See the whole Newsonic Story at: http://cosmicastronomy.com/newsonic.htm Forget the mouth organs, big orchestras with famous stars wailing sirenic laments into the third dimension don't have harmonicas. MORE EXPERIMENTS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: - February 23, 1992. And so. Another evening passes. More experiments are done. What is learned. Well, actually, not much that is really new. The famous 'Airframe' effect (the long distance carrying kind) boasted about in previous topics, has vanished for the better part of three weeks. Nothing famous is heard upstairs. Why it went away is not certain. Two of the variables which are now completely different from those very famous days when the sound system could be heard just as clearly upstairs in the back rooms of the low rental condo, are possible causes for the disappearance, but then again maybe not. One of the variables is that a total of five giant snowflakes fragments which were sitting around the experiment upright at odd angles for a brief period have been removed for more than two weeks. The thing that was so different about these giant snowflakes, besides their size (being constructed of from five to eleven snowflakes glued together) was that none of the snowflakes constructing them had been chisled, that is, none of them had been filed into six sided facets, so that all of the edges of the blades were still round. The other variable is that back in the famous days of a month ago, when the SOUND carried EVERYWHERE, saturating pretty well the WHOLE environment at constant equal volume, several snowflakes were twist tuned to be facing the huge sound image behind the windows face-on in a 90 degree rotation relative to most of the other snowflakes. These have all been turned back to be facing edge-on directly to an imaginary distant focal point away back deep in the huge sound image in the atomosphere balloon behind the dining room area's windows. Both of these variables were thought to have been major or minor contributers to the famous 'Airframe' effect. But this might not be the case. Today a snowflake was put back into a hot spot from where a snowflake had been removed over two weeks ago, and about 30% more 'Airframing' instantly came back into the sound stream. MORE ROOM SENSITIVITIES ----------------------------------------------------------------- But even as this (gradual improvement) is going on, the whole room environment is becoming more and more sensitive to the exact positions of random and arbitrary objects. Yes, its true, alas. I have found more than a dozen new hot spots for snowflakes, all of which have improved the overall fidelity of the system, as well as stablizing the bottom bass so that the lower bottom bass octaves can be heard most of the time. On the other hand, a coffee cup, a computer diskette sleeve, even the position of my head and chair, can make or break a really good deep resonanant authentically wall vibrating sound. I had hoped that pinning down some stability with more snowflakes would gradually soften the tendency for random and arbitrary room objects to input their stuff. But this has not been the case. The more the whole sound stream has been sensitized by positively focused snowflakes, the more the whole sound stream is influenced by negatively positioned (spoiler) room objects. And so, at this moment, truly great listening is by chance experience. Sometimes it is there to the max, and sometimes not. Time will tell if I can find a solution to this dilemma. The main problem seems to be that the generator sources (the speaker boxes) are of course not capable of generating the really big strong long bass waves, nevertheless those waves are being induced into the sound stream as invisible (perhaps cross harmonically re-enforced) waves, which are being teased into manifestation by the sonically focused snowflakes. The result of this is that the strongest deepest bass range sounds are like tenuous spider web strands which are there in the air but not glued together. You can hear them faintly, or not at all, until a snowflake focusing gells, and suddenly the stronger floor vibrating resonances spread forth through the room. THIS, is so tenuous, nevertheless, that the slightest disturbance, such as a coffee cup in the wrong place, or even its handle sticking out in the wrong direction, can cause the spider web pattern comprising the deep bass to collapse in choas, leaving a rubbery, or muffled, or thumpy bass, or nothing at all. It is very impressive, when that BASS is there hanging the air with powerful resonances. It is not impressive at all when there are no tones in the drums or the bottom-most bass vanishes. This loss of bottom-most bass can include richness in the low notes on a grand piano, as well as miked and amplified tom toms and snares of sweaty hard drummers doing solos independent of the music they are supposed to be playing. These drummer inputs become smashers or swacks, rather than tones and reverberating pounds. The bass is more responsive to the phenomena resonance rather than to selectivity in terms of wavelength frequencies, which is why the sonic snowflake experiment works for boosting the invisible bass ranges, but also why the whole environment is becoming concommittantly more sensitive to the resonance phenomena of the resonating bass patterns. THE MONO IN STEREO SITUATION ? ----------------------------------------------------------------- In terms of positive consequences, you should HEAR the TV set. At times this old thing (23 year old 24 inch Quasar with 5 inch single tweeter for a sound system) is sounding more and more like a modern stereo TV. Last night after a few minor adjustements in room tuning immediately around the area where I (the viewer) was sitting watching a movie, a point was reached where the TV's sound had become almost as good as one of my better Mono in Stereo demonstrations with the stereo sound system, albiet the TV's volume was much lower than the room filling band-almost-on-stage demos I have done with Mono in Stereo effects using the stereo sound system. Nevertheless, with the TV set, at times I can now hear marginally discernable point source instrument and voice separations in the sound tracks of movies or programs on the TV, and at times the lower bass range has actually touched on bottom bass response levels. This, as already alluded to elsewhere throughout these reports, is co-incidental to the room tuned environment brought into being by the sonically focused snowflakes. Oh, P.S., regards my stereo sound system itself (the original getto blaster) you should hear the Left hand speaker in MONO. It is a complete DUD. Has been for over a week. In more than a week absolutely nothing can be heard coming from it that is worth while listening to in Mono, even with the volume cranked way up. All of its puny little sound issues from the front of the speaker and you can hear this standing anywhere in the room. The Right hand speaker on the other hand, in Mono, has at times been both a good performer and a bad camper. At times, (even though its Airframe in terms of both space awareness and long distance carrying capacity have been up there), its fidelity has been god awful, high pitched, pissy, shrieky, and no bass let alone bottom bass. And at other times its MONO performance has been right up there in lights. This is the situation right now, UP THERE, real good fidelity, real good bottom bass, etc., etc. MONO IN STEREO UPDATE --------------------------------- Right now, I am playing my favorite FM station. Its programming at the moment features established female and male vocalists backed by large up to symphonic sized orchestras which have lots of roomy bottom end stuff resonating down there in the big depths of sound, even if a drummer is intruding wacking away with power amplified disturbing shocks on the skinheads. The only thing different when switching from full (two speaker stereo) to Right hand MONO, is that the sound wall off to the Left behind the drapes of the patio doors disappears and the sound stream becomes instantly sourced from the Right hand regions of the sound experiment. Otherwise, the volume is about the same for either full stereo or the Right hand speaker in Mono. And the fidelity is about the same as well, in terms of clarity of the whole sound range and no disturbing distortion in any particular frequency range. The Left hand speaker is now also responding to STEREO in MONO effects, though nowhere to the degree of the Right hand speaker. The Left hand speaker's volume is still greatly diminished when playing on its own. This is quite a change from, say, three hours ago, when, then, the Left hand speaker was a feeble little dud, and the Right hand speaker could be endured for perhaps three seconds. (I exaggerate, it could be endured for about two seconds), so shrill and distorted it was at that time. Room tuning - an odd object here or there at random - plus play with about six snowflakes, has changed all this around to an impressive performance in the Mono in Stereo universe, as well as, of course, gaining more fidelity and whole sound range stability in the sound stream in full stereo. AUDIOPHILE ? (not yet but... ) ----------------------------------------------------------------- In late January I had made a remark that going for better fidelity was going to be a challenge. Not quite so. Fidelity has been inexorably improved over the past month, a little bit more of this, a little bit more of that. At the moment, the fidelity overall is quite far beyond anything I ever thought I would get with this sound system. This is the same opion held by the 'Good Listener', who for the first time has started to listen to ways the sound can be marginally improved or even greatly improved at any given time by the adjustment or moving of random or arbitrary objects around the environment. It seems the system has now passed the grade into an audiophile class and it is now a guess as to just how far into audiophile such an experiment as this can penetrate. A main problem still persists, a slightly discolored tone in the whole sound range, perhaps best described as the difference in playing a tape over a good solid state Hi Fi, vrs over a good test tube amplifyer from the old days. In the system here in the dining room area of my Low Rental Condo, there is plenty of hang in the bass and hang in any other instruments played to have hang when recorded, but the solid state-like coloration is still the number one diminisher to success in terms of going for the ultimate. It is noticable. Another strangeness comes and goes, as my favorite FM station plays its things. The strangeness is a kind of warbling between certain instruments and throughout the deeper bass. I do not know if the warbling is due to Digital signals in the recording, or broadcasting, or if it is due to the room tuning and focusing of the snowflakes. I suspect the warbling's cause may be Digital, because it is very similar to the booming rubber bass which usually happens when I try certain Dital CD disks on the CD Disk player, only in the case of the FM radio, the warbling can selectively effect most areas of the sound range top to bottom, when it comes and goes. Perhaps a better way to describe the 'warbling' problem is to describe it as the kind of sound you might get from a Jug Band, with the bass fiddle a rope attached to a baseball bat stood on a washtub, and some of the lower timbered instruments done by mountaineers poofing away into the mouths of big jugs, while fiendishly grinning skinny people clap away in rhythms with pieces of leather slapping