I built by hand", he said, "they are about 15% of the potential". And then the demo was over. The demonstration was illuminating for another reason. In inter- dimensional experiences, for instance when lying full awake when physically sound asleep, I have always noticed that stereo vision in these scenes is as by a single all-seeing eye, that is, that stereoscopic is there, but not the same as with two eyes wide open in the binoccular physical world. The TEXTURE of the SPACE is DIFFERENT. So that's three different places where the TEXTURE of SPACE is different, even though stereoscopic depth and presence is in, er, full, no, er, uh, ah, obvious, effect. In fact, in all three - the stereoscopic effect of colors seen with one eye for instance in my Farstar Unit, plus Ralph's STEREO in Mono sound demonstration, and in interdimensional and Cosmic Communications - the texture of space is similar. Interesting, but HOW and I mean HOW am I ever going to point this out to the ACADEMY. Even Sluggo, when I tried to show something to him in my Farstar Unit, was, ahem, quote, too goldarn busy right now sorry Nancy got things to do my Farstar hiccupped and farted this morning and I can't find the short circuit in the wire to the 'Sting' button and Eebles is due in an hour, an HOUR, and I can't get the 'Sting' working. So much for Sluggo. Poor guy the effort he puts INTO such THINGS. Oh, oh, I feel better for him already, He's just got the 'Sting' button working again. That hunch I see over there caressing the 'Sting' button and saying 'thank you Juh-Eee-Uh-Zuz' is Sluggo happy that he's going to be able to, quote, "Sow, Hoe, and Reap Eebles", after all. "Yes, lordwork is working full power on ME today", says Sluggo, getting ready to reap. (Out of nowhere a voice echoes in on Sluggo's Farstar Unit, captured in the room echoes of Nancy's Farstar in the replay she is just now cruising through, the distant voice saying): Hey, Sluggo, I didn't know you were BORN AGAIN'. 'Not', answers Sluggo back, 'that's what YOU were saying the day you got your grant back'. 'It wouldn't hurt you to say a prayer now and then', says the distant echoing voice. 'It wouldn't hurt you to say a few less', answers Sluggo back while sitting upright and starting to get hostile'. 'Whoah, wait', someone else hastily interjects over the Farstars, 'I thought we'd already gotten rid of all of the religious kooks'. 'Well, you're not going to get rid of ME', says that first voice, upping the shout to high volume. 'Already, have', says Sluggo, shutting his Farstar OFF. Some fades, and a few bars of nonsensical music, finish up the replay. Nancy shuts her Farstar OFF on STANDBY, and goes for lunch. ------------------------------------------------- RALPH'S HOME DEMO - PART TWO ------------------------------------------------- ..................... Something I want to make note of ...(NANCY HAS RECORDED FROM HER PRIVATE THOUGHTS ALONG THE WAY IN HER FARSTAR)... is the latest demonstration made by Ralph, in which it is prooved that STEREO information is contained in 100% MONO sound sources. But, mmmmm, feel lazy today, don't feel much like writing, but, a few minutes to spare with nothing to do and Sluggo gone to the lunch room for coffee's for both me n' him n' me with thoughts roaming around I want to get rid of, so here goes. Writing them down even no matter how poorly, can get rid of such thoughts, so here goes.... It was pushing into christmas when Ralph called us over to his house again. That was last week. I am now getting around to writing a summary about what happened so here it is. This time as we walked into Ralph's living room there was on the floor, a laboratory stand like ones used in the old high school days - it was a Fisher Stand with a large white porcelain base and an upright post - on which was clamped a horizontal piece of 1/2 inch diameter copper pipe, from where were suspended from elastic bands four 8 inch woofers hanging suspended in the free air, all in a row, each about 8 inches apart, in the middle of Ralph's living room floor. The getto blaster consul on the floor over by the TV set in the corner was playing away, obviously, because you could see a little red indicator light running up and down one of the signal indicators on one of the 2 vertical indicator strips on either side of the doors of the blaster's 2 cassette tape decks. And something was playing loud and reverberating in the room. And I mean LOUD, and REVERBERATING, the, ahem, sonic BOOMS of the bass was causing the floor the furniture and my hair to vibrate. It was magnificent stereo in any language. There were cymbols and a triangle playing way off to the right, way beyond the physical range of the living room wall itself. And way off to the Left there were things going on in the music that were W A Y Y Y Y out there beyond the boundry of the left living room wall itself. And then the switch to the 'Save the Rain Forests' ad. Someone had actually gone into a Rain Forest and recorded the jungle. There were hoots and howls and tweets and screams and chirps and whatever coming from EVERYWHERE beyond Ralph's living room wall, and in the living room as well, ALL of the sounds were point source, in this vast fantastic stereo image. 