See the whole Newsonic Story at: http://cosmicastronomy.com/newsonic.htm Standng on the edge of tomorrow. MONO in STEREO ! - First Week of January ------------------------------------------------------------- The title of this latest (and unplanned) experiment is an optical illusion, as you will see. What this means is the meaning of the title changes in a distinct way once you know the following. The reason why this somewhat facetious first paragragh is stated is because of a somewhat sneaky listening test which was used to verify a definately unusual and unexpected effect, which fooled a good listener. (The 'good listener' in question is an individual who has built stereo speakers from time to time over the past 35 years and has explored the potentials for so-called live room sound in large tower box speaker enclosures which operated without cross-overs or regard to any such thing as flat curve responses. One version in the mid 60's had 32 tweeters (size 4 inch) in each enclosure, which was a two faceted shell standing upright and was open backed), and curved outward like a satellite dish. (This 'good listener' was recently tested by a mobile public health hearing unit and found to have the hearing acumen of a piano tuner, which was noted by the testers, since the 'good listener' has turned 52 (middle aged). This latest experiment entitled MONO IN STEREO was done today in anticipation of seeing what might happen to MONO sound in view of environmentally tuned sonic excitements with the snowflakes in place. In the last three weeks things have been left much unchanged, and the setup has been used for pleasure as a reasonably fidelic sound system for listening to music. At the start the number of snowflakes and their positions were essentially unchanged from that described at the end of the file named SOUND1.TXT, under test descriptions titled 'FINAL TEST' and 'VIBRATING SNOWFLAKES'. I should mention however that changes have been made in terms of three new snowflake locations. Three more snowflakes are in use. Each is of the composite variety, a 12mm cartwheel glued with crazy glue in the upright arms of an 18mm cartwheel. (Their design is described in detail in the topic 'FINAL TEST' in file SOUND1.TXT). A composite snowflake is now tuned on a small inch wide ledge just over the kitchen counter roughly parallel to the sink but over to the side against the far back wall. Another is sitting atop the back of the stove in the kitchen just around the South corner from the opening to the dining area. And the third is perched on a small decorator ledge running a foot above the counter in the downstairs washroom. This small washroom is by the front door and up a corridor past the coat closet. In other words, the washroom snowflake is sitting in the far South/West corner of the condo's main floor, with the kitchen wall (and behind this wall to the washroom doorway) separating it from the table area and Getto Blaster in the dining area. Nevertheless, with the volume cranked up and listening closely, a favorable tuning position could be heard for this snowflake in the washroom. WHY MONO ? ------------------------------------------------------------- The intention was to see (in a sudden idea for curiosity sake) what effect on MONO sound all of the more than 90 tuned snowflakes might be causing using this Getto Blaster. The fact that something unusual might occur as a possibility, though not a necessity, is an idea which suddenly occurred in the middle of random thoughts while watching a TV movie. The idea occurred late at night and couldn't be tested until the next day. The system has never been tried in Mono up to this point, not even once. This is how far deep-entrenched universal thinking is regards Mono vrs Stereo sound. Why even THINK of testing an effect in Mono mode, when it is full time stereo that is the motivation behind the whole of the experimenting. The thinking was that since the snowflakes (as so tuned) are handily effecting the characteristics of sonic reproduction (ie. East/West, North/South, and Up/Down polarity factors in a sum total yielding a positive inter-phasing re-enforcement, or whatever you want to call it), then it might be assumed that original microphone(s), and/or speakers playing in Mono, may include captured but hidden audio characteristics in the sound stream conducive to room echo harmonics which could be teased forth by hyper fine tuning of the snowflakes into a RESUMED stereo effect, despite the fact that the reproducer sound system was technically operating in MONO. At least this was the philosophy behind taking a look at Mono. Before today's tests in Mono were started, the room and the snowflakes were tuned uphill to a reasonable fidelity level using the cassette tape called THE BEST OF THE MANHATTAN TRANSFER, which includes their version of Tuxedo Junction recorded live. (The Best of the Manhattan Transfer, Atlantic, XCS-19319). In this version of Tuxedo Junction, a huge live audience vigorously claps along on the on-beat with the music, and is the only tape around here which has such hand clapping lasting for the whole of the cut as well as long sessions of announcer effects shouted into the audience at the start and end of the music, recorded live, in concert. Typically in stereo system reproductions, the clapping of this huge audience, though it can be loud and distinct, is on time with the beat of the music, and the place of the clappers in the sound scene is more or less the same as the band, in a flat stereo wall which spreads East to West but is like a cyclorama, a flat canvas curtain, just back of the speakers. However these limitations have been dealt with and overcome by use of the snowflakes which have sonically retuned my environment to thus change the character of the way Tuxedo Junction sounds to the listener. Before trying the Mono, the room and the snowflakes had been carefully tuned to embrace the North/South polarity aspects of this music, so that the reverberating echo effects of the large audience's handclapping, along with the music, were obvious in a huge expanded front to back imaging. In this, the reverbating hand claps were coming back fully HALF a beat behind the beat of the music, welling forth from a huge region comprising the sound scene projecting far back into the sound image area behind the windows behind the table on which sits the Getto Blaster producing the sound stream. In other words, in images generated by the mind with the eyes closed, this powerful sound seemed to be welling forth from the depths of a very large auditorium or stadium. This expanded front to back imaging was done deliberately by me and taken beyond the point of previous tests using this cassette tape. This time the claps really did reverberate like the hands of a huge audience clapping, the opposite of a local clacking racket like the sound of bacon frying noisly in a fry pan. Front to back stage noises included the MC announcer screaming hysterically out there as a tiny figure in the distance, standing well foward to the front edge of the stage out in front of the band (actually further back behind my dining room windows with the announcer's back to me (the listener) in respect to how the microphones actually captured the announcer facing the audience), shouting from this long distance away into the far realms of the audience away from the band, all of this was also clear to hear or I couldn't have described it if not having heard the effects. The above mentioned 'good listener' was then called into my condo test area to listen to this effect, so as to duly note that irregardless of reasonable fidelity (or lack of it) the fact that a live audience and giant stage was definately out there, percieved in particular in the far distant foward position of the tiny announcer way out there on the front of the stage, and the delayed echoing of the thousands of hands clapping in clear reverb coming back over such long distance from far back into the giant sound image behind the windows, so as to take (properly) so long a time to propigate forward to the recording mikes and so to be properly a full HALF A BEAT out of synch lagging behind the music, just as such hand clappings ARE in a live performance with a large audience clapping. Tough to describe actually without being here in my condo. But also, the Left to Right separation was hightened, with instruments and singers clealy projecting their sound from either side of the stage, and the powerful electric bass was resonating away in the low notes in a way which dominated the power of the band. What was most noticable was that the singers clearly had recorded straight into mikes positioned right in front of them, with the audience (and announcer) behind the mikes, so (with your eyes closed) you could see the singers singing straight toward you. Whereas the announcer (being further forward on the stage, and behind the singer's mikes, and the announcer's mike used to project out to the audience was not recorded with any hard gain), and being picked up from behind the singer's mikes was clearly standing well BEHIND the singers and clearly had his back turned to me the listener. This was a very interesting sonic stereo effect, a kind of reverse stage setting right in the midst of the recording of a live performance. I had the musical instruments of the band spread out in front of me, not any one of them really point source distinct, the singers facing straight toward me each one of them distinctly point source and loudly distinct, the announcer turned away from me and also point source distinct but not loud, being so much farther away, and the audience facing toward me like a wide distant sea of hand clappers rolling backward far back into the windows. The 'good listener' readily complied by acknowledging without pause the fact that it was clear such imaging had been achieved and reasonably fidelic sonic effects were obvious, by using mass tuning objects such as the snowflakes to excite the mechanics of harmonic sound propigation itself, independent of the stereo hardware used to generate the sound stream. The 'good listener' was sent on their way, now that the stage had been set for "before and after" observation in case anything of interest was found regards playing around with any possible MONO effects in this sound system and the experimental external consequences regards the sound being reproduced in the room. Once again in a random listener test some hightened sonic qualities using Manhatten Tranfer's 'Tuxedo Junction' had been acknowledged, this by the 'good listener'. GETTING SET UP ------------------------------------------------------------- Getting direct Mono sound from cassette tapes played on the FISHER 8400 Getto Blaster turned out to be impossible since there does not seem to be a Mono setting when playing through the tape decks. 1. Since the position of the electronic consul of the Getto Blaster itself is crucial as a room tuneable object in these experiments, the position of the feet of the consul was first marked on the table so that the consul could be repositioned precisely after tipping it forward to play with the speaker leads. An attempt was tried to hook up both speaker box leads to the Left Speaker's wire terminals on the back of the consul. But all this did was produce a horrendous buzz with the volume off. Oops. 2. A second attempt was tried. This time the black lead from the Left speaker box was coupled into the black outlet for the Right speaker box, and visa versa. Not much changed. The overall sonics were much as before except a noticable peak and valley effect in the sonic volume could be heard merely by walking back and forth in front of the table. 3. At this point the wires were re-hooked properly and a different attempt tried. In that the FISHER 8400 Getto Blaster has an FM Stereo radio and FM Mono switch for the FM radio, the FM radio was turned on and switched to FM Mono mode. The collapse of stereo effect in music being played over the FM radio was immediate, just as expected, with the sound pretty well all suddenly bunching together from a same general region slightly back of and directly between the two speaker enclosures. It was the fact that the sound was slightly back of the table (back in the window) that gave a clue. I started playing with the snowflakes, tuning them to about the highest degree I could maintain with mere touching of the fingers in most cases, with the snowflakes parked upright sitting on honey. Some were moved around by slight iotas into better hot spot nodes which had opened up in the presence of the FM Mono mode. Overall, the tuning was made just about as tight as I could get it. By this, I was able to get the sound improved overall in FM Mono in terms of reasonable fidelity, and also had it spread out more Left to Right and to be more seemingly further back in the window to fill a larger sound area, but still with a generally consistent sound Left to Right but which changed slightly in characteristics as you moved back and forth in front of the table, for instance. And then another change was made using two more snowflakes, as follows. Under the table itself is a small two shelf end table on caster wheels used to store books and papers etc. Previously in later November some snowflakes had been tried in lower positions (on this small end table under the table), but were later removed at the time the snowflakes were all stood upright, in being found to then now impart a sharp high end distortion into the sound stream when under the table. However at this time, today, standing a single 18mm cartwheel snowflake in a hot spot on each of the two shelves under the table seemed to smooth out the overall quality of sound in the FM radio Mono mode (it was noticably improved). And then with a bit more fine tuning of several of the snowflakes around the room a new effect was brought in. In this new effect, some iota of separation between instruments could be said to be there though not dramatically. In the overall there was still a more or less consistent East/West conformity in the sound, the position of the instruments came generally from a larger