together. Forget the mouth organs, big orchestras with famous stars wailing sirenic laments into the third dimension don't have harmonicas. February 23, 1992. UPDATE: - February 29, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- It comes and goes. The huge lower bottom bass area can be gelled and suddenly a whole new glorious range of frequencies and power in the sound wells forth and the very walls seem to resonate with the propers of this glorious sound. Then it fades. It gets squeezed, as if only half the waves are responding. Its almost as if (a sneaking suspician) that the boost to big power sound can cause things to start vibrating around, vibrating out of focus. This might not be the snowflakes per se, they are all pinned down with honey. This could be everything else, including dust balls hidden between cracks, perhaps. Little red ants running around on the kitchen counter. Perhaps. Something, somehow, is doing the spoiling. This is because the glorious sound potential (I have now found that it is there in the stereo system and have already heard it) seems to last only for a few moments at a time, sometimes at most only through three or four tracks on a tape or the FM radio, even, sometimes, only three or four musical bars of goodstuff. Then problems are suddenly twisting the sound stream again. I don't know what it is that causes the big sound to squeeze out. I do know that any lisp in a female announcer's voice on the FM radio is entirely due to focusing of the snowflakes. I can hear a really lispy commercial ad underway, and quickly tune out the lisp entirely, and when music comes back on it is the huge glorious room sound I hear, then after a while it is gone again and when the same ad comes back on, she the announcer is lisping again. (The lisp is more like a 'whispy' fracturing in the 'S' sounds, for instance, repeating a hammer on your brain box to get the message of what I write). In the meantime an odd thing is happening with the snowflakes. For awhile recently, it seemed that most snowflakes could be twist tuned even moved around by rather large amounts with only small or marginal differences heard in the overall sound. But at least another dozen snowflakes are back in place in old hot spots and more new ones have been added (the total in place is now 126. Only one is a 12mm size, it sits on the window ledge in tandom about an inch apart parallel with an 18mm snowflake). And now, there is an entirely new situation. The snowflakes have never been so sensitive to any tuning. At this moment, just about every snowflake inputs an abrupt major collapse in the soundstream with the merest of touches. And twist tuning certain snowflakes can now cause changes in the harmonic nature of the sound stream so extreme that it can sound like several different orchestras are playing in turn as the bars of music beat on, as far as sound coloration is concerned. This is the converse of what I was hoping. What has actually happened is that the overall sensitivity level of the system is without question increasing, to the point that to be able to tune in glory takes very great care, and even then, the glory lasts for only a short while, maybe perhaps 15 minutes at most, then it is tune-up time all over again. Tuning is also now very much a question of waiting until all of the response levels in the moire patterns of sound through the various medias including solids and liquids has stablized per any touch of a snowflake or room object, before knowing if the touch has been a good one or not. The wait can take several seconds, depending on where the snowflake or object, is in the room. Time delay tuning has taken on GREAT meaning. I shouldn't be so critical. For the most part, the system is quite adequate for pleasant back ground listening. It is the gloriouso that would impress anybody who heard regardless of the kind of system producing the glory, that is so fragile, keen in the mind because it is there, long on insult because it lacks staying power. Thus it is with curiousity. I have to try and figure out some means of controlling the glory, if possible, which is a task because as of this moment everything I have thought of to try hasn't worked, so its an open ended ball game once more with who knows what the final outcome is going to be. .... I've just discovered that the speaker boxes themselves, though sitting raised in the air slightly on wads of folded masking tape, can vibrate enough in very strong deep bass punches to move an iota out of focus. Just a fingertip's pressure against the side of a speaker box can 'iota' it back into sonic focus. UPDATE: - March 3, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! How fast things change in an instant. Here is a very quick update, because there is more to do and will be more to come. The problem of transient persistent instability was partially solved in a major way almost in an instant. Here is how. SNOWFLAKE TOWERS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Some six sided hexagonal shaped metal hydro extenders had been sitting around in a bowl of odds and sorts since last fall when they were tried unsuccessfully in some sonic tests. (These extenders are about 2 3/4 cms in cross sectional diameter and about 5 1/2 cms long and are expensive, usually about 2 to 3 dollars each as small parts; I got them from a junk dealer for 20 cents each). On a whim, one of these was stood on end on the table in front of the Left speaker box, and on top of it was layed a giant snowflake made of seven of the 18mm cartwheels glued together to form a hexagram. The change in the sound stream was instant. More bass, more fidelity, more gain in volume without changing the volume knob, and so on. And literally a leap in the degree of more East/West wide width separation in the imaging itself. To make a long story short, it was learned that two of these ornamental controllers (snowflake towers) placed roughly five inches apart (the distance between a pair of human ears) was well worth the effort of discovering all of a sudden. The thought that a superior sonic controlling factor could be achieved by placing two large sonic controllers apart by the same distance as the ears (which are the most intrinsic factor of all in terms of the human physics of stereo sound), worked. (A one eared person cannot, by fundamental phsyics, hear stereo). To make a long story shorter, a bit of fiddling brought about a new level of enhancement in the Mono in Stereo effects. Not withstanding that better bass etc., etc., was quickly tested at much higher sound levels (volume) than ever before, for the Right hand speaker, it was also possible to set up the tower snowflakes in such a way that stereophonic separation in the Mono sound source was achieved by snowflake controller tuning only, having little (or nothing) to do with baffling as was used earlier using kitchen cupboard doors partly opened as the means of achieving apparent point source separations in the Mono generated sound steam. I know, I never specified these resulting effects, but using open kitchen cupboards as baffles has always been a factor, once mono in stereo tests were initiated, the doors, open or closed, always had input, one way or another, open, then, later, closed. Or some open, some closed. (This is where the researcher takes for granted something that is inuitively obvious, then only later, discovers that the intuitively obvious is not obvious at all until specified and spelled out in detail). WHAT YOU CAN HEAR ----------------------------------------------------------------- There are a couple of differences in this new form of Mono in Stereo effects. The sound quality, though big and powerful, sounds more as if a lot more of the sonic responding is coming from the vibrations of solids, in that much of the upper mid range and higher end in particular can have a compressed texture, (rather than a pristine purity when instruments are being played alive out in the open air of the room and you can hear echos in the space behind them). What is so very different, however, is that there is a HUGE giant sound wall now up and behind the windows, spreading well both to the Left and Right of the Right speaker box itself. Mono. What's more, this spread is more or less constant, it lacks the instant jittery peak and valley effects of former Mono in Stereo tests. This new effect is solidly there in a huge atomosphere of sound which is almost as wide across as that being tested for the previous two weeks in full two speaker stereo. You can walk from the kitchen, in and around through the dining room area past the Right speaker box and the huge atmosphere balloon of sound stays up in the air, (it does not drop down like it did before to localize into a deep narrow channel originating from the Right speaker box and receeding into the depths of the wall behind the speaker, and even further deteriorate, snuffing up (localizing) right into the oriface of the speaker box itself as you approach the table). Now things are very different. As of this moment, the sound stays right UP in the AIR as you walk right past the speaker box. Now this is VERY different, because it is a full Stereophonic effect, being generated by one small mono speaker box containing one five inch paper cone speaker as the driver, and two one inch metal coned tweeters as exciters. At one point, after playing around with focusing for a few minutes, I even sailed right through the final frenzied passage of the Pier Gynt Suites - In The Hall Of The Mountain King; big bass batteries grunting away, tympanies banging on the down-beats, trumpets doing licks, the whole kaboodle, at high volume, with Fidelity, and it didn't break up, or fade in volume, all in Mono through the Right hand speaker. Except this was different, anyone listening would have sworn they were listening to a genuine Stereo system. Mind you, such a success was fleeting. Within moments after sailing through the big one (Hall Of The Mountain King), I had lost control of the system again, and was floundering around trying to get things back into sonic focus. At one point during the flounder, I had two separate sounds, all of the instruments seemed to be playing twice as if about two feet apart in a phase shift from a science fiction movie. Don't ask me how I did this, I couldn't tell you. But it was weird. The problem was that this was not a sound you wanted to listen to for very long so I soon enough had passed over it heading back toward something with reasonable fidelitic accoustics. FINISHING OFF THE DESCRIPTION (still in Mono) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Interestingly, there was as much high end (cymbols and so on) as there had been in the previous two weeks using full stereo, bearing in mind that with the new setup as of today (using at this moment six snowflake towers made of fragments of giant snowflakes), there is far more high end (cymbols and so on) than ever before in Mono. There are problems, however. Two to be specific. A better Mono in Stereo seems to be from my favorite FM station, rather than tapes. With casette tapes the sound tends to be more focallized around the vacinity of the Right speaker box itself. But with the FM, the sound at times can spread out into a full significent atmosphere of huge sound behind the dining room windows. I say 'at times', because the best of this huge theater in the atmosphere seems to be conditional to the kind of recording being played over the FM radio. In one piece of music, the huge atmosphere is there. And when the next piece of music comes on, the sound can be heard to localize around the vacinity of the Right speaker box as you walk past it. CHECKING SOME VARIABLES ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. I am well aware of the problem of engineering, where soloists or vocalists have been mixed in the studio to appear in an artificial hole created as an imposter cavity right in the middle of the sound stream. But I have heard, (when things are especially well focused) that it is easy to tell when imposter point sources are present and it is easy to live with them, in other words the imposterism does not seem to cause problems in fidelity. In fact, I think there is an obvious way around the problem. This is to assume that the sound image thinks an imposter instrument is a new live instrument playing in the midst of the image, and let the cross harmonic influences link in and become a part of the rejuvinated sound stream, so that it is no longer an imposter, so far as the sound stream in concerned. 