'Point source' means here, there, over there also... I make special note of this because all of a sudden a loud high speed car came roaring in from the right and hurtled past us at high speed and continued far down the road into the distances of the park and expressway deep into the left behind the living room of Ralph's house, me, the whole time, standing poised in mid-move in freeze frame, a step half taken, a finger half raised in the air, the form of me frozen for seconds listening to this effect, until all of a sudden an announcer's voice broke in to advertise some urgent news being introduced by the speeding car. And then the kicker, the grinning Ralph telling us that; yes, folks, you just heard the station break, this is the famous station called '54 ROCK', it is AM Radio, it means the sound source HAS to be MONO, it CAN'T be stereo. And yet you all heard it, you all agreed that this is without question stereophonic sound, what you didn't know is that ALL of the stereo is coming from a 100% MONO source, all piped in from an AM radio station and run in series off the Left hand channel of the getto blaster through the five open air resonatng speakers Ralph has hooked up for this demonstration, sitting on the living room floor. And so on. I can remember Ralph saying, 4 of the generating speakers were the 8 inch woofers hanging by elastic bands from the laboratory stand in the middle of the living room floor, the fifth a 12 inch woofer hanging by an elastic band from another laboratory stand set back near the rear left corner of the living room. Mind you, not that five speakers were needed. Ralph bent down and fiddled with a worm pile of thin wires and alligator clips running helter skelter around the floor and the sound changed, not so big, not so boomy, not so wide spread, but still STEREO, and still fidelic (fidelic is the word Flo and Sluggo kept saying). At this point Ralph gets a couple of us to line up in the doorway to the living room to guess which speakers are playing and we all guess wrong. It turns out there is only ONE speaker, playing at this moment, only one 8 inch woofer, one of the four, hanging by an elastic band from the copper pipe cross piece attached to the laboratory stand. VERY IMPRESSIVE. How was it done? Apparently the plastic snowflakes sticking up in pairs around the room had a great deal to do with achieving the final stability factor to be able to go for the final iotas of focus to get the great range and fidelity, and the sharpening of the 'point source imaging' in the stereo itself, or something like this, as said by Ralph, the point being that extra clarity in the stereo-ness came from letting two of the speakers tilt and cling to each other as they hang suspended by elastic bands, to induce 'magnetic coupling' between the speaker's powerful magnets, the magnetism amplified when the speakers are turned on. Ralph demonstrated this by hooking up a second woofer, and getting the two to hang separate, then tilting one back slightly until it came into reach of the magnetic coil of the second which sucked it right over, the center of the back of its magnet clinging firmly to the lower rim of the other woofer, whereupon the stereo-ness of the overall sound jumped like a door had been thrown open. Funny thing is, you couldn't hear this change if kneeling right beside the woofers, it was only when standing back that the stereo jump was appreciated, when right up close in fact the sound could seem to harden up instead of open out when the magnets coupled directly via physical contact of the woofers. To show us how much magnetic inductance was happening between the speakers Ralph got each of us to run our hands between the two hanging speakers (after de-coupling them so they hung suspended alone by their elastic bands), and oh wow creepy you could FEEL the magnetism shooting right through the center of the palm of your hand, it made Roger immediately think in fact that perhaps such sonic/magnetism could be conducive in Cold Temperature Fusion experiments, and made me immediately think of medical healing applications through such sonic/inductant magnetism. I should mention that in this case one of the 8 inch woofers was hanging by an elastic band that was twice as long as the band hanging the other so that the rim of one of the woofers was climped directly to the middle of the magnet of the other when the two were physically coupled, hanging there. Anyway, that is the story of the latest visit to Ralph's house. The plastic snowflakes were a gift from God, said Ralph, jokingly. They turned up on sale in a local giant toy and hobby store featuring big sales for christmas, and had been made to simulate a snowflake rather accurately, with most of the parts of the intricate design of the plastic snowflakes accurately in the form of 30 - 60 degree angles. A second version of the same snowflake image, the second being covered with glitter to be very rough surfaced, did not work at all as sonic conducers, according to Ralph. It was the smooth ones that did the job. Ralph had found that a pair of these snowflakes, mounted in a base made of a styrofoam piece cut into a hexagram, with the two plastic snowflakes set upright in the base and splayed at a 60 degree angle, was what was needed to stabilize the sound stream being produced from his 100% MONO sources so that the sound stayed much the same no matter where in the room you wandered, in contrast to very abrupt peak and valley and transient stereo effects so much so in evidence in his first demonstration when he had had us come over to his house for a listen back in October. In all, there were a dozen plastic snowflakes sitting around the living room in 6 pairs, the location of each pair was not a real critical factor in that a plastic snowflake pair seemed to work in just about any place that was a sonic hot spot in the room, according to Ralph. Mind you, setting up the six pairs in a single hexagonal array definately was the quickest way of turning the TV set with its single little tweeter speaker, into a stereo set, according to Ralph. Mind you, a number of major problems still had not been solved, according to Ralph. For instance it still took adjustments of less than a 32nd of an inch to tune any one of the snowflake pairs and other sonic tuning devices set up in the room, all having basic six sided hexagram and twelve sided star matrixes featuring 30 and 60 degree angles. The point was that a whole lot more was able to be focused at once with a tiny adjustment of any one of the devices, much more than before, much easier to hear, with the simple inclusion of the plastic snowflake sonic baffles, the snowflakes being of size of roughly that of a teacup saucer. 