sound area behind the windows whether standing in front of the Left or Right speaker. And when leaning near either speaker all of the sound could be heard to be coming from that speaker, with the wider spread of the consistent sound's effect being heard behind the windows only when standing back from the table. Mind you the sound spread could be said to range beyond the actual position of the speakers to the Left and Right. It was roomy. What was different is that the sound was coming forth from a sudden much larger area which rolled back into the distance behind the windows. Because of the lack of really good high fidelity, you couldn't say that the drums were coming from (say) 10 feet back, and a clarinet coming from (say) 5 feet back. But you could clearly hear distance projecting backward now, in the music of the FM Mono radio. So right away another test was tried, a very simple one. The set was turned back to cassette tape mode and the above mentioned tape of the Manhatten Transfer doing Tuxedo Junction was turned on. And the Right hand speaker was shut off, completely down to zero. Only the Left hand speaker was playing. What was the effect? This is what happened. The above mentioned 'good listener' was called back into the condo to the table and told in advance that in this test, the alignment was a little off so the listener would have to stand positioned in front of and back from the Left speaker. Which the listener did as I turned on the tape. After a few seconds the listener moved to the right by about a foot (to be now standing just to the right of the Left speaker and back by about 7 feet). After a moment the 'good listener' shrugged their shoulders and said "hmmm, not really much different than before. It sounds about the same, slightly different, but what the heck its about the same overall. So I said, "yeah, except its in Mono", and leaned over and brought in the Right hand speaker using the balance toggle. Instantly a hard loud highly distorted unpleasant sound kicked in, which I already knew was being caused in part by the two snowflakes under the table, and also by the retuning done when playing the FM radio in FM Mono mode. Back in stereo yes it was a much LOUDER sound, agreed, but not reasonably fidelic. All of the good effects vanished in an instant. The 'good listener' jumped back and exclaimed; "Whoah"! COMPLETELY FOOLED ------------------------------------------------------------- This otherwise experienced audio liker had been fooled completely by the non expectation that a single small plastic moulded speaker box sitting on the Left hand side of the table was producing a huge sound image, with apparent left to right instrument and vocalist seperation, and deeply projecting front to back (North/South) sonic characteristics with reasonable fidelity including solid deep grunting resonating bass, rock drums reverberating around the stage, and singers spread in an array loud and clear across the front of the stage, all being produced by a cheap 5 inch paper cone speaker in a single little box. In other words, snowflake tuning had re-excited hidden sonics which had been captured on different mikes but which were now being reproduced from a single Mono track only. The only real difference was that now the sound was homed more or less behind the single speaker source of the sound (Left speaker box), instead of arrayed behind the whole area behind the two speakers. Also the sound's East to West spread was not very wide, being about (say) 6 feet wide between maximum point source instruments, rather than (say) 15 or 20 feet wide. Also, an unusual change was that one speaker was producing what had otherwise taken both speakers to produce in terms of instruments featured through the Left hand vrs Right hand tracks. For instance in Tuxedo Junction by the Manhatten Transfer, the strongest bass originally had come through the Left speaker, whereas the cymbols of the drums originally had come mostly through the Right hand speaker. And without prior setup (in terms of the tuning of snowflakes), the higher sounds of the drum set via playing the Left speaker only, (a so-called strictly Mono potential) resulted in merely weakly audible drums and cymbols, hardly there, for instance. But not in the single box MONO IN STEREO results noted immediately above. Somehow, the drum kit (normally introduced in volume through the right channel), had become so amplified enough by cross harmonics and re-phased enhanced polarizations, that any less presence of the drums was not really noticed by the 'good listener' in terms of the overall stereo presence of the room reverberating to the live sonic performance of the whole band, reproduced in so called MONO by one small five inch paper cone speaker and two 1 inch metal capped tweeters, all in the one self contained plastic moulded speaker box. MANIFESTING THE IMPOSSIBLE ------------------------------------------------------------- The next day the setup had been recalibrated (snowflakes retuned) for full two speaker stereo, with still other differences in effects worth noting. It started with the throw of the balance toggle. Just for the heck of it, in trying the system in MONO while playing cassette tapes, it turned out that the Right hand MONO channel (Right speaker) now had the sound, the best stereo effects yet in MONO tests. Previously, the Right hand speaker had tended to have an unpleasant screech and to be indistinct in imaging in MONO. Yet now it was, ahem, real good. But the Left speaker was a complete dud in MONO. No. Nothing. Not a thing. When the Balance switch was toggled to the Left speaker only, it all disappeared, just a weak flat sound was concentrated entirely at the Left speaker box itself, no front to back imaging (depth) to speak of, and no Left to Right seperation in any of the instruments, and utterly no sense of 'live room' performance whatsover. It was in all ways exactly what you would expect of a MONO sound. On the other hand, the Right hand channel was very unusual for several reasons. For one thing the sound was manifesting to the right beyond the location of the Right speaker. It was in fact well spread out behind the window and wall and at least (say) 3 to 4 feet over to the right, which in the small confines of the Condo's dining room area is a very large, very noticable displacement. But also, the MONO in STEREO sound was generically good more or less throughout the entire listening area. It did not matter if I stood directly in front of the main sound image, or walked around, or stood well off to the left near the living room area. Or in the kitchen. In general, the sound was impressive no matter where I stood. These effects were not noticed during a test but merely when double checking to see what might be happening in MONO after a while of playing around with the idea of refocusing some of the snowflakes to a full face-on focus to the main sound source area behind the windows (rather than having all of the snowflakes turned end-wise and targeted in focus to the main sound area). CASCADING COLLAPSE INTO CHOAS - Major collapse. ------------------------------------------------------------- At this point something occurred which had not happened for over two months. The system suddenly collapsed completely. The bass (all of it) just suddenly faded out and vanished within a few notes and there it was, all I was getting was a weak Whump Whump Whump and weak Blat Blat Blat no matter what I did with the snowflakes. Now I was suddenly revved up in high gear with only one task in mind; to try and regain control of the bass end of the system. It took over half an hour and many different tapes before some sound began to filter through the noise and I could begin to hear faint bass sonics down there in the mess, some weak notes comprising bass. It was the next day before I was able to get the system recalibrated enough (by constant retuning and retuning of the snowflakes over and over again) to the point where I could begin to feel the snowflakes vibrating again in my fingertips. By this time ALL of the snowflakes had once again been refocused END-WISE to face the main sound source in the imaging area deep behind and spread out behind the windows. Several new snowflakes which had been set in various locations around the room during the MONO tests had now been removed, with a few new snowflakes put into new places. Once again I stress the extactness to which the tuning had once again become at this point. Just TOUCHING a snowflake was enough to get a dominate better effect in the sound in many instances. This TOUCH tuning level did not come in until after a long saga of careful torque tuning (twisting the snowflakes sliding back and forth on liquid honey by iotas with steely concentration and very steady fingertips). BOTTOM BASS ------------------------------------------------------------- And shortly after this point the bottom bass clicked in for the first time. In the middle of an orchestra playing modern music, (the theme song for Jesus Christ Superstar the rock opera), suddenly there opened up into the sound picture a whole new TONE in the bass drum, reverating with body felt power loud in the sound stream. You might think of it as throwing open a door and letting a soar of fresh air into a stuffy room. (On a tape called Golden Film Themes 2, Distribution Macey Inc., MCR-1720, World Records WRC4-2957). It is exactly as if a whole new octave of lower sound is turned on, when the bottom bass clicks in. Which brings me to one final comment about tuning. It seems an impression (it could be false but this is what I feel) that generally (in tuning) when hard strike sounds are clear such as drumming or afro-cuban drum effects, then orchestra and voice chorus sounds which usually well up and sustain, are somewhat snuffed or highly distorted, whereas when sounds which well up and stay steady are loud and clear, then hard strike sounds such as snare, side tom, and bass drum are tacky or pocky with no tone. The bottom bass mentioned immediately above is very noticable because when it comes in you can hear power and propigation delays in the reverberations of the bass drum (hang, in other words), and the same for power (rather than merely indicative tone) in the reverbations of the various sized side toms amplified by microphone as used by (for instance) a drummer playing in orchestrated rock style such as Jesus Christ Superstar which is a very demanding task for a little getto blaster system to try and produce with reasonble fidelity. It is not just symphonic in scope; a large part of this theme song is in the mode of hard strike playing, rather than sonorous (such as drawing bows across strings, or human chorus refrains which match (say) violins). For instance the vocals in Jesus Christ Superstar are also very hard push on the part of the rock singers. This distinct perception of a reverberating power goes on almost as a second kind of sound in the midst of stength and clarity in the steady resonances of human choral voices and sustained instruments which do not have hard strikes, when the snowflakes are tuned to the max. In other words, the perception of me the listener is that the bottom bass effect (in this system at least) is due to fidelic control of room echo effects rather than to any efficiency in the reproducing speakers, wherein the room echo reverberations become strong enough to overpower the distorting inefficiency of the speaker drivers. Quite the reverse of normal stereo theory thinking. The skill I think I have developed over five 1/2 months is in being able to tune in both kinds of sounds. For, at times, a good sonorous (sustained) music has become well tuned but it gets trashed out when putting on something with (say) loud drums or accoustic bass. The sonorous part of the sound stream becomes homongenously fuzzed and uniformly distorted. And at other times good well tuned loud drums start to muffle or distort and fade out when switching to a tape with loud symphonic type music such as motion picture themes. So the secret is to tune with both types of sound kind working harmoniously together enough not to clash or to interfere with the speaker cones. At times I have hit brief stabilities in which good to very good sound quality is present for a number of different kinds of tape qualities and music kinds. (And then touching a snowflake or two in going for the gold - something better - costs, and the good effects disappear, leading to a new round of tunings or tests). DYNAMICALLY UNSTABLE ------------------------------------------------------------- At this point the system is very dynamically unstable. For instance the bottom bass comes in, then it is gone, and then comes in again, with constant retuning and retuning of the snowflakes to overcome lesser effects which keep coming up as different tapes are tried. The usual problems are getting good hard strike responses (including strong bass) but loosing good sonorous effects such as humans singing in chorus along with violins, while trying to keep higher frequency distortions from suddenly appearing to spoil things upon the mere little torque twist or touch of a snowflake. Once again it is thought that a better designed (or more realistically accurate in terms of pure principle) sonic snowflake used for the mass tuning objects could dramatically improve the situation. A larger snowflake could help, I think. I should mention that there are only two snowflake rosettes in use in this current setup. These same two have been carried along through tests and listening since early December. There is a rosette with six upright snowflakes (and a seventh in the center) on the table on the outer side of each speaker. The rosette on the outer side of the Right speaker is composed of six 12mm upright snowflakes forming the hexagon image with an 18mm snowflake in the center. The other rosette has only 18mm snowflakes. In these rosettes, all of the snowflakes are focused toward the main sound image area and so are splayed left to right like cars in a drive-in theatre. Enough said. AIRFRAME - January 8, 1992 ------------------------------------------------------------- Another