2. One experimental variable has to be checked out before further decisions can be made regards new challenging developements. None of the cartwheels being used thus far in the giant flakes have been filed. As already said, the giant flakes are made of 7 of the 18mm cartwheels glued together into a hexagon shape. Only one these has survived intact in a full hexagon shape, the others have all been knocked over or fallen and shattered into fragments. Three other giant snowflakes are fragments shattered from larger giant snowflakes, one of which fell to the floor, and two others from giant snowflakes which flew off a motor shaft on which they were at one time spinning during earlier unavailing experiments of last October and November. The most important variable is that none of the cartwheels in these giant flakes have been filed. So the next thing is to file anew a bunch of 18mm cartwheels and glue them into giant snowflakes. Two varieties I can try right away: 1. A single hexagram rosette with 7 snowflakes glued together. 2. An enlarged hexagram (more fractal-like) using 13 snowflakes glued together in an expanded hexagonal array. As you can see, the short story isn't finished. The moral of the story is that yahoo! something has been found which can dramatically stablize the sound stream in a single stroke - the use of giant snowflakes sitting flat on hexagonal extenders to comprise sonic towers. Oh, forgot to mention, the only way I could hold a tower together was to cover its top with honey so the giant snowflake fragments would stay in place, and to honey stick the bottom of the tower to the table. As for the glory mentioned in the previous Update (of February 29), it is there, more so since it is more stable, but still not locked well in place regards staying power. The slightest movement of a snowflake tower can cause immediate compression in any area of the sound range, top, mid, bottom, or combinations thereof. What is a relief is that random and arbitrary room objects have lost much of their major degree of sensitivity. Any object in the room is still a spoiler, but can be moved around in a wider area and not so instantly cuts in or out some aspect of better sound. In other words, many of the sonic hot spots have become greatly enlarged in cross sectional area due to the input of the greater cross sectional areas effecting from the giant snowflake, and fragments, lying flat on top of the hexagonal extender posts. HUMAN EAR INPUT AS A MECHANICAL PROPERTY IN SOUND ---------------------------------------------------------------- Regards where to put a pair of towers to tickle the physics of the human ears in terms of mechanisms respondent to the maximum degree to percieve Stereo, it does not seem that there is any one place that works best, two towers can be set at an angle seperated roughly five inches apart along an East/West axis, or a North/South axis, or at oddball angles, and only slight dramatic difference may be heard between the orientations. Also, a pair can be situated at the front end of the table, or on the bookshelves on the opposite wall in the dining room area. One factor that is definitive is that there is more lower bottom bass augmentation with the snowflake towers sitting further back from the speakers, and more higher end augmentation with the towers sitting up closer near the front of the speakers, although the higher end version tends to be sharp pitched. R.S.L. March 3, 1992 Peace Joy and Happiness IT WORKS Morning ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: March 4, 1992. It works! At the close of the report on yesterday's session (Update, March 3,), I indicated some new ideas had come to mind to try next. They worked. To make a long story short, I have one new giant snowflake so far ready and erected in place. This time, instead of being layed on top of the hexogonal shaped extender post, it is standing upright, with one of its snowflakes gripped in the opening of the post with a piece of wet sponge. (The new giant snowflake is the first made of officially filed cartwheels to be the same as the other snowflakes being used throughout the environment). The idea is that the giant snowflake gripped by a small wet piece of spong can be manipulated and adjusted sticking up in the air, and when the sponge dries it will be a more or less permanent grip. So far so good. The giant snowflake consists of 13 filed 18mm snowflakes and is standing upright exactly where I focus it. It has not fallen and shattered, it has not leaned to become a spoiler. One other modification is that I dug out of a storage tray a 3mm bead which had earlier been filed into a six sided shape and used last fall to construct Star of David rosettes on the table in tests described in files SOUND.1 through SOUND.2. Two of these 3mm filed beads have been bonded with honey into the centers of the center snowflake in the 13 point giant snowflake, and rotated carefully back and forth to greatest hightened sonic influence, gripped in place as centerbeads by the honey. It turns out that these tiny beads when focused properly, can import great positive influence in the Hi Fi quality and depth of the lower bass range, amongst other things. It later turns out that only one centerbead produces a better fidelity, two can sharpen some parts of the sound but subtle aspects of fidelity are sacrificed. UPDATE REPORT CONTINUED March 4, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Currently being played on the cassette deck is: GOLDEN LATIN FAVORITES, MCR, 171, Manufactured in Canada by: Distribution Madacy Inc. Here is what is happening with the new giant snowflake. I just happened to stick it on a tower post that was sitting at the front of the table offset a little to the Left of the Right speaker. With no more work than tuning it at that spot the improvement in the stereo system was immediate, to say the least. Here is how advanced the improvements are for this experiment via this one technical innovation. In switching to Mono sound, both Left and Right speakers are reponding better than ever in Mono in Stereo effects. Both are also doing something which I had only glimpsed for the first time in yesterday's test through the Right hand speaker after fussing and fiddling for most of the afternoon to hear the following effect in a transitory way that came and went ad hoc for music being played on my favorite FM station and not heard at all when playing cassette tapes. I am now playing the GOLDEN LATIN FAVORITES cassette tape. When switching to either speaker in Mono, the sound STAYS up in the air, spread wide open in a huge sound environment behind the windows of the dining room area. When walking past the table, the stereo sound stays up there constantly spread out and receeding back into the sonic atmosphere behind the window for the whole walk. This is true when walking past either Left or Right speaker playing in Mono. The sound itself is reverberting loud and strongly everywhere in the main floor area of this low rental condo (the whole environment), with no dominant peaks and valleys in the sound stream at all. When walking directly past either speaker playing in Mono, there is no momentary collapse of the sound image into an issue coming locally from the oriface or immediate vacinity of either speaker. Just as you would do when listening to the system playing in full stereo (both speakers working) you could not tell that the sound was being source generated from a speaker until actually leaning completely close to that speaker. The same is now true no matter which speaker is playing in Mono. You cannot tell it is the actual sound generator source until leaning close toward that speaker box. There is no 'head in the vice' effect, period! .... I have just walked around past the sound table, through the living room area, through the kitchen area, and back here through the second doorway into the dining room area to where I started the walk. The only place where there was any diminishment at all in the sound was a slight valley in the middle of the kitchen. Othewise the sound was as strong and clear as ever thoughout the whole of the walk. The so-called 'airframe' presence was much more active than during the past few weeks, hence the dissolving of the peaks and valleys and the 'head in the vice' lessers, both are gone. When walking into the main floor washroom (up the corridor on the far side of the kitchen wall), the sound gain dropped by about (I would guess) 35%. It means some of the 'airframe's' long distance carrying presence is back. For instance I have just walked up the stairs and into the back room uptairs and there heard the volume gain finally drop to about 25% when standing in the middle of this back corner upstairs room. This is quite an improvement from before, when it was reported a month ago that most of the long distance 'airframe' carrying power was gone by the time I got to the top of the stairs when listening, at which point I couldn't tell if it was the sound system downstairs playing at loud volume, or the TV set. Now there is no mistaking that the sound system is playing at loud volume when I am upstairs, until reaching the point of actually crossing the threshold into the back room when the greater presence of the sound stream falls off noticably. DON'T FORGET, ALL OF THIS IS HAPPENING WITH THE LEFT HAND SPEAKER ONLY, PLAYING IN MONO. Actually, I have to reveal a hint of emotion in this. I have just stood in the kitchen peeling a banana and randomly walked around in a sort of daydream listening to the violins playing out 'here' to the Right, and the big electric bass playing out 'there' to the Left, and heard the same imaging presence as I walked around through the whole of the main floor area's enviroment. There is no question that this is full fledged stereo, and borderline audiophile Hi Fi to boot. Please don't ignore that it is coming from a single Mono track on a cassette tape being played through the Left hand little speaker box. Okay, I'm feeling satisfied, right now. WHAT ABOUT BAFFLES ----------------------------------------------------------------- Here is something to report however. I have finished eating the banana, and typed the above remarks regards feeling a little emotion, and then did a double check. I went through the kitchen and closed all of the cupboard doors. None of them had been baffle tuned. (In the earliest of the Mono in Stereo tests reported for later January and in February, the only way to get a semblence of East/West image separation was via careful tendious testing and placing of the kitchen cupboard doors to act as signal delaying echo baffles, in which tests the audiophile quality of the sound itself could be quite awful, a