'Ten minutes to set it up now, instead of three hours', was Ralph speaking at random, talking about the plastic snowflakes sticking upright in styrofoam. After that, the talk got too technical for my liking, with Dumglo arguing that the principle must be absorption for the sound to respond, and Ralph responding that its because of reflection and refraction, very much similar to laser light, and that even just one mike stuck up in the air recording a symphony orchestra on stage is capturing ALL of the sound that would be coming to a listener including the sideways cross harmonic room reflections and that the only reason that STEREO has never been heard in a MONO reproduction was the technology of the speaker enclosure itself which over the decades has supressed any chance of cross echo harmonics to be re-created, set up in a room after the fact, and so on. Can't see any commercial device out of this, at least, not right away, Ralph told someone. Tuning the whole environment to become a giant sound regenerator is one thing, doing it with a single device on display in a stereo store is quite something else, said Ralph. 'This can't do that', or some such thing, is how Ralph ended that discussion. I went out to the kitchen to eat pizza and left the boys to enjoy their brain buzzes, arguing, all except Ralph, he was getting everything BUT joy from the kinds of questions he was having to try and answer, expecially from the Department Head, although the Supervisor seemed to have caught the wind for he was interjecting on Ralph's behalf everytime the Department Head got really trivial. I've heard better questions in kindergarten. Anyway, the pizza this time was a lucky strike, a way better than average. I can remember me'n Ralph standing in the bright sunlit kitchen trying to feed hot pizza into our faces, the pizza dripping, Ralph between gulps saying how the plastic snowflakes had instantly solved problems he'd been fighting for over sixth months, now, for instance, batteries of violins playing high notes has philharmonic sound instead of compressed shrieks with an occasional philharmonic coming in after hours of tests as was the former case with the setups of certain sonic devices, before finding out about the plastic snowflakes whose effects mutually enhanced the four 8 inch woofers hanging in series from the laboratory stand. However, with this new system the philharmonic is there to begin with, but now there are other problems. For instance, even though it is a lot easier, well, almost trivial now, getting full STEREO and fidelity and such from a MONO sound source, the whole thing is in some ways even more fragile than before, in that just the SLIGHTEST disturbance in the sound stream can disturb the best of the fidelity of the sound, and a few distubances can snuff it out completely including the stereo. I knew at once what he meant. Sluggo had just at that moment come into the kitchen and put down an empty coffee cup even as Flo had picked up a coffee cup, and Roger had been walking along gazing at the stars in his head and accidently kicked the Fisher laboratory stand. Not to mention that the Department Head had been fiddling with one of the pairs of snowflakes and at this moment it was turned around backwards to where Ralph had originally had it. The result of all this was that right at this moment, with Ralph and I standing in the kitchen listening, the sounds eminating from the living room from Ralph's experiment were god awful. Yipe what weird sounding distortions and high volume racket were coming from that experimental system. But, then, Ralph just merely reached into an open kitchen cupboard and tapping a bottle of iron pills sitting on the shelf a few times and lo and behold back came some major fidelity, then Roger twisted one of the coffee cups on the kitchen counter slowly by a few degrees until its 'handle became focused' and back came some more fidelity, then Ralph went into the brightly sunlit living room and nudged the Fisher laboratory stand with his big toe a couple of times and back came more fidelity again, then Ralph turned around the snowflake pair that had been fiddled by the Department Head, and with a couple of none existent adjusts of a couple of other pairs of snowflakes back it came, the sound was back to where it was fifteen minutes before, full glory. The supervisor was amazed. 'Every text book in the W O R L D !! will have to be re-written because of these discoveries', and so on, and on, the supervisor was ranting, and me, I just kept eating the pizza, catching dripping sauce in my hand. Oops, there goes Clango! the Bell. Gotta buzz off for another test. This has been a real busy week at the Academy, what with Sluggo getting promoted and all that. Greydon Moore Dec. 13, 1992 Orleans, Ottawa, Ont.