effect worth noting was tested and verified, today. The experiment began last evening with a clue provided by the second day's MONO in STEREO tests, of January 5, 1992. At that time, the greater stereo effected for the Right hand Mono speaker, noted above under the topic MANIFESTING THE IMPOSSIBLE, was gained by having some of the snowflakes turned sideways to be rotated by 90 degrees and thus tuned facing face-on to the main sound image area behind the windows. Then to regain control of the suddenly collapsed system (which meant having to get back everything resembling bass frequency responses), all of the sideways snowflakes were returned back to edge-wise focus and a few snowflakes were removed from the sound arena. As already reported, this worked. However, in turning the system on last evening to listen quietly to FM radio for background music, it was inevitable that the fingers got back into the act and started twisting and turning snowflakes again to try and achieve a better overall reasonable fidelity and increased gain in volume in this so-called 'quote' low volume setting. The volume switch with the FM radio playing in stereo mode was turned to about 13%. Well, some success, certainly, however, along the way it was noted that the famed 'open air' room effect was missing. That is, by walking through the kitchen and around the main floor of the condo, great differences in the quality of sound could be heard. In particular, in the kitchen the sound was diminished and weak and quite distorted, and in similar vein the sound quality was obviously badly deteriorated when in the living room area of the condo. The only place where the system was reasonably fidelic was when standing in the optimal place for usual stereo listening, ie., back from and between the two speakers. In this situation it was also noted that any MONO in STEREO effects had completely vanished. That is, in turning off either the Left or Hand hand speaker channels the sound instantly collapsed to the usual flat typically weak ineffectual sound typically associated with Mono, with muddy dulled sounds sourcing directly from either speaker box. So. It was thought that something rather dramatic had to be introduced at this point to try and get around what had seemed to become an impass, where in the impass, the intense hour of better/best tuning accuity seemed to have brought about an immediate focused maximum listening area between the speakers when standing back from the front of the table (in fact the so-called 'head in the vice' best listening area of any stereo set), but had stiffled most of the other impressive effects such as open air roominess in the characters of the sound (called around here the 'Airframe' effect). And had returned the Mono effects to total dud status. Also, the bottom bass range in the sound was gone once again. AIRFRAME SOLUTION - Two Snowflakes at a Hot Spot ------------------------------------------------------------- One thing which had been noticed during snowflake tuning tests over the past three days had been that some snowflakes were located in hot spots which were unmistakable, and that any deviation of the snowflake from that EXACT location and FOCUS, resulted in immediate loss of constructive effect. Just TOUCHING the snowflake could cause sound quality loss, with dedicated effort needed, touching the snowflake again and again, to try and regain the lost quality. A hot spot can be THAT critical. Whereas certain other locations were ambiguous. The snowflake could be slid around on the hot spot by small or large iotas with no instant loss of contructive effect but instead there would be some difficulty in telling just what constituted the difference between a better and best effect when tuning the snowflake at that hot spot. SNOWFLAKE PAIRS ------------------------------------------------------------- So something new was tried for the first time. This was to try TWO snowflakes at each such location. In this, a second snowflake was tried standing alongside the original, and sure enough some of the hot spots definately GAINED an improvement in the overall reasonable fidelity with a second snowflake. In these busier (dual) hot spots the second snowflake seemed to be best positioned standing alongside about 1/4 to 1/2 inch apart from the original. This time, when first trying a pair of snowflakes the effect was absolutely different. The first snowflake pair to be tried brought about an instant improvement in the overall sound. So did a second pair at another location. A third location, on the other hand, brought in an instant deterioration. So the task was obvious now, to try at different locations to hear what would happen with a second snowflake put in place as a partner sharing a hot spot. Putting in place a snowflake pair meant the simple act of sitting a snowflake on one then the other side of an existing snowflake and listening to hear which side had a better sonic response, or if there was a response for the better. Snowflake pairs had been tried before but had always resulted in an instant deterioration in sound quality, so the idea had never been pursued. But now, after a short time spent in new trials, there WAS something happening, enough that it was worthwhile playing with at length. At low volume (about 13% gain on the volume knob for FM radio and about 20% for tape cassette mode), an overall improvement in the whole of the fidelity range top to bottom was soon made obvious with the inclusion of snowflake pairs here and there around the dining room listening area. (It was late at night). Only a few hot spots actually proved to be enhanced with a snowflake pair. At the moment there are eight pairs, but by no means all possible snowflakes have been tried for partners. The impression is that most hot spots seem better as stand alones having only one snowflake in place. The result was that inexorably, the sound range was becoming more stable overall, with no more dramatic cutoffs in either the higher end or lower portions of the sound clicking in or out in an instant with the slightest tuning adjustment of one or another snowflake. But, something still tasted flat, so to speak. Specifically, there was not an open air tone in the drums. You could hear the snare and bass drums clearly enough but there was no tonal echos around the drum strikes which would otherwise give the drums the timbre of being played in a live room. SIDEWAYS SNOWFLAKES ------------------------------------------------------------- Thus sprang forth another idea. This was provided by the above mentioned 'clue' previously noted for the MONO in STEREO second day of tests (when the Right hand speaker had unexpectedly become extremely responsive to in-Mono stereo sonic effects momentarily before the catastrophic collapse of the whole system), where it had been found that getting a more reasonable timbre in the drums in the system playing in MONO had been gained by turning a few of the snowflakes sideways by 90 degrees to be facing face-on to the main sound image. So, what else but to try this idea with the new snowflakes which had been put into the dual hot spot locations. And, oh yes, it worked. As each such snowflake was turned sideways you could HEAR fidelic gain move in immediately into the overall sound stream. Some of the snowflakes did not respond when turned sideways, but those that did began to clarify the reasonable fidelity levels beyond anything achieved before through the whole months of experiments. It was not possible to try loud volume tests at this point because this is a low income condo with neighbors and a sleeping brother upstairs. So high volume testing was left until this afternoon, today. And so, today, when the system was first turned back on at 2 PM, and the volume turned up, the effects of last night's snowflake pair improvements was well, pretty good, not bad, but should be better. But not bad in fact. Hmmm? Otherwide, the bottom bass was missing. (Please note that higher volume at this point is with the volume knob somewhat higher than volume levels reported for high volume tests back in December). (Back then, higher volume was with the volume knob turned up to about 25 to 35%. Whereas today the same approximate volume level was occurring with the volume turned up to about 40 to 45%). To start trying to resolve the Hmmm?, snowflake tuning was tried by torgue twisting the flakes and even sliding them around on the hot spot nodal points, but with little effect in terms of any overall improvement. A little of this was gained but a little of that lost with each snowflake tried. A sort of stalemate. So, then, the ultimate in tedium seemed to be demanded. This is to go around and around the circle, retuning snowlakes into hyper fine focusing by touch tuning only, over and over again, around and around the 'quote' circle. After about 30 minutes some good improvements began to be detected, and suddenly, sure enough, a new stable sound range was achieved. A plateau. This was a much stronger, deeper, more powerfully resonant overall sound with more reasonable fidelity than ever before. And yes, bottom bass had crept back into the system. Only this time it had gradually crept in, until it was quite noticable rather than appearing in and out as had always been the case previously. Such hyper fine touch tuning had ever so gradually, inexorably, improved the overall result. One of the results of this is that the face-tuned snowflakes now sit typically forward or rearward alongside an edge-wise snowflake, standing at just about exactly parallel with the forward or rearward edge of the partner snowflake, and in all cases only about 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch away from the partner. In another change several snowflakes, of both 12mm and 18mm size, (stand alones - no partner) are also turned to be facing face-on to the main sound image area. An attempt along the way to try off-angle focusing, say, twisted by about 30 or 60 degrees rather than a full 90 degrees partitioned to the direction of the main sound image did not seem to yield any worthwhile gains in fact began to cause problems that were noticable right up front. So all tuning now is with the snowflakes focused to either a direct edge-on alignment, or a full 90 degree rotation, relative to the main sound image area. ANYTHING GAINED BY THIS ? ------------------------------------------------------------- This is what is now happening. More or less, it doesn't matter where in the main floor area of the condo you are, the sound is strong, clear, and resonant anywhere. In fact walking through the kitchen and around through the living room area back to the table does not result in any significant peaks and valleys in the sound level or in overall fidelity. There are of course slight effects noticed in terms of sonic qualities, but nothing of major significance. In other words, there seems to be no deteriorations in the sound anywhere in the whole of the main floor listening area. This is what we around here really call 'Aiframing', or the 'Airframe' principle. One thing noticed however is that the East to West sound spread is not so dramatic as in previous tests. In this new environment the sound image behind the windows is in a spread of (say) about 10 feet maximum and is concentrated more noticably well back out there in the area between the two speakers rather than noticably also extended well beyond the Left and Right arms of the speakers. What IS most noticable is the 'quote' AIRFRAME effect. The sounds have delayed ECHOS between the notes, and there is the presence of plenty of SPACE between the reverberating instruments. Things have 'hang' throughout the sound range. In particular the drums now have a sound like DRUMS sitting live in a room, even if the drums on some tapes sound like the mikes are sitting a foot or two from the vibrating skins, and all of the drums are still diminished in realistic power. It is definately NOT as if you were playing the drums. VERTICAL VIBRATIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- In unmistakable excitement, the table is now vibrating vigorously in certain areas of the table's surface and in general the whole of the table's surface has become alive with up and down vibration, as of this afternoon (January 8, 1992), after this latest tuning. At this same time, some of the snowflakes have begun to vibrate more vigrously than ever before, in fact more than enough to cause the fingertips to vibrate (move) as well when squeezing a vibrating snowflake. In a couple of the snowflakes those vibrations are STRONG enough to give an impression that the snowflake is being vibrated by a mechanical device so can't be snuffed out by gripping with the fingertips. This is entirely new, in terms of such a vibrating power, and points to a principle that proper and more effective sound reproduction has to be a product of excitement comprising both 1. Horizontal vibrations (provided by the vibrating drivers of a speaker's cone), and 2. Vertical vibrations (provided by the vibrating surface of the table and probably other arbitrary objects in the room). In conjunction, a combination of the two vibrations (up and down, and horizontal) is provided by the SNOWFLAKES, most of which are now vibrating openly in sonic nodal hot spots in a re-enforcing way with both horizontal and vertical vibration resonances causing accoustically constructive responses. SONIC LIGHTHOUSES ------------------------------------------------------------- The bottom bass effect is now back, as already mentioned. Bottom bass was not present when the system was first turned on this afternoon at 2 PM, but began to re-appear at the point where snowflake tuning was switched from torque focusing to touch tuning only, this afternoon. And the reason why such bottom bass resonances in the bass range have been so ephemeral, so intransigent over the duration of the past few days, is now perhaps obvious. At least this is an apparent thought which I assume makes logical sense. Specifically, the bass sound waves are long in length and so any so-called focusing of them has to be precise, due to an obvious lighthouse