trade off in order to tune in any East/West image seperation. What happened when I closed all of the kitchen doors, is that the glorious magnificent full stereo effect in Mono just reported in the above paragraphs vanished! The borderline audiophile Hi Fi quality is still here in the sound stream, as is the airframe sonic image, sustaining itself in a large atomosphere up there in the area behind the dining room windows. But now it is a tube balloon, localized directly in the region behind the Left hand speaker box sitting on the table. The 'airframe' live sound presence is still there, as is the long distance 'airframe' carrying effect, and the sound is still semi-stereo in terms of receeding echo-wise by depth into the sound image behind the window. But the magnificent wide East/West image separation heard only a moment ago has vanished. There is no Left/Right point source instrument locations in the orchestra. The sound stream's band width currently is very localized. And when walking past the Left speaker box the sound falls down and becomes obviously sourced from the speaker box itself. So. There is no question, sonic baffles it is. I am going to go back into the kitchen and hopefully get back that magnificent orchestra playing latin american favorites on stage in a concert hall, the live presence I was listening to only a moment ago. Here goes. WHAT HAPPENED ----------------------------------------------------------------- It took less than two minutes to get back some Left/Right image. I can't really say its better or worse than before. I would say the audiophonic Hi Fi quality is better than before particularily in the strength of the lower bottom bass echo reverberating regions. But it seems that the wide window is not as wide as it was. The important thing is, however, that some width separation re-appeared in the sound stream the instant I started throwing open some kitchen cupboard doors. So baffles it is. It means, alas, I am going to have to play a bit with the doors to try and release the hunger for the really obvious wide spread orchestra I was listening to before I closed the kitchen cupboard doors. So here goes. I shall try again SOMETHING IS LEARNED ----------------------------------------------------------------- I have just learned something new. Two more minutes have passed and I am back at the computer. The wide East/West sound image is wider than it has ever been. The fidelity is better than it has ever been. All it took was to treat the kitchen cupboard doors as room tunable random objects. Moving a door back and forth through a narrow arc of a few inches revealed immediately detectable hot and cold sonic resonance positions. So each door was quickly tuned for its sonic 'hotspotness'. The improvement was obvious after only the first five doors had been tested. The improvement was so obvious after tuning just nine doors that I broke off and come back to the computer to get this report out of the way. There is no point in describing the details of each door's position, most are open by about an inch or so, a couple of doors are wide open, sort of. There are still eleven more doors to tune, but what's the point of reporting on it after, or even taking the time to do the tuning now anyway. Well not quite. I have just done the walk around through the listening area and back to the computer and there are subtle peaks and valleys in the sound stream as I did the circle, plus a slight momentarily brief localizing around the vacinity of the Left speaker box as you walk past, both of these effects not being evident at all before I originally closed all of the kitchen doors. So obviously something was being captured in the chance bafflings of the doors earlier which has not yet been restored in full with the latest door tunings. Nevertheless. The sound system in Mono in the Left hand speaker is producing very listenable not just background music, but enjoyable clear and open-ear loud volume easily accepted sound. Loud means not brain trashing, this is loud enough that you can't hear a voice on the phone, but you can certainly think straight as you concentrate on other things. There is still only one new giant snowflake in place as of today. I haven't touched a thing (other than the kitchen doors) for over three hours. Five more giant snowflakes still have to be put together - the 13 flakes for each to be bonded together with Gell Crazy Glue, and then mounted on the hexagonal extrender posts using pieces of wet sponge as mobile grips to create snowflake towers. The flakes were filed last night while watching a turkey science fiction flick on TV. This will have to wait for a few hours or perhaps a day. The reason why is today is one of those rare days occuring about twice a month when my hands are a little jittery. Its a question of age as much as anything. No pressures, no stress is hampering my peace of mind. However, in the usual ebb and flows of what I suppose are normal bio-rhythms every so often a day formulates into a physical down dip that can include some slight jittery in the hands. This is not really bad at all, don't feel sorry for the poor experimenter, it is not this kind of situation at all. It is just that ANY jittery in the hands is TOO much for quality control in this kind of experiment, although I notice that most of the jitter has dissolved in the last half hour. I'll let you know when next there is something to let you know. One of the things I hope will CLEAR up when more full sized 13 nodal giant snowflakes are standing up in place, is better total high end resolution. Despite my claim that here we have borderline audiophile Hi Fi at this moment, it is unstable. It is sensitive to such things as the movement of my head (hence pair of ears) and to the locomotion of the little dog, for example. This is a real problem, because the higher end is going in and out in a rather screetchy rather compressed distortion rather freely, and obviously I do not like this. I would like to predict that more giant snowflakes will stablize this fault. I'll let you know. Incidentally, I can double the volume gain of the TV set by a very simple means; move a kitchen cupboard door by about an inch, and move a small Bic cigarette lighter sitting on the counter by about 1/4 of an inch. I think this was a chance random tuning opportunity but it sure did happen. R.S.L. March 4, 1992 Peace Joy and Happiness ITS LIKE GROWING A FLOWER GARDEN 6:15 AM ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: March 6, 1992. What a difference a few giant snowflakes make. Last night and today was a busy day, what with the Michelangelo computer virus scare and whatnot. The whole of the time until last evening was spent producing and delivering disks with anti virus software using our designed Menu driving system. For the whole of the night, all of the spare space on the stereo system table was being used to produce disks and packages, you know, making the disks using the two computers going none stop, labels, write protect tabs, sleeves, stuffing the envelope packages. And then at 5 AM., we (my brother and I) ran out of package envelopes. And now there is some spare time again after a few hours sleep. Five giant snowflakes are now glued together and standing up in bright colored hexagonal arrays in the environment. The kitchen cupboard doors are all closed. And the stereo is in full effect, even at very low volume. Oh, forgot to mention, only the Right hand speaker box is working. It is in 100% Mono. I am listening to a cassette tape of Xaviar Cugat favorites and can hear the orchestra playing in a Latin night club in the huge sound image up there behind the dining room windows. Nice. Lots of airframe live presence, lots of long distance carrying power, lots of stable fidelity as I do the circle walking through the main floor area. Etc. Etc. Nice. (The cassette tape is: Xaviar Cugat And His Orchestra, 'The Beat Of The Big Bands', CBS Select, BUT-50193). It turns out that the giant snowflakes need to be put in certain positions to work properly in regenerating full stereo in Mono source sound. As far away as possible from the sound table (the generator source) seems to be the best place to locate these upright giant snowflakes in the listening environment, with each giant snowflake focused to an imaginary point of center deep in the sound image back there behind the dining room windows. This also works for best all around Hi Fidelity, the same as is the case with each individual snowflake sonic controller, all uniformly focused drive-in-theatre-style to an imaginary point of focus back in the huge sound image. As for the exact locations; one giant snowflake is sitting on top in the middle of the bookshelf against the opposite wall in the dining area. Two giant snowflakes are at either end of the bookshelf. A fourth is against the far back corner to the South in the kitchen, and the fifth is on top of the TV set against the far North wall, back in the corner of the living room area. As I said, farther away from the immediate vacinity of the speakers the better for these giant snowflakes to regenerate full stereophonic reproduction from a Mono sound source. The point of this momentary Update report is.... ....no more kitchen door BAFFLES. The kitchen cupboard doors are all closed! CATCHING THE WAVE 10:30 AM. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: March 6, 1992. The 'Good Listener' was by for a moment, in a hurry, had no idea the system was working in Mono. Thought the fidelity was a bit rougher than a couple of days ago, but realized it was a different tape playing heavy duty Golden Piano stuff and not frequency drift on the FM radio, but thought the stereo imaging was fine, but had no idea that it was entirely Mono through the Left hand speaker. "Oh, in that case, hmm... " said the good listener heading out of the room still in a hurry. Catching the Wave means that, in tuning the giant snowflakes, (I think I am going to call them sonic soul patterns), there is a reflection through which the flake passes that is probably about 1 or 2 degrees at most (out of 360 degrees) in which a whole bunch of frequencies consolidate into real good stuff. But like I said, it is really fleeting, you have to be on your toes to catch the wave, particularly since these giant snowflakes can take many seconds for their resulting final responses to kick in in full, when tuning them. It means that tuning has to be done VERRRY slowly to be really effective. It is during the long moment of HANG, when the old sound has been dissolved and the new one is still unconsolidated, that you can MISS the wave if hurrying too fast in twist tuning or torgue turning a giant snowflake. One of the more noticable effects (already seen earlier last month but more so today) is that I can project the image over the speakers, bringing it foward, into the room, out from the sound image area behind the windows per se. Some audiophile specialists might tend to think that recurrancing the imaging right over the speakers is preferred. I can't get into real forward imaging tests due to the fact that there is no room for it in the dining area of my low rental condo. On the other hand it is really easy to more deeply move the sound out and farther back into the big area behind the windows. This is possible entirely by snowflake tuning. In a major example, tests using the Dick Tracy movie sound track cassette (conducted at the end of January, 1992), led to imaging so well developed (albiet weird) that at times you could picture yourself standing on a busy corner in a downtown intersection of a major city and hear police sirens echoing sonically from up the street and way around the distant corner, for instance. It wasn't just a simulation, you could hear the sirens echoing from afar. THE PROJECT IS COMPLETE 3:00 PM ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: March 6, 1992. One more giant snowflake is in place. This makes a total of six. (The only reason for six is I have no more hexagonal extender posts to stand the flakes up in). Everything is better. You may have wanted to know, so I have just told you. It still takes GREAT care to tune things. But you should hear what MAJOR tuning is possible, especially in the now filled in lower regions of the bottom bass. The sweet pure frequencies now happening in point source instruments of the high end are finally sounding like authentically fidelic in a stable way. One of the things to watch for when experimenting with Mono in Stereo effects is that it is really easy to get a parallax into the sound image. This means that as you walk past the table and the working single Mono speaker, the sound image itself will be heard to shift in total, being on the Left side of the speaker when you are standing to the Right, and rotating around a pivot, to end up recurred in the air behind the Right of the speaker when you are standing to the Left. This parallax effect is as if the recurred sound image is pivoting by a lever with the generating source itself the fulcrum of the lever arm. It takes some acute listening to tune the system so that the sound image stays in the same place located in the huge environment behind the windows, no matter where you are when walking around. THE FRAGILITY OF SUCCESS ----------------------------------------------------------------- When first setting up the 6th giant snowflake I re-adjusted the position of three of the other giant snowflakes and ran immediately into a problem. I had the system on MONO playing through the Right hand speaker. All of a sudden there was irrational noise, lots of it. A quick check of the piston in the five inch tweeter showed the cause without question. The piston was visibly throwing in long strong vibrations, causing the bass range to fracture, break up, blat. You could see the piston throwing in and out as plain as day, just like the cone of any ordinary playing loudspeaker. And in and around the throws, the piston was clearly vibrating at smaller rapid and variable rates. Oops, Oops, and Oh No!. The system was once again 'dynamically unstable', to state the problem in a simple two words. It was not dissolving into full fledged Turbo Roar, thankfully. But bass caused roars occurred a couple of times already, for perhaps a few seconds each time as heavy duty music played on the FM radio. First thing to do was turn down the volume a little to the point where the speaker crapping did not seem life threatening. And then start re-tuning snowflakes willy nilly here and there to see if I could re-stablize the system. It worked. Shortly along the way I became aware that the lower bass range was starting to respond anew with power filled resonances rather than meaningless noisy shatters and could see that the tweeter's piston had again become centered in impact vibrations so that to all extents and purposes the voice coil piston was once again absolutely immobile to the naked eye. Now that the impact vibrations were coherently synchronizing with the sound stream generator, I quickly re-adjusted the giant snowflakes and thus the crisis was over. The good sound was back. It had only been a few minutes, say perhaps five minutes at most had passed. Fortunately it had been just a momentary upset. Real good recurrancing and resonation was back in the Mono playing speaker. Not only was this single Mono speaker source sounding once more like a large stereo system at work, the sound stream image itself was back up in the stage behind the windows spread out Left and Right and into depth like an opera and not in anyway localized around the source of the sound stream itself, ie., the single little Mono Right hand speaker. It meant that not just the speaker cone itself, but also all of the moires in the room, were also once again acting as if they too were power generators, and their vibrations (if somehow visible) would appear motionless to the naked eye even though extremely powerful vibrating was going on inside all of the sonic moire patterns of the environment. I say with emphasis; this demonstrates just how much beyond the normal performance capabilities of getto blaster class speakers and normal stereo sound systems and theories that this experimental sound system is, in how it utilized many fundamental sonic enhancements as are already embodied in the spiritual realms of Reality to achieve such engineered results. THE PROJECT IS COMPLETE March 7, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- There is no need for any further updates. The 6 month sound experiment in my low rental condo has led to a clearly seen need to push and shove beyond the barriers of present day bogged down technologies and the inhibitive pre-conceived beliefs of those in control of the technologies and their theories about it and life. Anyone who may want to follow the route may in fact find that I have hardly touched the hem of the garment in terms of what can be learned about higher qualities of sound and what can be deduced easily regards certain principles in Reality, learned from understanding principles as they also occur in the third dimensional realm of this universe. FINAL UPDATE March 10, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I figure that at this moment I am at about 30% of potential. The 1st super giant snowflake (31 snowflakes glued together), needs some means to be able to support it so I can stand it upright tilted at about 60 degrees from the horizontal and rotated by about 60 degrees to the sound image area behind the windows to be more effective as a sonic conducer. This setting I know works in hand held tests. There may be other angles which are better. Time will tell. I figure two of the giant snowflakes will be able to give a real boost to the whole performance level of the stereo in terms of both major gains in overall fidelity and more powerful reverberations that are stable in the bottom bass and lower bottom bass regions of the sound stream. I have to wait until filing more snowflakes for the second giant item, and figure out how to support them in some way that I can focus precisely. But, why bore you with details. Otherwise, I have already seen and heard enough to know that I am at about 30% potential. In tests this afternoon (March 10, 1992) I simply rested the super giant snowflake held upright in place by a random clutter of cassette tapes on the book shelf against the wall opposite the sound table and left in that angled upright position the giant snowflake was still workable enough to give the best performance ever achieved to date for my sound system. What is particularly interesting is that this best ever performance is in 100% MONO through the Right hand speaker. I heard electronic gongs pass in a run from the far Right to the far Left of the sound image for instance, so there is no question about a wide stereo spread recurring in a room from a Mono generating source. Once again however random room objects have come back to being major spoilers. On the other hand only a few objects have to be discretely adjusted to overcome the spoil. The major gains cancelling the spoiling come in after the snowflakes have been well tuned. What I have learned is that sonic tuning is very hard to do at first, I have to proceed through some very strange distortions until a new effect starts to gell, wherein tuning becomes much easier. The fact of the super giant snowflake as a conducer has stablized a number of transient effects to where they can be tested and controlled. I suspect the strangeness has to due with distortions of the cross harmonic kind - reflections moving laterally back and forth between the instruments and sideways between the walls, because the tiniest of iotas and touches to the snowflakes can make or break 'tone' in the music. This is by far the tightest sonic tuning I have ever had to do, to where I can start to hear space behind the different point sources instruments and vocals, plus richer harmonic overtones in the rings of the ride cymbals. When this gets focused I am able to handle the more important qualities of tone and authenticity leading to reproduction of live sound presence without compression distortions, in the Mono playing system. At times, I have had the Right hand Mono speaker's sound spread out to the LEFT to such an extent that it fills the same sound image area as is filled when running the system in full stereo. In fact at times I have been able to lean right up to the Right speaker box with my head about a foot away and tune a snowflake, listening to changes in the image still UP in the AIR spread out behind the speaker. In other words, the Mono sourced sound is no longer being collapsing to the front of the speaker by local big interferences such as my head and body. The recurrancing at long distance from the generating source is very stable. Please note that most all of the tuning is at long distances away from the speaker. I had three single snowflakes near the front of the Right hand speaker and discovered they had become spoilers. It was in testing them before removing them from the system that, out, I found I could lean my face right close to the speaker (maybe a foot and a half away) and looking up into the huge sound area hear the sound and percieve the image effects still up there in the air when testing the snowflakes. This is why I say that at the moment the system is working at about 30% of potential. During today's tunings I could hear a lot more come and go in transient ways. Just hearing the glimpes of, means I know that inevitably a whole lot more can still be coaxed out of the system. One thing learned today more than ever is there can be great audiophile differences between one cassette tape and another, and between individual tracks on a tape, particularly if the tape is a collection such as movie sound tracks. The feel of fidelity between one recording and another can be surprising. As for the 'airframe' long distance carrying potential, this seems to be a factor of tuning. At one point this afternoon I had chance tuned things in such a way that in the main floor washroom with the door closed it was back to being almost as loud and clear as being out in the living room area, with the solid washroom walls having become more or less transparent for the sound stream. But this was short lived. In further tuning for more high end fidelity and more powerful lower bass reverberations, the brief taste of super quality long distance 'airframe' had vanished again. There was still long distance 'airframe', but nothing like what I had briefly heard. It does however tell me that in days to come and with further developements, such can be tuned fully into the system in a stable way. I know this, because everything I have so far ever heard in a transient way during the duration of this experiment has come to pass in an out front stable way, inexorably. The future is forever hopeful. SEE POSTSCRIPTS IN APPENDIX.3 ------------------------------------------------------------- APPENDIX.3 has support information, for anyone curious enough to read it, beginning under the heading: POSTSCRIPTS. ALLSONIC is a FANTASY a short story written in 2 days at the last minute to indicate what I expect could actually happen, given the sonic techniques already demonstrated and in place today (at this moment) in my low rental condo. THIS PHASE FINISHED . . . March 10, 1992. ------------------------------------------------------------- GIANT SNOWFLAKE CONSTRUCTION ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 12, 1992, 4:45 AM. I have just constructed a giant stonehenge-like image consisting of the six sided large nowflakes arrayed in a large rosette in front of the Right hand speaker, with all angles focused toward the center of the hexagram. Six single snowflakes form another rosette within the main Stonehenge construction. The seven snowflakes in the two other rosettes on the outside of each speaker box have also been twist tuned to be uniformly focused toward the rosette's center. The result of THIS has been to almost completely stablize the sound, furthermore the random room objects have lost just about all of their sensitivity. At this moment the Left hand speaker is producing in 100% MONO a giant sound wall reaching all the way across and beyond the stretch between the two speakers, in a manner which noticable also comes and goes (in terms of maximum wide width) between certain tracks on certain tapes being playing as I sit here writing on the computer. TWO SPEAKER STEREO VRS MONO FOCUSING ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 14, 1992, 11:30 PM. It looks like two different ways of focusing the snowflakes are in order. 