effect, wherein, with a lighthouse, the further from the lighthouse, the wider the light beam sweeps out an area with any slight turn of the lighthouse's beam. In tautological imagery, the circumpherence or distance between any two points touched by the sweeping lighthouse beam increases rapidly the further the sweep from the light source. Similarly for bass waves. Since they are long, only a minimum turn of a sonic focuser (the lighthouse beacon) can cause the wave to miss well to either side past an invisible sonic hot spot across the room, instead of hitting it right on the button. You could say that the snowflakes have to scatter sound wave reflections into assumed more harmonic moire pattern images, in reflecting the waves front to back, sideways, and up and down, through the room. And this can only be done by setting up (in metaphor) many dozens of lighthouses and then constantly refocusing their criss crossing light beams until the maximum many points where the beams can intersect and become brighter points of light are gained. Clearly, when distance is a factor, the focusing of the beams cannot be done by hand with single once only adjustments. It has to be done the tediuous way, by going back around the circle over and over again gradually re-adjusting the beams of light (reflected bass waves) until the focusing becomes tight enough that the bright spots of light begin to appear in the moire pattern of criss crossing points of action in the beams. The reflected sound waves include both low and high frequency sounds since a snowflake being focused in the far rear corner of the living room area can handily effect the quality of sound in violins, as well as for a row of bass fiddles sawing away. For instance, in fact really good saxophone sound comes hand in hand with really good accoustic bass sound. When you improve the sound of the bass fiddle you also automatically improve the sound of a sax, for instance. This is a form of cross tuning of instrument harmonics you learn by experience. This sax/bass coupling was actually pointed out to me by the 'good listener' to clarify its existence as a fact. The secret is to get the positive and negative re-enforcing nodes in the sound's moire into a most focused imaging that re-establishes positive resonance abilities in the moire through all levels of main harmonics and sub harmonics and thus to most effectively reproduce the original signal inherent in the sound stream, irregardless of means of reproduction, or medias, or recording techniques. The quote 'moire' is the resultant pattern of sound which gets set up in an environment, originated from a sound generating source, after all room absorptions and reflections have come to their maximum effect. The 'moire' holds the principle image of the sound being sustained and harmonically resonated through the environment. This is a sort of trial definition which now forms a fundamental thinking philosophy towards understanding some of the more interesting natures in these sound experiments. In this romp through abstract philosophy it is the bass waves which have to be most exquisitely focused via the touch tuned snowflakes, to bring them into proper harmonious focus and thus get the 'quote' bottom bass effect, respecting the lighthouse beam principle in cross room focusing to its resultant maximum 'moire pattern' efficiency. (It is almost possible to imagine setting up a room saturated with lasers, and sonically tune a sound system therein with snowflake objects, then set a couple of truck tires on fire to let the room fill with smoke and then stand back and watch through a glass door to see if the laser can light up a moire pattern being produced by the sound stream with the saturating laser light picking up concentrations of smoke particles which may (or may not) be concentrating or at least be excited in the sonic hot spots of the sound stream. Maybe try fog instead of smoke. It can be imagined that lasers are sensitive enough to allow the optical detection of sonically vibrating hot spots in the fog appearing as blurrs in the laser light. But, who can know this until it is tried. This blurring is an obvious fact, in fact, that the snowflakes illuminated as floating in the air in the room are vibrating so fast as to be completely masked by the blurr. A solution might be to video, then slow the video down enough to see if vibrating snowflakes are in fact being illuminated. It may be necessary to run the video at an artificial superfast speed in order to be able to slow it down enough later to reveal any snowflake patterns illuminated by laser lights. A MONO SURPRISE ------------------------------------------------------------- As for MONO in STEREO effects, what a SURPRISE ! I have just tried the system now, turned it on and threw the switches. (5 PM, January 8, 1992), Now what I have is Mono in Stereo in BOTH....BOTH ! speakers. There is a volume difference between Stereo and Mono mode There is a volume difference between Stereo and Mono mode imaging is now there in either speaker by itself regardless. The only distinct difference is more volume running in full stereo. In fact, between either speaker the sound is not a great deal different, and not a great deal different in quality of sound than with the system running in full stereo. There is of course some differences due to which stereo channel is carrying particular instruments, but this channelling difference is not really all that obvious. Of course there is SOME difference between one and both speakers. But neither speaker is a dud in Mono, that's for sure. In particular there is no sudden flat collapse in the sound when the balance switch is toggled all the way to the Left or to the Right. To be truthful the Left hand speaker in Mono mode is lesser compared to the Right, in both higher and lower frequency signals, but otherwise it is about as stereoscopically SONIC and this is the first time for sure that both speakers are producing stereo sonics when playing in Mono mode. This is in sharp contrast to previous Mono in Stereo tests of a few days ago, where originally the Left speaker only was producing stereo sonics in Mono and the Right speaker was a complete dud in Mono, and then the next day the Right speaker was found to be producing even more striking stereo sonics in Mono and the Left speaker was even more of a dud. Now, today, both speakers are horking away with stereo sonics in Mono mode. Neither speaker is a dud at all in Mono. Hello. Here is a difference. In switching the FM radio to FM Mono mode, both speakers become stereo duds when tried as mono units. No sonics, no airframe, no sound enhancing echos, nothing at all that is likeable. It seems that two track overlaying now causes any sonic effects excited by the tuned snowflakes to cancel in two track mono playing mode. This time, some stereo sonic effects are heard when standing back in the most favorable typical listening area, between the two speakers, when in FM Mono mode and both speakers running, particularly the sense of depth behind the windows is still very well developed, but any such partial stereo sonic effects vanish in an instant when switching just to either speaker, in the FM Mono Left or Right speakers only. In this instance the combination of compiling both sources of sound waves into the same channels (FM Mono mode) causes a mutual cancellation of re-enforced stereo sonic effects otherwise set up via the snowflakes in the room. One new thing worth commenting on is that the snowflake rosette sitting on the table on the outer side of the Right speaker has been modified. It has a snowflake pair at the center of the rosette's hexagram, with one of the snowflakes turned 90 degrees in focusing to the main sound image area, and three 12mm snowflakes have been replaced by three 18mm snowflakes. At first, with this rosette, the smaller snowflakes had better apparent overall fidelity when used in this rosette but as of today the whole sound response seems stronger when larger snowflakes are used, particularly for bass responses. Though not in all cases. There are still some hot spots where smaller (12mm) snowflakes work better than larger ones (18mm). ROOM TUNING ------------------------------------------------------------- Unfortunately, room tuning is back in the picture again as a necessity. By this is meant that the bottom bass, and aspects of really good fidelity in the higher ranges of the sound, are directly dependent now on the explicit tuning (or lack of such tuning) for just about every object in the whole main floor area of the condo. Every arbitrary object has become a spoiler due to the hightened sonic sensitivity levels of the whole room (as if the room itself has become a loudspeaker with two point source generators within it (the two speaker boxes) providing the sound stream for a single room sized enclosure. You the listener are hence standing inside the main box of one giant accoustic loud speaker. In this, the tuning of the arbitrary objects in the room is to minimize each objects 'spoiler' effect even though the effect of moving or turning such objects around by iotas seems to be the reverse, to use such objects as favorable tuning devices. This is not the case. The objects are spoilers and tuning them simply is to reduce their spoiling effects to a minimum thus seeming to gain their maximum audio enhancement. This is because the whole of the environment seems to have become accutely harmonically sensitive, obviously more than ever before, because of the way some snowflakes have been partnered with two snowflakes (instead of one) forming a local configuration on certain nodals (sonic hot spot), and certain snowflakes are now tuned to be focused face-on by 90 degrees to the main sound area image. Room tuning of aribtrary objects includes both torque twisting and touch tuning. For instance a pencil lying beside one of the computers can be moved and torque twisted into a favorable harmonic place, and then touched ever so lightly to slink it into its most lively sonic response spot. The same is true of course for all of the snowflakes. WHY MERELY TOUCHING A SNOWFLAKE WORKS ------------------------------------------------------------- The reason why touch tuning has become so vital is that it seems the up and down vibrations due to the vibrating surface upon which sit the snowflakes has become crucial to the developement of positive re-enforcing harmonics in the room-filling giant moire pattern generated by the sound stream within the single main large enclosure called the room. Merely touching a snowflake can effect a snowflake's horizontal vibrating, and of course its precise focusing, but does not snuff out its up and down vibration. In similar arguements, any disturbance to the horizontal vibrations are kept at greatest minimum when the snowflake is merely touched, rather then gripped when tuning it. In further arguments, minimum touch tuning can allow for subtle vertical alignments to occur, in that the snowflakes are standing in honey and so can take miniscule leans to the left or right and still stay locked in position due to the honey. In which case, yet another aspect in the overall polarizing field of the sound stream is now self evident. This regards constructive interference pattern amplifications provided by the snowflakes and their particular shapes principled upon a six sided snowflake-like fractal type hexagram. Such shape allows for East/West (width), North/South (depth), Up/Down (height), phase polarized harmonics taking place with sonic excitement being provided by snowflakes located in every area of the main floor area of the condo including the washroom, also at different elevations both above and below the horizontal plane of the two speaker box sound sources, all effected by 60 degree flat-faced facets in the snowflakes, 120 degree chisled faced facets in the snowflakes, 90 degree rotations for the snowflakes, and miniscule tilt in the upright vertical stance which may be able to compensate for minor errors in the exactitudes of each snowflake's various hand filed facetings. THE FUTURE ------------------------------------------------------------- At this point I don't know what else to test. It seems now to be nothing more than a question of more improved reasonable fidelity, a prospect that may be viable with this present system (and setup) in that the overall fidelity top to bottom in the reproduction of all tapes tried seems to be better than it has ever been. At least this is the impression. (Bearing in mind that at anytime the ears can be easily fooled in the lack of real and obvious comparative A and B testing). On the other hand it wouldn't suprise me if I come to the point of being able to sense a far greater realm in high fidelity, but not be able to get it. This barrier limit could have several sources. The source of the sound stream itself (the Fisher Model 8400 Getto Blaster) may have an intrinisic limitation in what it can supply. Or the size of the room or its condo design characteristics may become an empirical limiter. Mainly though it could be a question of the shape of the snowflakes themselves, in that these are chisled to have hand filed facets which approximate 60 degree angles in six-sided embodiments but most of the filing is by eyeball and some of the facets have sharp chisled leading edges rather than flat surfaces, either of which (flat or chisled) may prove to be a re-enforcer of sound or a spoiler. This cause or effect may be possible to check out, given a differently designed snowflake's image as a mass object, and/or an improved means of dublicating such snowflakes with controllable accuracies. In fact the variables that are possible in chosing an improved design for a snowflake as a tuning object are (as you can guess) most wide open for speculation, at this point. DIFFICULTIES AND CONCLUSION ------------------------------------------------------------- If the so-called MONO IN STEREO descriptions sound like there were coming on a little strong, this is deliberate. Mainly, if anyone is intrigued enough to try such experimenting themselves, they should be encouraged into knowingly accepting