1. For full two speaker stereo, splay tuning (drive-in-theatre style) seems to be best, with all snowflakes small and giant, including those in rosettes, focused toward an imaginary point of center deep far back in the giant stereo sound image. 2. For MONO IN STEREO tuning (one speaker only) the best sound comes from having snowflakes in rosette focused cartwheel fashion, that is, each flake small or giant is focused toward the center of the rosette. TWO SNOWFLAKE SONIC ENHANCERS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 15, 1992, 10:50 AM. The nice thing about using liquid honey for research is that you can glue things together, and when finished, simply rinse off the liquid honey to unglue them again. For instance two giant snowflakes have been pressed together like an Oreo cookie with liquid honey, just little dabs on the sharp corners of the flakes of the snowflake forming each little hexagram did the job, one giant snowflake was laid atop the other, and rotated 30 degrees to create a 12 sided figure. Now THIS has sonic power. You wouldn't believe what it does to the sound stream, particularly the bass end. Two of these new 'atomic' snowflakes have been made (bonded together with liquid honey). They seem to work best titled at about a 60 degree angle and turned more or less face-on to the main sound generating source, rather than focused to somewhere within the recurring sound image behind the windows. In terms of Mono in Stereo, here is what is happening right now. A cassette tape of 20 favorite latin melodies produced in Holland was originally so bad it was thought to be a 4 or 5 piece cabaret orchestra playing tinny ricky tick latin stuff. It turns out to be a major orchestra with big arrangements and an extremely wide setup on stage when recorded. (20 Sweet Latins, MCR, STEMPRA, 2687154, Made In Holland). For instance on one of the cuts a miramba (latin vibraphone) is playing far off to the Left in the giant wide sound image. Through the Right hand speaker playing in Mono only, the mirimba can't be heard until after some very fine tuning, using the Stonehenge array as described previously above in the Update of March 12, 1992. After the ultra fine tuning, the mirimba can be heard as a very faint very high pitched almost metallic instrument way off to the back, barely discernable. With two of the 'atomic' snowflakes in place, the miramba through the Right hand speaker in Mono comes to life. It is still way to the back offset to the Left (rather than away off to the Left by itself and loud and clear) but there is no mistaking that it is a mirimda, and that it is being picked up by cross echoes and is coming back, amplified sonically by the 'atomic' snowflakes, through the Right hand Mono channel. A simple means was found to mount the 'atomic' snowflakes at the proper angle. This was to make a stand out of a strand of 16 guage copper wire, bent to shape to have an equalateral triangle base, and the other end sticking straight up then bent out, the shaft wrapped with a bit of masking tape to help hold the 'atomic' snowflake in place. It is easy to bend the upright support wire to any angle to focus the 'atomic' snowflake. The name 'atomic' comes on the spur of the moment because the resulting image from the two giant snowflakes (each having 13 single snowflakes glued together in a six sided hexagonal array) looks in fact something like an atomic lattice when seen as a reasonable copy of some atomic images shown in such magazines as 'Discover' and 'Scientific American'. I think I have tapped a mother lode. The sonic enhancing effect of the 'atomic' model snowflake is stupendous, compared to any other sonic controlling arrays and devices tried so far. This one single advance, (the 'atomic' snowflake) had solved more problems than I can count. The only problem(s) remaining are .... ?? FOOL A GURU ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 16, 1992, 5:53 AM. Well, I've got stereo enough to fool a guru. Audiophile specials and speaker freaks talk about a certain kind of background effect called 'cross talk'. They don't like this, and try to get the 'cross talk' out of their speaker designs. Or sometimes try to modify it with passive exciter speakers sitting on the bottom of a speaker enclosure facing straight up, for instance, to give more 'presence' to the enclosure's sound. What the cross talk is is transient echoes working back and forth way in the background between the speakers. What it actually is is cross harmonic room echoes being picked up cross channel from one side of a room or orchestra into the other side's stereo microphones. What this means in terms of Stereo in Mono is glory. The cross talk can be teased forth using the snowflake controller techniques into enough presence to operate as the missing channel, albiet fainter, or in the background, rather than a foreground. Nevertheless there is enough cross talk information which can be teased forth to make the orchestra seem in full size, in that the cross talk reflections contain the pulsations (BREATHING), and HANG, that go to generate a full stereophonic recurrance of a sound stream. THUS.... When the 'cross talk' is teased forth from a Mono playing speaker, you have rebuilt (or rejuvinated) the hang and pulsations that comprise a full sized orchestra, or sound source. Now how I did this is sort of a story in itself. For one thing, there are now two artifacts made of two giant snowflakes stuck together in a 12 sided double hexagram, each hanging facing sort of down on temporary but adequate support stands made of 12 guage copper wire bent the right way. I was calling these things 'atomic snowflakes' but now call these artifacts 'sunflowers' since that is what they look like, the way they hang suspended on their copper wire supports. A narrow piece of masking tape wrapped around the end of the wire keeps the sunflower from falling off. Each sunflower has 31 snowflakes glued together in a flat pancake with six star arms or radians sticking out. Two suitable sonic hot spots have been found in the room for them, one about two feet to the right of and and foot forward of the Right hand speaker, the other in a more kinky nook on the left end of the secondmost top row of the bookshelf against the wall opposite the table, and tucked in behind a support for the top row of the bookshelf. (This bookshelf is made of narrow strips of wood, sitting on stiff cardboard cartons used as supports and cubbyholes for the bookshelf). In this location, the second sunflower is about six feet out in front of the Left hand speaker, and offset to the right by about a foot. The first mentioned sunflower is facing down toward the wall which runs behind the table, hanging at about a 60 degree angle, and turned about 30 degrees away from the Right hand speaker. The second sunflower (the one on the bookshelf) is actually facing about exactly the same direction as the first, and at about exactly the same angle too, (as it happens) except it is hanging down by only about 30 degrees. I say 'as it happens' because I did not notice the similarity in the alignment until checking right now, and was surprised because the second sunflower was set up and aligned totally on the basis of where it sounded best, having nothing to do with alignments to any other object in the room. By the way, it doesn't seem to much matter where the sunflowers are hanging around. The two locations described immediately above just happened to have been two good locations first found. A couple of other locations have just been tried and it sounds a little better - more bottom bass. These two new locations have nothing whatever to do with the old, and there is no parallel alignment. So, it is up to you to try any locations, given that you get to the point of trying your own hand made sonic sunflowers. There is a problem though. Fidelity can come and go, between tracks, between tapes, and between periods during the day. In other words, as good as the system sounds after two hours of pounding around the circuit tuning everything in sight, two hours later there is no fidelity and tuning has to be done all over again. BIRTHDAY AND THE AIRFRAME EFFECT ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 16, 1992, 5:53 AM. Today is my birthday. With that great news out of the way, here is an update. Tonight I have learned something about the 'Airframe' effect. This is the long distance carrying feature of the 'Airframe' in the sound stream. I have been able to get more, then less, then more Airframe again, by predictable snowflake tuning, for the first time. There is a certain sound which comes into the sound stream when tuning snowflakes and the sunflowers, and within the sound is the long distance carrying effect of the 'Airframe' principle. It was difficult up till now to be able to identify just what it was that was constituting 'Airframe' quality, because as it turns out it is not tied in directly to fidelity, nor to more echoing effects which can be tuned into the music. It seems to do more directly with jumps in volume, the kind gained from a snowflake's tuning rather than from turning up the volume knob. In other words, the long distance carrying component in the 'Airframe' is not a question of improved fidelity so much as more active efficiency. Which raises a question about so-called 'speaker efficiency'. I first heard the word 'efficient' in a hard sell speaker mart store run by Hong Kongese ten years ago. I was in to look for a cheap pair of stereo mikes for a cassette recorder and in came a rather run down looking thin middle aged fellow to look around. Immediately a sales staff (one of the owners) was on the case, throwing buttons to turn on this big pair, then a button to throw on that bigger pair, and the dollars kept going up as more and more tweeters, woofers, and 8 inchers were getting activated in the different giant boxes all standing in a row in the maximum 'head in the vice' position in the store, to where the middle aged fellow had long since being steered as the sales staff talked at ninety miles an hour. Then I heard words to the effect: 'These are our best pair'; a button was pushed and a new pair came on stream. They sounded louder and harsher. Nevertheless, the sales staff