hardships in advance but persevering by enticement of the goal into going beyond normal reasonable quick test levels hoping for immediate confirmation or denial, in that such testing may take patience and a willingness to fuss and fume over seeming intractable variables to get the darn thing tuned properly to produce worthwhile effects. In particular, getting any kind of East/West separation in point sources in Mono, or even an impression of such separation, is extremely hard, because if separation is there it is being done by accute harmonic facteted-tuning to the extreme, with subtle cross harmonics bouncing off the snowflakes facets in such a way as to become harmonically similar to cross harmonics that were present when the music was first recorded. I had made some deliberate effort, (in the first Mono In Stereo demonstration), to get some point source instrument separation into the picture to prove that the concept was possible. That was helped by the fact that there were a couple of Manhatten Transfer instruments and voices which were easy to move around into point source locations within the overall sound stream, comparatively speaking, probably due to the way these particular point sourcers were specifically recorded. I will qualify this by saying that after deliberate tuning, some separation was occuring in certain point source instruments and voices only, and that other instruments and voices remained in a consistent spread in the entire sound picture. This is different than stereo at its best, where all instruments are to some degree either point sources in the images of the sound, or are at least spread separately apart somewhat. However, as already said, in the Mono in Stereo product, some instruments were homongenous and others became point source separated, eventually. This could only be done by standing motionless, listening, as a snowflake was touched, or torque twisted, and listening for a long moment for the final response in the room. For sure this kind of tuning means making some gains in East/West sepearation very tiny bits at a time. I say I had noticable separation in the first Mono In Stereo test done, but had to expend a lot of slow breathing time pulling on stale air, concentrating on East/West separation before it become clear that some separation was there. All of the tests, not just Mono In Stereo effects or its East/West separation, have not been easy at any time. Time passes quickly as the results appear slowly, usually. And good results can vanish in an instant by a single bad grip or twist on a snowflake. An experiment described in the January, 1992 issue of Discovery Magazine, (PHOTON MOTEL, Page 51), tells of setup difficulties so extreme that the experiment either works, or doesn't, simply on the bases of touching a single small ball bearing in a container of many small ball bearings designed in the hope of capturing photons in a closed trap. The way the experimenters describe it, the slightest variation in the environment can allow photons to escape but when done just right (not an easy task at all, apparently) then photons are trapped, for the first time accomplished in an experiment. The gist of the article is that at this point the capturing of photons either occurs or it doesn't, and variables such as merely touching one ball bearing can cancel the capturing. As already noted everywhere I have found similar difficulties in the series of experiments described above. In particular, merely touching a snowflake could cause some improved high end fidelity to click in but some good bass sonics to click out in the same instant. And of course visa versa. (Mind you this Yin Yang obstacle seems to have finally become at least partially overcome as of the moment of placing of some snowflakes to a 90 degree alignment relative to the main sound image and using snowflake pairs at certain locations). Similarly for East to West separation, and for a North to South clean image in depth. Wide separation in the sound image has always been a kind of Yin Yang affair with no single technique definative for producing guaranteed width focusing responses. One also has to be patiently slowed if in a hurry, in that tuning a snowflake is a slow motion job wherein a change in sonic effect takes time to take full effect in spreading through the room. At times things can become so sensitive that two to three seconds can pass before an effect is fully sonic when handling a snowflake. Whereas in other instances just tapping a snowflake can cause an instant response. Sometimes tuning means merely touching one or a few snowflakes, nothing more. Generally, the tuning has to be done very slowly per snowflake while listening acutely to many subtle final changes in sound quality before deciding which in-tune effect is better or best. Also you may have to re-tune certain given snowflakes dozens of times when tightening up the clarity of some overall effect. Or to try and get rid of a sudden devastating bug. For instance in MONO tests it is easy to loose control of your system, with result that the bass becomes nothing but a meaningless rattle, not even a rumble, just a rattle or fuzz, or worse, and I mean awful, no bass whatsoever, and it can take a half hour or more of judiciously re-tuning of snowflakes just to get the bass stabilized enough to be workable again. The point behind this last remark is that nothing but a Blat Blat Blat for bass does not mean that a speaker or the speakers have blown. Rather it is merely a question of bad tuning of one or a few snowflakes which gangs up on the whole system to suddenly start distorting either as a rattle in parts of the bass range, or occasionally a total collapse of all bass effects into nothing but a Blat Blat Blat. But, as said, these effects can be tuned out by careful re-tuning of the snowflakes, which can include the removal, addition, or local repositioning of one or a few of them. WIDE WINDOW DIFFICULTIES ------------------------------------------------------------- Also, very wide East/West wide separation in full two speaker stereo I have found to be particularly tricky. You HAVE to listen very closely. For instance a clarinet could appear to be distinctly playing in a most noticable way (say) 5 or 6 feet and back by about 10 feet, way off to the left relative to the Left speaker, and then, by merely touching a snowflake, that separation would click right out and the clarinate would be oh, say, a little to the right of the Left speaker and merely somewhere in the left hand side of the orchestra, in a more normal and certainly less striking stereo embodiment. In further difficulties, with striking wide spread degrees of Left to Right separation, when for instance something is way out to the Left as a distinct sound source, and well back in the deeper regions back there, a clarinate (for instance) could be so very weak or distorted as to be hardly discernable in fact not noticed, or it could be made to be most loud and clear in reasonable fidelics. But to obtain good effects and reasonable fidelity such as this requires patience, patience, patience. For instance in one piece of music on a tape I use, (Frank Purcell, Digital Around The World, by ABLE, AB5 17065), at first you can sometimes seem to hear a bongo drum playing weakly way up there in the background of the higher end, until snowflake tuning eventually takes effect, and the so-seeming bongo turns out to be a GUITAR chattering away strongly using rhythm structures of a bongo player rather than lyrics of a guitar. When clearly heard there is no mistaking the bongo pitched guitar, and its major contribution to the music. In particular, at these levels of tuning everything in not just the dining room but the entire main floor of the Condo can become part of the tuning realm for the sound stream. For instance merely dropping an empty coffee cup on the kitchen counter could cause some good strong resonances in the bass end (or higher end) of the sound to disappear unnoticed until later when replaying a tape and wondering where the tone in a tympani drum went. Or how come, now, I can't hear the little bongos at all in a track from a cassette tape of Famous Film Themes. In keeping with this, one thing worth mentioning has been discovered in the last few days. Previously, a number of specific objects in the main floor's whole area were found to be particularly conducive to room tuning. For instance a triangular shaped plastic astray in the dining area by the opening to the kitchen was found to be particularly good for strengthening the bass range when positioned just right and turned just right, relative to the speakers. Also, a large empty 1.5 liter Coca Cola bottle was dropped onto a hot spot between the two speakers one day after mid December during some quick tests, to immediately produce a jump in the volume of the bass range. Also, a large rectangular shaped magnifying lense from a hand held 35mm slide projector, sitting on a small shelf on a table against the South wall of the dining area, was also found to impart a strong kick in the bass range when a flat side of the lense was turned to face the speakers correctly. Several other objects were similarly constantly a part of the entire main floor's tuning environment. However, during a recent round of distinctly accute tuning of the snowflakes it was found that room tuning of objects such as the ashtray was merely tuning out their distorting effect to a minimal level, and that the best tuning of all was to simply remove the objects from the environment. For instance moving the Coke bottle around by small iotas still effected the bass range for the better or worse by small iotas, but it was suddenly found that simply removing the Coke bottle resulted in an immediate improvement in the overall reasonable fidelity, with no loss now in the volume or power of the bass range. In other words, ever so gradually, arbitrary room objects such as the Coke bottle which had originally been used as sonic boosters had now become sonic spoilers, once a more precise fine tuning had been achieved by going back over the snowflakes again and again, gradually fine tuning them in more and more sonically conducive stable positions. At this point the snowflake objects themselves have become the dominate influence of the sound, independent of the speakers, or cones, or medias supplying the sound stream, and independent of arbitrary objects in the room. It only stands to reason that more reasonably accurate six sided (or related) mass tuning objects should lead directly to more striking sonic effects and levels of fidelity. At this point I have to presume that limitations spoiling the emergence of really striking levels of authentic instrument fidelity and true reproduction of their live room sonic nature (concider for example a grand piano heard when standing close up to it - these pianos are no cheap toys and definately can't be reproduced to full power by cheap speakers) is standing distortions caused by the shape of the snowflakes themselves currently in use. It should be possible to hear what a mike hears as when positioned only a few inches from the grand piano's strings while recording. What a final shape for such snowflakes (or six-sided based objects designed for maximum sonic re-enforcement) cannot be suggested at this point without the availablity of equipment and means to make and test a number of different designs to see which works best. In this, it cannot be said if different designs are needed for each kind of stereo set or speaker designs or medias used for the experimental sound stream, or whether one design will prove to be suitably universal for all such sound. I should mention once again the nature of the sound source used through the experiment. It is a Fisher Model 8400 Getto Blaster. Nothing has been touched in terms of electronics or the speakers. All is exactly as when unpacked from the cardboard carton from the store. The only arbitrary constant is that the equalizer toggles have all been pushed UP to the top and left on full power right from day one last August. This includes both the two bass range and two higher end range equalizer toggles. Tests that were tried with one or another of the higher end or bass end equalizer toggles eased off proved of no value. One other constant is that the SURROUND SOUND feature has been left OFF for most of the tests and experiments. In August the experiment was started with the SURROUND SOUND feature ON, since every trace of improved sound was needed to have something to work with. But along the way it was found that the SURROUND SOUND had started producing sour sounding echoes in early tuning attempts, and this artificiality is even more pronouned in the presence of sonic snowflakes. For that reason, only a few tests have been conducted with use of the SURROUND SOUND feature ON after it was turned OFF early in the fall. VERTICAL COMPONENT VIBRATION LIMITATIONS ------------------------------------------------------------- It has to be clearly noted here that vertical component vibrations can be like a viper with fangs at both ends (in the realm of this experiment) in that the vertical component vibrations contribute to higher frequency fidelity and to open air (airframe) sonic qualities, while at the same time smothering the bass range frequencies in a lesser effect, or so it seems. This assumption can be easily proved simply by placing the hands on the table and pressing down. If you want a lot more sudden big sound in the bass, then press down hard, but at the same time hear the upper ranges weaken and go somewhat flat. This could be due to the nature of short vrs long sound waves, where longer sound waves are not being re-enforced harmonically by the up/down shorter lengths of the vertical vibration component on the surface of the table whose range of possible inter-harmonic interplays may be limited by the material out of which the table is made, for instance. This problem could be due to the material (press board) out of which the table is made but the only way to know this for sure is to try tables made of different substances looking for substances that can sustain dramatically longer up and down resonances as well as remaining sonically excitable to short wave sound frequencies. Which also brings us back to a further remark regards 'quote' touch tuning of the snowflakes. Touch tuning, when done delicately, does not cause snuffing of the vertical component vibrations in respecting the table and its better/worse intrinsic sonic responsiveness, thus does not arbitrarily boost the bass ranges momentarily in a deceptive way while the snowflake is being tuned (which happens if the vertical vibrations are momentarily snuffed or interferred with during the tuning). It can be assumed that such a table can be involved in the sonics of the sound stream in any instance, no matter what kind of sound system is at work in the room. But specifically the snowflake mass object sonic tuners are enhancing to hightened levels the intrinisic vibrational components being imparted by the vibrating nature of the table, amplified through the small point source snowflakes back into the sound stream. They sit there jutting upright, vibrating up and down, as well as sideways, and back and forth. (Which helps explain why there can be certain particularly dynamic hot spots for snowflakes which co-incidentally also happen to be some of the most vigorously vibrating places on the table's surface. The result is, ergo, more long wavelength re-enforcable harmonic excitement in the vertical component vibration, hence more lively boosting of the bass and bottom bass qualities of the sound, which happens to be true for these locations, they are particularly important for supplying boosted bass ranges in these experiments). (If this last paragraph sounds long winded it sounds the same to me too. But let's face it at this point I am almost inventing words to try and put across information to the reader). (Concider that a few of the table's most vigorously vibrating locals are not the best sonic hot spots for putting snowflakes). THE TV SET ------------------------------------------------------------- One other variable in the environment has come to the fore. This is the TV set, sitting in the North West corner of the living room area. This is a 23 year old 24 inch Quasar color set with a small port on the lower right side for sound, produced via one small speaker, probably oval shaped in that its horizontal width cannot be larger than (say) 4 or 5 inches due to the small space of its location. In weeks past the sound of the TV set has improved dramatically, then diminished, on at least two occasions, each lasting in its better sound embodiment for several days. At first it was thought that greater sound could be due to some form of digitalizing expanded sound dynmanic techiques by modern TV stations in which aspects of the sound, particularly the lower end, can be enhanced by projecting small re-enforcing nodals into the sound stream so that sound enforcement occurs in the air external to the speaker source. Or so I have been told. However, it now seems that even if some channels are doing this, it cannot account for the dramatic changes in the nature of the good vrs bad sound which has occured at least twice in the past couple of weeks. It seems more than ever likely that such change in the quality of sound for the better has been due to the sound changing characteristics of the snowflakes, in tuning the whole room to a more lively accustically responsive environment. As of this evening, (January 8, 1992) the TV sound is muffled, with no tone whatsoever evident for bass levels of sound, and the sound source being unmistakably from the small portal at the lower right corner of the TV set. Whereas two nights ago the sound was much worse, being spitty, extremely hard to hear, with the speaker rattling in an irritating way in the presence of any kind of music. Dialogue was very hard to discern and in fact some attempts were made during the evening to try and improve the noise by moving a few arbitrary objects around in the room. Yet a couple of days prior to that the TV's sound had been generally so good that viewers in the room had been moved to remark that this must be due to the new digitalizing techniques which alleged are being used by some stations to, for instance, sonically create more bass in the air in the room. It was quite interesting to hear sort of deep booms coming from the TV, In the midst of audio clarity that was like breathing fresh air. Such TV sets otherwise have long been notorious for bad sound. At that specific time a few days back, one thing most noticable was that the sound for the TV could not be point source located. All of the sound came from an impressively large general sound image area encampassing the whole of the TV face and the larger wider space behind it. Nothing of the sound could be deemed to be coming directly from the little grid for the TV's Mono speaker. In overall effect the impression was easy to accept that somehow this sound had stereo sonic characteristics. Plus range. Even tones of tympany drums were sonically reverberative, with the tympani dynamics being obvious and most easy to listen to. Today however (January 8, 1992) the situation is entirely different. All of the sound is deemed to be projected from the little portal and is very muffled, though not deteriorated in terms of spitting and rasping or rattling. At the moment there is no spitting or rasp or rattle, but it is all a high pitched, flat, normal mono sound from an old worn out TV small speaker, with no roomy echos or airy effects, and no bass tone discernable at all in such as tympanis, which are merely dull weak high pitched dud strikes. Mind you, some sonics can be regained by room tuning a few arbitrary objects in the room, for instance by gathering up the daily newspaper on the floor, and repositioning an easy chair, and even repositioning a coffee cup. Thus, to say it again, it seems that various ways for snowflake tuning in a room can effect the nature of mechanical sound producing systems in the room in general, dramatically for the better or worse, such as has been happening with this 23 year old Quasar TV and its single tiny monoral speaker sitting over in the North West corner of the living room area kitty corner from the location of the Getto Blaster in the dining room area in this low rental condo. Yes and No changes in the sound quality coming from the TV set has been dramatic. In regard to the sound quality of a co-incidental sound source such as this old TV set in the corner, there may be an important mitigating circumstance, in which, rather than sonically tuning the whole room environment, the snowflakes may in fact merely be sonically SENSITIZING the environment, to where any arbitrary object can have a major influence in terms of either enhancing or spoiling the resonances of sound from random sources such as the TV set. This conjecture is supposed in that the snowflakes are focused specifically to fine tune the sounds of the Getto Blaster whose sonics eminate from a large main sound area behind the stereo speakers on the table. Whereas the TV's sound seems to be particularly sensitive to the position of just about anything in the room in the vacinity of the TV set. For instance at this moment, (3 AM January 9, 1992), the sound is much improved over earlier in the evening, on all TV channels. But only 1 hour earlier was even better than now. These changes seem to be due strictly to the rustle and bustle that goes on with daily living in which arbitrary objects are moved around more or less randomly in the room. Even where the small dog is lying has an effect, bless his heart, he often picks spots to lay where the change in sound is a definate clear cut improvement. This dog is learning how to acquiring very sensitive hearing. COMPARATIVE TESTS ------------------------------------------------------------- Such sonic sensitivity due to snowflake resonance tuning seems to foreclude being able to do any objective A vrs B comparative listening tests with two different stereo sets in the same room. For example, suppose a listening test was wanted between my system (as it sits here in my low rental condo) and (say) a so called really good even expensive stereo set, the testing would have to be done with the second set in a another place which is sealed and separate from my main floor of the condo. If set up also in my main floor area, the only tests for the second set would be subjective, seeing if the sound of the second set is excited, or harmed, or otherwise unchanged, by the presence of the sonic snowflakes. If two separate locations are for comparative listening tests, listening to different tapes on either set would not be so easy because of the delay in the hearing of responses as the listeners hurry back and forth between rooms carrying casette tapes or trying to remember which FM station was just heard. And subliminal false impressions caused by the LOOK of my room vrs the LOOK of another room which has the second set could influence certain listeners. On the other hand, having a second set or even other sets tested in my room which has the snowflake tuned Getto Blaster may have some revealing surprises. For instance, concider the following. THE FM RADIO ------------------------------------------------------------- I think there is something going on with the FM radio which has become obvious enough that I can take a chance and comment. I think that sonically tuning the sound stream with snowflakes is having a direct effect on the sound quality of different FM stations, and is causing a distinction in sound quality between certain FM stations vrs the sound stream of casette tapes. This is random in the FM band, not constant from one station to the next or one day to the next. If true, this could be due to different broadcasting or pre-filtering techniques used by different stations, or even different ways of pre-digitalizing of sound if this is what they do, even perhaps to different brand names of the equipment used to do similar kinds of digitalizing, in the presence of sonic exciter snowflakes. Whatever. What gives me this impression is an observed effect that tuning the snowflakes for advanced fidelity, listening to my favorite FM station, can result in some dramatically improved sound characteristics, including bottom bass, but these impressive qualities vanish when going back to casette tapes. I have to more or less start all over again tuning the snowflakes to get impressive status back again in the quality of sound when going back to playing the casette decks. On the other hand, cruising the FM dial with the system tuned to the ultimate for (say) casette tape listening, results in some stations booming through loud and clear, with other stations obviously diminished. For instance my favorite station always starts out diminished when first turning on the FM after tuning to casette tapes. In particular the station's bass range and specifically any bottom bass, usually starts out sluggish before being tuned. But this is not always true for certain other stations. When the FM is first turned on, some stations can be well advanced in terms of overall fidelity and very good bottom bass. But such goodness is by no means predictable, station to station. Even so, tuning my favorite station for best quality of sound results in a different selection of FM stations sounding better or worse when cruising the dial after. I have not gone to the effort of trying any definative tests regarding such seeming effects, due to the fact that the FM antenna on this Getto Blaster is not very efficient, and for much of the time the FM has weaknesses such as hiss or break up or fading on some or all of the stations, and at other times all stations are loud and clear, until the moment I decide to go for some acute listening tests and hiss starts in again. It seems a demonstration of Murphy's Law - the FM reception gets worse the moment I want it to get better. Some FM antenna effects can be due simply to where I am standing. No good. Not with this kind of grapple hanging around the ether. I tried adding a wire to the antenna but finally gave it up due to the fact that its presence was a major sound spoiler. I don't wish to create an impression that I was frustrated or aggravated by this situation. I took the poor antenna for granted and count myself lucky in the periods when the FM reception is good enough to work with. DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS ------------------------------------------------------------- How about doing sonically tuned stereo experiments using snowflakes in an anechoic chamber? I don't know. I can't think of any reason why such experiments should work in view of the fact that room echo reflections are being absorbed into the sound absorbers of the chamber rather than bouncing back into the room to re-enforce a sonic moire pattern. Forget about sound waves bouncing back (impacting) against the drivers, this does not seem to be a deciding factor as far as I can determine. Impacting can of course be destructive - witness the reports of turbo roar and rattling involving bass notes, and even the sudden complete collapse of the whole system loosing response to any bass signals, and also higher frequency spitting, which I have duely noted in describing certain tests. On the other hand witness also that these impacting effects get tuned out by refocusing of the snowflakes. In thinking about it another other way, use of snowflake tuners in an anechoic chamber may in fact set up a whole new resonance pattern in the room that may get around the problem of reflection absorption in the chamber's walls, and so allow a whole new moire pattern comprising sonic reflections and resonances to establish between the snowflakes. Like I say, at this point, my answer would be maybe, maybe not. Try it, and see. HELPFUL HINTS IN TUNING ------------------------------------------------------------- Tuning may not be as easy as imaged without hands on testing. For one thing you may have to spend mucho time locating suitable sonic hot spots in the room for snowflakes or snowflake rosettes. Don't forget, the only way you can find them is by hearing