was saying shouting: 'These are VERY efficient'. There was a long silence. Then the middle aged fellow said: 'What the fuck does efficient mean'. Boy did I ever enjoy that, because I was wondering exactly the same thing myself but was keeping my lips zipped. Now, circ. Mid-March 1992, I am beginning to think 'effeciency' means long distance carrying power. It can be said to be obvious that when sonic snowflake controller focusing is done correctly, the sound can carry farther, and axiomatically echo reflections and reverbertions from long distances return, rejuvinating the sound stream at the source and in the recurrant image of the sound itself, leading to an obvious gain or jump in volume. In this context, 'efficiency' simply means more activity in the moire patterns pumping away more solid-seeming in impact vibrations resulting from the sound stream in the environment. In this context, 'effeciency' really has nothing to do with the loudspeaker's electronics, nor its voice coil, etc. Efficiency is strictly a question of most positive re-enforcing harmonics at long distances throughout the environment itself and perhaps independent of the generating source(s) or what kind of sound they produce per se. The reason why I say this is my two generating sources (the Fisher Getto Blaster 8400 speaker boxes) are producing practically nothing per se, on their own, and the sound itself, in sonic recurrances well away from the mouths of the generators, only comes to life after the environment has been tuned with sonic snowflakes. YEP YEP YEP ON THE WAY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 18, 1992, 8:20 PM. Benny Goodman's was quite a band. Unfortunately all we have to listen to from that era are Mono recordings made with wire recorders. Stereo wasn't invented until the 50's. So old Benny Goodman recordings are Mono, and rather high pitched, screetchy. Not any more. I am listening to the full orchestra spread out on a sound stage. This Benny Goodman cassette tape was unplayable until tonight. You could play it, in order to hear originally recorded Benny Goodman music, but you had to accept the conditions under which the stuff was original recorded, 55 years ago. Not any more. In fact, as I type this information on the computer, with Benny Goodman playing behind me, I can hear tell-tale ticks and crackles telling me this tape was picked up off an old recording and mass produced for cheap consumer sales at a bucket shop cassette making factory. Fact is I got it for $1.98 at a Pascals Hardware store in Ottawa in 1991. The Benny Goodman orchestra I am listening to right now is as good and fidelic and STEREO as, for instance, the Spitfire Swing Band, or the Glen Gray Orchestra, recorded last year circ. 1991. I don't want to lie. The fidelity is spotty, better on some tracks and worse on others. However, over the last, say, two months, the fidelity problems are less severe right now than they have been over the past two month with tapes of modern swing bands, such as the Spitfire Band. The thing is that the fidelity at this moment is better than reasonable. And there plays the original Benny Goodman orchestra, spread out in stereo on stage behind the dining room windows in my low rental condo. What's most important of all is you can hear SPACE between the instruments. And it is all coming from the Left Hand Speaker. The Right hand speaker is shut down totally all the way to zero. True enough, a 100% Mono playback is reproducing a 100% recording, in stereo. Tuning in this original Benny Goodman stuff started with Sing Sing Sing, the first version, recorded in 1937 prior to the better known version recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1938. HOW SO ----------------------------------------------------------------- I reasoned that even though recorded in Mono, there had to be significant amounts of background reverberation echoes, or cross talk, going on between the recording mikes due to the conciderable resonance frequencies of the huge calf and pigskin tom toms being played by Gene Krupa. Sure enough. After playing with the sound in tuning around for a few minutes, another, fainter, more far away distant sound could be detected echoing in and around slightly off the beat in the drums in Sing Sing Sing, barely hanging in there on the perifery of perception. It was not hard to tune in more of that distance factor. In fact it was relatively easy to get it brought forth into a major sonic ambiance, once its presence had been detected. And lo and behold here is where both the fidelity and the stereophonics were found, on this cassette tape of old original Benny Goodman recordings. Like I said, the original Benny Goodman orchestra was quite a band. AUDIOPHILE FIDELITY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 22, 1992, 12:30 PM. I guess in all fairness there is something else to report. Yesterday afternoon I came home with two new tapes, purchased at bargain prices from one of the area record stores. The first was a cassette for $3.95 with original Glen Millar classics recorded circ. 1938-1940. (Produced by the General Electric Corp., 1990 BMG Music, with RCA logo, 2168-4-R). The second tape (purchased for $3.00) was the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, playing Rimsky-Korsakov SCHEHERAZADE, produced by Allegro, ACS 8003. When I got home I put on the Glen Miller tape, after having (as reported in the previous Update immediately above) played around with a cassett tape of original Benny Goodman stuff. When I turned on the Glen Miller tape in Mono, ooh, wow, yeah, did it stink. High, screetchy, scrunched up deader'n a doornail, and the bass, what there was, was that strange open Poing Poing Poing I was always getting on the CD player playing a laser disk of old classics on the Fisher model 8400 Getto Blaster. Yeoh what a dismal racket. It was even worse with the getto blast playing in stereo. So I got to work. I played with room tuning and snowflakes for quite awhile until it was clear that the Glen Miller tape was sounding somewhat better, (yet nowhere fidelic or stereophonic) then put on the Scheherazade tape. Oooh boy it was even worse, as if the sound had been squeezed up like an old fashion squeeze box accordian and turned sideways or something. Geez this racket was just about the worst I had ever heard. The Scheherazade tape was utterly non fidelic even in full stereo. For a moment I thought I must have screwed up the sound system. But in putting on the cassette tape of Golden Latin Favorites, my favorite all purpose referencing tape, and finding it about the same as usual, I could immediately assume the Scheherazade problem was not in my system, it was the tape, and thought - 'no wonder it was on sale for such a low price'. Needless to say I started back tinkering around with the Glen Miller cassette, trying to see what I might be able to do trying to get a Stereo effect playing it through one speaker, since this would be Mono sound, played through a Mono speaker. Several things ensued very quickly, none of them yielding any worthwhile rewards. Nevertheless several things did ensue. The following report is with Glen Miller being played in Mono through the Left hand speaker. One thing worth noting is that a couple of days earlier I had stood the speaker boxes up on end, pointing toward the ceiling, each sitting on a hexagonal shaped giant washer used by plumbers (about 2 inches across in diameter). This is because this seemed to give the sound stream a spacier presence even though some solid thumping power in the lower bass end was lost and it was harder to control the power overall because you could see the speaker cone's pistons throwing in and out in the bass punches. And they could rattle on certain tapes that formerly didn't rattle. But I stayed with it. Another new variable is something else I had also devised. This is two birdcages, made the day before. These each consist of two hexagons made of bent 12 guage copper wire. One hexagram is 20 cms across, and the other is 11 1/2 cms across. The smaller is set inside the larger, and rotated by 30 degrees. Inside each are 6 single snowflakes, pinned with honey in the middle of each of the six radii side section around the circumpherence in each hexagram. (The hexagons are geometrically proportional, in that I constructed the 20 cms hexagon on a sheet of grid paper, then geometrically constructed a Star of David inside the hexagram, then a sphere through the nodal points where the arms of the Star of David criss cross, then drew in the second 11 1/2 cm hexagram through these inner points, then used these two hexagrams as templates for forming the birdcages). Originally I tried the birdcages mounted on mike stands at distant corners of the room, but later moved them close to the Left hand speaker, one on each side, mounted on hexagon hydro extenders with pieces of dried sponge inside to hold upright the birdcage's support wires. These techniques all had ability to improve the quality of the awful Glen Miller original recordings, but only so far. The fidelity was fierce, piercing shrieks and shrilly on all of the sax and claranet type intruments, and the huge vague whumpy or rasping boomy bass had utterly no distinction. One thing I did detect momentarily, along the way, was that one of the skilled features in Glen Miller's orchestra was to pulsate sound rhythmically between different sections of the orchestra, contributing to the orchestra's overall major rhythm and swing impact. It almost sounded like the band was BREATHING. As I said, I detected this pulsation between sound sources momentarily on one of the tracks on the tape, then the effect was gone again. But I had heard it, and knew it was there, despite the awful fidelity. Today, after a long sleep, I resumed around 10:30 AM. I started playing with the Right hand speaker in Mono. To make a long story short I found that if instead of trying to avoid distortion by tuning for fidelity, if I tuned further into a certain kind of distortion I could come out the other end with a new kind of HANG in the music. It turns out that the humongous distorted bass was actually front to back room echo reflections that needed only to be focused, to include very harmoniously the sonically rhythmic puslating effects working back and forth between different sections of the Glen Miller Orchestra. Furthermore, I went around closing all the doors (downstairs and upstairs) and found an immediate improvement in overall fidelity. And lo and behold, there it was, the Glen Miller orchestra, recreated to about 50% live in the main floor of my Condo. I say about 50% because there were still pockets of distortion, obviously, particularly since some of the tracks had been picked up off 78 RPM recordings because you can hear the pops and crackles of the needle. Nevertheless, what I heard makes me believe it will someday be entirely possible to recreate the old original Glen Miller orchestra using the old recordings, like a hologram made of sound in the middle of a theatre or auditorium, as well as of course a room like mine in a low rental condo. I have to tell you that the original Glen Miller band was doing some amazing stuff, compared to what you hear today in terms of modern bands doing swing, or playing original Glen Miller orchestrations. Not only did Glen Miller use the orchestra itself - and distances between parts of the orchestra - to produce various HANGS as part of the rhythm structure, all of the musicians, particularly the solosists, had awareness of this sense of HANG and used it to great effect in their solos. This is a very different effect than