their responses when sticking a finger or object into such a hot spot. And then, once some groundwork has been laid out via activating a number of hot spots, it may still be a question of going to the nth degree to fine tune what you've now got using those found hot spots. It is obvious that the environment will be filled with other hot spot centers which you can not see unless some scientific means is applied to, somehow, make them visible. In fact you can test this conjecture easily enough. Suppose you are using a getto blaster sitting on a table. Find a good location for placing a pair of drinking glasses uspide down on the table and put a snowflake on the top of each glass, and you might hear an immediate difference for the better in the overall quality of sound. You will have to move the snowflakes around slowly to find the best hot spot on each glass. This might bring in more in the higher ranges of sound, the lower ranges, the mid range, or combinations thereof. But, you should hear sonic qualities going uphill and downhill as you move the snowflakes around, or move the glasses around, slowly. You may have to use something like a small smear of honey to pin the snowflakes in place on the water glasses. In any case, if you hear a change for the better, you will have immediately learned a quick lesson in the art of how to hear differences in sonic effects when tuning via snowflakes. REGARDS ROOM TUNING - January 10, 1992, 2:30 PM. ------------------------------------------------------------- As has been reported several times, at times tuning of arbitrary objects in the room has become extremely important in the controlling of reasonable fidelity vrs high fidelity vrs diminished fidelity in the sound. At the start of a definative test just completed moments ago, room tuning was very much a part of the sonic picture. For instance a hexagonal made-in-China cheap ordinary lead pencil lying beside the telephone was involved. Five minutes were spent trying for better/best effects with this object and just touching one end of the pencil could cause something to subtly click in for the better but something else to click out for the worse. This is what I mean about the room having become so sensitive, with pairs of snowflakes in place and some snowflakes tuned to be focused face-on 90 degrees relative to other snowflakes. But, at this very moment, that same pencil has pretty well no effect, no matter what I do with it. What has happened is that within a few moments I have overcome the dominating influences of arbitrary room objects whose spoiling effects had to be tuned out physically by extact positioning, giving the illusion that they were sonic boosters. How, is as follows. SECRET ------------------------------------------------------------- And here it comes. Pssst! a secret test. This one is not going to be reported because it has latent commercial possibilities. A few minutes ago (2:30 PM, January 10, 1992), a test was imagined in advance, was set up, and worked perfectly. About twice the fidelity came immediately into the picture, particularly in the mid range of sound and in the bottom bass. We are now talking high fidelity potential for the first time, a fact duely noted by the 'good listener' whose ears had previously been called upon to verify that hearable stereoscopic-like sonics had been achieved in what should have been dud Mono sound coming from only one speaker. In this instance, today, high fidelity which now includes the more important qualities of open air ('Airframe') sonics and the feeling of being in the presence of live instruments being played in front of you, is definately at hand. However, to be in all ways fair, one diminished effect resulting from the test just completed has to be acknowledged. Exceptional wide spreads in the sound image reported for previous tests is no longer here. The high fidelity resulting sound is mostly centered between the area of the two speaker boxes, but, then, its stereo is highlighted by increased front to back imaging, with lots of depth receeding into the background of the sound image projecting behind the windows. Otherwise, this is a very likeable sound, AT LAST! MORE ! ------------------------------------------------------------- A half hour later. Aww, geez. Things are changing so fast around here it is almost not worth the effort of making reports. Now the WIDE WINDOW IS BACK! This time, with the added advantage of high fidelity, it is really back. What I am listening to right now is an outrageously bad (what WAS a really BAD) tape of the Beatles. Previously it was not worth the effort of using in sound tests because of its high pissing shrieking hot distortion and utterly no bass. But not now. I can play it FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME and it is a GOOD tape. In particular, this tape has snippets with the Beatles standing around talking and remarking and tuning up, with a small audience of spectators standing on the street below. What I am playing is the version of GET BACK which was recorded on the roof of the building outside the Abbey Lane studio the first time this tune was introduced to the public. You may as well imagine yourself standing around drinking coffee with the guys and gals on the roof, so distinct is the point source separation in the East/West and North/South polarity factors. This came about by the simply expediency of moving the speaker boxes back and forth into their strongest tuning positions. Previously, the North/South alignment of the speaker boxes had always been sensitive but not specific, for instance perhaps here, perhaps there, in a range of positions which seemed to be offering better or worse sound. Because the effect was so marginal, it had been a long time since the the speaker boxes were twist tuned to test out their responses. WHAT a DIFFERENCE this time, improvement was an instant blast. This time, when slowly turning the boxes, the BEST sound clicked in all of sudden with no mistake. The whole character of the sound dropped by many degrees in octave strength, and the whole of the imaging aspect clarified, with, in particular, East/West point sources of sound suddenly LEAPING into the outer regions beyond the Left and Right locations of the speaker boxes. AT LOUD VOLUMES ------------------------------------------------------------- At loud volume there is a lot to hear. However this is with the volume knob turned to 45%. In previous testing in the fall, (with 13 hexagon and Star of David rosettes in place and all snowflakes and 3mm filed beads lying on their side, with snowflakes focused to the center of their rosettes rather than to the main sound image area behind the window), loud volume meant LOUD, with the volume knob at (say) 45% and the volume so loud two people standing side by side could not hear each other even when shouting. At this moment such a loudness does not seem possible, in that turning up the volume knob does not seem to present any more useful volume. The sound gets a little hotter in the high end, is all. And people can talk quit easily even with a powerful sound image horking away. For instance people can talk sitting in the audience during a real symphony concert even when the orchestra is playing loud enough to vibrate ones clothing. But, of course, not necessarily so in a disco or up front at a rock concert. Badly compressed distorting volume levels can produce a wall of raw sound that is impossible to shout through. In these power driven raw sound situations its as if the sound images starts to become overlayed, as if two, three, maybe even four or more recurring complete sonic moire patterns start building up over top of each other in the environment, something like when a computer in the movies goes into a loop and starts rebuilding the same graphic image overlaying itself over and over again as the image begins to fill the screen with swelling image lines taking up the screen for instance, even as it inexorably blurrs. I have heard something like this in earlier tests done last fall, when, in high volume testing, cranking up the volume more caused the sound to start compressing, stiffling its fidelity even as new power in the raw noise (enough to ring the ears) squeezed out any other sound in the room. Noise became more powerful in the sound even as the sound itself was homogenously inexorably shrinking into a more pounding thump and shriek, beyond a certain point, when cranking up into higher volume levels of around 60 to 70%. A couple of times, audiophonic sound seemed to disappear into a single intense standing wave, which meant time to turn it down instantly. The power collapse into a standing wave does not seem to be happening, now, when turning up the volume past a certain point. In fact I can now run at a volume of (say) 75% and can tune snowflakes nicely and can hear myself talking without having to raise my voice drastically or shout. NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MYSTERIOUS CATASTROPHIC COLLAPSE ------------------------------------------------------------- In coming back to a mystery that seems to cling to the thoughts like lint, something like a recurring overlaying in the sound pattern may have happened when the whole system suddenly collapsed as described in the reports on the second day's testing of Mono In Stereo effects. (See topic MAJOR COLLAPSE further above in this file). Or perhaps it was a sudden critical catastrophic breakup into interferring cross harmonics that occurred to cause this. It happened just after several snowflakes had been retuned and another was in the process of being retuned. Whatever the cause, that collapse was also met with a nearly complete reduction in sound volume. It was as if an imp had suddenly banished the Getto Blaster by magic replacing it in an instant with noise only an imp could admire. It was eerie to be intensly listening to the sound of a big orchestra while tuning a snowflake and suddenly having the whole bass range fade to nothing but weak whumps in the space of a couple of notes. The volume itself faded to nearly nothing. Everything had become squeezed out. Whatever did it, I can't say with any intelligence, other than in a wish to speculate one way and another. But, what's past is the past. What actually caused this collapse is still a mystery because there are so many variables to ask questions about. What is known is that in the first few weeks of experiments with this Getto Blaster, such intense collapse was more or less par for the course, and the challenge was to work past this obvious limitation in the Getto Blaster's ability to produce some reasonable fidelity, with any presence of deeper bass sonics, and to have decent higher end as well, the sought goals. (The Airframe presence and single speaker stereo effects were not even a part of the goals, at that time. Neither was the existence of a bottom bass in the music even suspected, when using such a simple sound system for the sound stream). What is such a BIG mystery is that the recent abrupt collapse back to a presumed normal state for the Getto Blaster occurred AFTER the goals had been met in the experiment, and everything was running at that moment in the full reverbations of room echos and bottom bass and deep imaging behind the windows, and the like. The fact that it was possible to bring back the full running system back into focus after the collapse, by retuning the snowflakes only, is testimony to the fact that it is the sonic snowflakes which are responsible for manifesting the tremendous sound coming from this Getto Blaster. TALK ABOUT STEREO IN MONO - January 11, 1992 ------------------------------------------------------------- And now comes another surpise. Yesterday, the MONO in STEREO effects of the experiments as of yesterday's tuning status was that both speaker boxes produced reasonable stereo-seeming effects in MONO, but that the Right hand speaker was producing more impressive results. The Left speaker box was not producing bottom bass in MONO, for instance, and its higher end was somewhat distorted. That was before. As of this moment (January 11, 1992, 4 PM) the situation is completely reversed. The Right hand speaker box is again producing reasonable stereo effects in MONO (still including bottom base). But... The LEFT hand speaker is horking away loud and clear, producing the best MONO in STEREO effects ever heard in this experiment. Agreed, a Left/Right imaging in the seeming stereo is not developed (no attempt was made to develope separation) but the dynamic sound range surrounding and behind the Left speaker box is very large indeed, and in particular in the area BETWEEN the two speaker boxes. So too is the audio quality of the powerful response to bottom bass, enhanced to a new found level of power and clarity. It is possible that the sound between the speaker boxes (officially it is actually sound that spreads to the right of the Left speaker box) is perhaps due to the fact that there are many snowflakes sitting around in that area and the snowflakes are setting up a responding resonance pattern floating in the air expanding well to the right of the physical sound source. This could also explain how it is possible to tease cross harmonic point source instrument separation out of a Mono track, because the floating image being awakened by the snowflakes includes hidden point source cross harmonics present in the original music when it was originally recorded. And these can be excited enough into becoming present after the fact, by effective resonance pattern re-imaging re-enforcing via the snowflakes, when being played back through a single track speaker. Ahem, err, ahh, if the idea sounds hairbrain try it yourself first before passing judgement. FOOLED AGAIN ------------------------------------------------------------- At any rate, this is quite a SATISFYING moment in the experiment. With this, it will be really easy to fool an unprepared listener that it is a stereo system playing. In fact it fooled the 'good listener' one more time, who should have been expecting it (but wasn't, due to the quality of sound), who had to ask to double check that the balance toggle was pushed all the way up to the top, so that the Left speaker box could ONLY be playing in Mono. Hmmm and hmmm, the 'good listener' kept saying while studying the best (and lesser) attributes of the dominating stereo effects in the full bodied sound hanging in the air in that huge area behind the vacinity of the Left hand speaker and rightward. You could walk around the listening area and through the kitchen with hardly a change in the music so good was its Airframe effect. Real fidelity itself was at its best ever, up to this point in the experiment. Meanwhile the Right speaker was parked on the table as a fake doing utterly nothing. You could haul out its speaker wires and let them hang there dangling their ends swinging slowly in the wind currents of the room, for all the difference it would make. You could have picked up the speaker box and put it on your head and strolled out of the room. Nothing would have changed in the giant picture of stereo sound coming from behind the windows in the dining room, all being produced by the one small moulded plastic Mono speaker box sitting on the left side of the table. But, this single speaker stereo effect is once again gone. The system has been retuned once more to full stereo sonics using both speakers (January 13, 1992) and the goal now is to see how much actual real high fidelity may be possible, given recent changes in the handling of snowflakes and improvements in the techniques of fine tuning. Its looking good. A casette tape of the Glen Grey orchestra playing big band swing (SM Capital Records 4XL 57219) has not been used much for sound tests because of its lack of bass and tendency for high pitched overall tone. However today the high pitch is gone and there is bottom bass echoing from the back regions of the band in the window. Talk about HANG in the drums. All that was needed to get drum volume from this tape was the right kind of resonance responses in the room. Some interesting things are going on. By playing around with snowflakes you can hear warbling in (for instance) a trumpet solo, with the warbling synchronized to the pulses of the bass fiddle, and then tune out the warble. I plan to play with this tape for awhile to see if I can boost the bottom bass, hence drums and bass drum, and improve the high fidelity through the sound spectrum including mid range. I have heard better things already; a touch of this, a touch of that; and believe more can be resolved into a true Hi Fi stereo system by continuing to use sonic snowflake tuning to rejuvinate and excite the sound stream. Significant wide spread between instruments and point sources in the sound picture is also easy to gain, as of this moment. A recording with good point source separation between certain instruments has helped in tests to verify that better overall fidelity and diminished subtle distortions clarified the sound picture, as better point source separation between certain instruments is focused into place. (The recording is Greig - Peer Gynt Suites Opus 46, by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Jonel Parlea, conductor. Brand name Allegro, ACS 8030). VOLUME AGAIN ------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, I must've done something right because I'm back down to a volume of 30 to 35% for casette tapes and it's almost too much to handle. Its not that more volume is not wanted. There is plenty available. Its that the volume now is as loud as it has ever been in terms of pure overall high fidelity responses in the whole of the sound stream and this is nice nice nice because original glimpses of insight are now starting to be affirmed in practice, in many ways, in this experiment. As more fidelity comes in, the volume inexorably has increased at the same setting, because more SOUND is being generated in the room. And all of the snowflakes are vibrating enough to tingle the fingertips. Oh, by the way, ahem, crow. I have gotten genuine High Fidelity in case anyone wants to ask. At the moment the system is pretty well settled on producing good fidelity, an upgrade from reasonable fidelity. But the future has been forecast in the sonic results in fine tuning of a particular tape. No lie, no exaggeration. The tape in question (The Spitfire Band, 10th Anniversary Album, by Tembo Music Canada, Inc., TMK-44-1) has a tune in particular named 'Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart'. This piece is characterized by a few instruments playing dominantly in the domain of the big swing band, with the drummer having freedom to play more at liberty, the whole thing something like the way Count Basie's orchestra used to do things, slow, with plenty of hang between notes. I went around and around the circle touch tuning the snowflakes and lo, it finally moved in, High Fidelity. Albeit lets call it a pretty good CHEAP Hi Fi rather than the very expensive kind. There is no belittling the result coaxed from this Getto Blaster designed by the manufacture for glitz and trinkets for trouts and kiddies, to blast minds in a psuedo experience, with raw noise shaking the ear canals and bending the tiny hairs inside permenently in a way the mass consumer now thinks is real. Hi Fi of any kind is not the purpose of such Getto Blasters. Now to be honest, the same fidelity was not there in cuts on this Spitfire Band tape in which the orchestra played heavy stuff, lots of instruments, lots of push. In these cuts there were pockets of sorry distortions. But in 'Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart' it was as clean as a whistle (though still not a true recreation of the empirical sound of each instrument in the flesh). Meanwhile, Something behind the wall next to the windows began to rattle in certain of the deeper bass notes, there was so much big band power and reverberating hang in the music when 'Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart' was playing. But.... GETTING AROUND COMPRESSION ------------------------------------------------------------- Other than accepting that a new semi-stable plateau in fidelity has been reached, it is still a yes/no situation. Different tapes are still responding in different ways. Tuning a tape of The 101 Strings Orchestra playing Western Themes can get around some of the compression used by the manufacturers to get all of those instruments squeezed into a sound that can be played through cheap transister radios for the mass consumer. Then when switching to another tape (Floyd Cramer, Almost Persuaded & Other Hits, RCA CK-2508) tuning is again needed to bring back high fidelity in accord with this full orchestra tape being mixed by the manufacturers for a discreet listening audience who would have major Hi Fi's in the house. YES? ------------------------------------------------------------- A point to make however, is that in running through a stack of bad and really bad tapes that have rarely been played here, all of them can now be quickly coaxed into producing reasonable fidelity. At last even a few of them have become very listenable, when tuned. Tuning may now only take a few minutes, rather than an hour or so, mainly by lightly touching or tapping about a dozen snowflakes, for instance when switching from tapes to FM radio and back to tapes. Also, I can now easily work around tapes compressed for transister play and can unravel some of the compression. I have not had enough uninterrupted time to see if it is possible to unravel a compressed tape to see if it can be coaxed into sounding like a tape produced for the audiophile market, but suspect that this could be possible, since the original sound in the recording studio has been captured by the mikes irregardless of what was done to the sound in later mixing by the manufacturers after capture. For instance, in a popular female vocalist singing a siren's love call on the FM radio, during the bridge when the push went up and more voice was coming from the singer, it was possible to coax apart the mix so that you could hear plain as day a second voice - which wasn't hers - an overdub, singing in counter harmony at a lower volume to give the extra push causing psuedo echo-like range to the bridge part of her singing. In the mix the two voices had been blended so cunningly that it sounded like one voice being given extra electronic effects. But that was not the case. The two voices became spread apart by snowflake tuning. The second female's voice was deeper (huskier and more contralto) and was finally filtered out of the background, unexpectedly, when playing around with the touch tuning of a few snowflakes. NO? ------------------------------------------------------------- More and more distinct is the reality that tuning out the worse on one tape can bring in the worse on another tape, meaning that recording techniques and medias are starting to stand out quite clearly in the differences easily heard between tapes and kinds of music. It is also possible to find a tuning range suitable for a number of different tapes and musics. Which brings the system in line with standard approaches in loudspeaker and stereo designs; one lowest common denominator offering highest overall fidelity for all applications. But such a tuned in status quo is not as good as any individual tuning for a given tape, or an FM station. And is not really a good sound for background listening. Too much minor irritation. Which means its time for one last comment. My supposition now is that the sonic snowflakes are also capable of tuning out sonic spoilers to a least minimum effect, and thus may be in fact themselves sonic spoilers, whose lesser effect vrs major boosting is an enhancing capability, due to the fact that the snowflakes also incorporate sonic dispersion principles that efficiently rebound in the reformation of moire patterns found in the original sound stream both before it is recorded and after. The moire pattern imagery is based on fractal six-sided steady state three dimensional geometry. It involves principles entirely co-existing within the matrixes set up by projecting compressional longtitudinal sound waves and the cross angled reflections and refractions of the waves as the sound pattern spreads to set up a moire pattern in a room. If a moire pattern of sound is in any way similar in behavior to moire patterns photographed as holograms created by lasers, then it is easy to understand why an object as small as the head of a pin can dramatically influence a bass range sonic (either to snuff it or enhance it), by moving the head of a pin through an area whose radius is no larger than the head of the pin itself. Comprehendo? Regards decompressing a compressed tape, anyone should be able to coax higher fidelity out of such compression, once they catch on to the tuning abilities inherent in sonically exciting mass objects such as the snowflakes I have designed and use here. In similar light, sonically tuned environments may prove useful up the line for being able to more usefully tell quality differences between kinds of recordings, medias, reproducings, and compression techniques in the business of sound. UPDATE - January 15, 1992 ------------------------------------------------------------- One thing not mentioned lately is that all testing is now done with the DBE (Dynamic Bass Expander) ON. What has happened is that gradually acquired tuning techniques have gotten around an earlier problem wherein the DBE tended to produce a sort of echoing effect that was unnaturual in the sound. But this is no longer the case. By the way the whole-room-sensitivity is back in the picture. A pencil on a nearby table can be a major spoiler depending on its exact position or lateral alignment facing (say) sideways to the main sound image. Even a bent paper clip on a shelf has better/worse position sensitivity. It also seems the whole system is more distinctly responsive to ambient temperature, pressure, and humidity changes. This has been suspected for awhile, and was finally demonstrated most clearly overnight. Yesterday as the system was shut off the temperature was above freezing, it had been raining, the humidity was high, and a blizzard was just starting to move in. The temperature dropped to deep arctic lows overnight and the moisture laden air dried up completely. In first turning on the system today, the sound was noticably hardened, shrill, with distortion throughout the sound range requiring a few minutes of fine tuning of snowflakes to bring back a reasonable fidelity into the system. This sort of thing has happened before. But this is the first time it occurred in a setting whose variables had been pinned down to the point of KNOWING that cold dry arctic air with pressure and humidity differences had changed major sonic characteristics in the room. The honey upon which sit the snowflakes has hardened, if an empirical arguement is needed to support a supposition that humidity can effect the sonic intunement of the snowflakes or rather, the sonic response sensitivity of a sonically vibrating room. By the way, I must have done something right today. I have just turned on the CD player with a disk of swing classics which have been digitalized for CD play. As previously reported in tests in files SOUND1.TXT through SOUND3.TXT, this CD disk has always been troublesome. In the main its bass has been a loose kind of rubbery detached floating low-gain boomer with no tone or scale and attempts to focus in some tone has led to rattle or complete snuffout of all bass. Today some low frequency boom is still around, but there is also volume gain, TONE, and SCALE in the bass. I didn't have to do a thing. I turned on the CD player and have the best sound yet heard for the CD disk. (Best Of The Big Bands, Vol. 1, AAD, Distributed by LDMI, S-4509). At least for some of the cuts. On the down side, you should hear the real mean slow rumbling booms and kablamos floating around in the air for bass in the Glen Miller Orchestra playing Pennsylvania 6-5000. It sounds TERRIBLE. Well, that's enough for THIS compact disk. Back to the FM radio. UPDATE - January 21, 1992 ---------------------------------------------------------------- An idea occurred to