standing up in front of an orchestra and blowing hard and strong straight into a mike in a separate track that is going to be overmixed on top of the orchestra later during stereo dubbing. Musicians cannot play the HANG when out of place from their usual position in an orchestra in which the HANG is an essential ingredient to the band's total impact rhythmically. Nor can they play hang when horking their brains out straight into a mike which is power amplifying their play back through into the orchestra in ways that are quite out of place in terms of relationship to other musicians in the band as the soloist horks away into the mike. On the other hand, on the Glen Miller recordings some of the playing by musicians is amazingly deft due to the way they handled HANG back and forth between each other. Its no wonder the musicians all chose to stay together after Glen Millar was accidently dispatched to an afterlife or next life during an air flight in 1942. There is one other feature to report. At the moment when I got HANG brought into the picture the sound and the fidelity clarified, the sound stream became extremely stable, in that I could walk through the entire main floor area of my condo, and right past the Right hand speaker box, and the Glen Miller orchestra remained up there in the huge sound image behind the dining room window, sonically filling the room with rhythmic pulsations of full bodied whole range sound the entire time. I call the effect BREATHING because you could almost think the orchestra was organic. The HANG works both Left to Right, and Front to Back. The bass fills a large area to the rear and to the right side in the band and I assume that it was one place where a mike was located close to the instrument (the bass fiddle). On the other hand, I assume from what I hear that no mikes were in particular used to get extra gain for the drums. The sonic echoes and reverbs I hear from the rim shots for instance sound exactly like they were hit hard and carried forward to the front of the band to where they entered the mikes or a listener's ears. However, my environment itself was EXTREMELY sensitive to room tuning. Even moving a pencil on a table could spoil the effect. It was the front to back room echo reflections which were the most vulnerable, these which were contributing in such a major way to the depth, width, and presence of the Glen Miller band, could collapse in an instant back to static harsh high pitched distortions and the boomy loose noise of the bass, just by moving a pencil, for instance. I got a witness to hear it. We had to move a sweater that had been dropped into a chair as my brother came downstairs ready to head out the door. When the sweater was removed and stuffed in the hall closet, the huge live presence of the Glen Miller band, pulsing away in strong echo creating stereophonics, came straight back into the sound stream. All of this was demonstrated with the system playing in 100% Mono through the Right hand speaker box. And so a technology has been demonstrated, there is stereo information and fidelity on old Glen Miller recordings. But here comes the rest of today's story. In getting to this high point regards getting stereophonoic and acceptably fidelity play from the Glen Miller tape, I was using the Right hand speaker in Mono, and had turned the box around to again face foward but this time rotated by 90 degrees so that the front face was vertical rather than horizontal, and instead of slightly turned in a splay position I now have it facing straight ahead (compared to the way it had been used originally), and again used the 2 inch hexagonal plumber's washer, this time to raise the box on this small pedestal about 1/2 inch above the table. In this new position, the speaker cone's piston again became locked solidly immobile by impact vibrations, getting around the problem of bass note rattles and rubbery noises. So, what else, now that the Glen Miller experiment was over, but to try the Sheherazade tape. First of all, I switched the system to full two speaker stereo, then turned on the tape. Ohh wow yeah what an effect! It was symphonic allright, and VERY fidelic. Now isn't that a surprise. Crystal clear instruments, point source located forward and back, left and right in the huge sound image, playing in totally audible presence even the highest notes of a violin. And when the whole orchestra ganged up including tympanis, the room shook a bit. There was another suprise. The Left hand speaker was still standing on end. So what else to do but get that speaker straightened around to match up with the new positioning of the Right hand speaker. The moment I lifted the Left hand speaker from its hexagon washer pedestal and turned the box around, the huge sonic symphonic presence vanished!. It was instantly back to the same old problems, unstable high ends, bass that came and went as you walked around, crushed or compressed sounds in the mid range, or high end, or low end, depending on how you tuned some giant snowflakes. So I turned the Left hand speaker box around back into its upward position, and there it came swelling back into the room, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra playing Scheherazade. It turns out that the assymetric arrangement of the two speaker boxes, along with the snowflake tuning as it is as of this moment, are what it takes to get a whole top to bottom sound stream stablized into a magnificent sonic and fidelic stereo presence. This assymetric requirement is probably due to the positions of the two different speaker boxes relative to where their major sound generation outpours into. The Right speaker's sound is reflected off a South wall about 8 feet to the right, and contends with two corners, including the kitchen wall and doorway in front of it. Whereas the Left speaker mainly radiates into the larger open area of the living room area, it is located on the table past the end of the kitchen wall. A main difference in the sonic controller snowflake tuning is that all of the giant snowflakes have been pulled from long distance or remote locations in the room and are positioned close to the speaker boxes, in a predictable pattern. Specifically, the giant snowflakes are set in a pattern which radiates out from the corners of each speaker box. The boxes are set forward on the table up to a half a foot from the rear wall leaving room for one giant snowflake to be positioned at the rear corner of the Right hand speaker box, and two of the giant snowflakes to be positioned aligned in a straight line radiating away from the two rear corners of the Left hand speaker box. Four giant snowflakes are radiating away from the front corners of the Left hand speaker box. But since there are no more to play with, only one giant snowflake is radiating away from each of the front corners of the Right hand box. There are significant differences in the way the giant snowflakes are now handled, as of the last two days. All of them are standing vertically straight upright, none are hanging downward at angles in the arrangement I was formerly calling sunflowers. The two super giant flakes (now called super giant starflakes) have been moved to new remote locations and are positioned at specific strategic angles, being the widest apart spread possible between the two giant starflakes in my environment. Both super giant starflakes are standing straight upright, and are turned to face edge-on (rather than face-on) to the sound image. One is positioned about 10 feet away from the Right hand speaker, angled at about 60 degrees to the right of the speaker box. The other is sitting on the TV set over in the back corner of the living room area, angling about 30 degrees to the outside of the Left speaker. That about sums it up. I figure that as of today, Stage THREE of the experiment is over. Stage ONE continued from late summer into the late fall and was concerned with expanding the getto blaster's sound stream enough in terms of both bass and ability for louder volume to give something to work with toward improving the system's overall fidelity and resonses. This was achieved last December using rosette shaped images laid out in thirteen different locations on the table, as sonic controllers. Stage ONE is described in files SOUND.1. Stage TWO began in earnest in January of 1992, as an attempt to get more fidelity and 'Airframe' presence out of the system. This was achieved by standing all of the snowflakes on edge and splay tuning them toward an imaginary focal point to the rear of the sound image behind the dining room windows. This led to great front to back imaging, and greater East/West point source imaging, and gave an indication that Mono in Stereo effects were possible with such a sound system. Stage TWO is described in from the top of SOUND2.TXT. Stage THREE was getting to the point of recreating genuine stereophonic effects in a Mono playing system, as totalled immediately above. This was achieved by several means, finally. The changes include the use of two birdcages (as described above in this Update), and using 19 strategically placed giant snowflakes (each containing 13 snowflakes glued in a hexagon-star array), plus two super giant starflakes (each containing 31 snowflakes - these in fact look more than ever like large snowflakes). I suspect that a few more of the giant starflakes are going to add more to the system, but more of what? Probably loud volume fidelic power, and perhaps more degrees of audiophile authenticity to the whole sound stream, and hopefully more overall room sensitive stablity, but, also, a new form of intransigent distortion. However, regards room sensitive stability, I don't know. Each time I've filed a new batch of snowflakes and glued them together into giant snowflakes and set them up, the whole room environment seems to have become a little bit more sensitive to good and bad spoiler and enhancer chance effects by random objects in the room. Otherwise, I guess this is it for the moment, now that Stage THREE is over. I am happy that more technology has been demonstrated, to wit, getting fidelity and stereophonic impact from original Glen Miller mono recordings that are over 50 years old. Plus hearing that HUGE orchestra sounding away majestically in the performance of Sheherazade in full two speaker stereo, using a cheap normally raw sounding portable getto blaster as the only sound generating source. THE CD PLAYER NOW WORKS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 22, 1992, 5:30 PM. What a surise. The CD disk player works, finally. I've just turned it on to see what playing responses it may now have, in terms of the new tunings as described in the above Update. I haven't turned on the CD player since last January. First I switched the system to full two speaker mode, then turned on the CD. What a surprise. On came Glen Miller playing Little Brown Jug, in full stereo. Gone was that strange boinging system-rattling bass I have always described for this system whenever attempting to play this CD disk entitled Best Of The Big Bands Vol(s). 1 and 2, which are digitally enhanced remakes of the big band's original recordings. Apparantly the work that was done today to get something reasonably fidelic and reasonably stereophonic out of the Right hand speaker playing in Mono has carried over into a much greater stereophonic clarity in these digitally enhanced disks. Not only are they now truly stereophonic, they are remarkably fidelic. I now take back all of my previous judgements regards this getto blaster's CD player. I really like it. Hearing the Glen Miller band explode into stereophonic life when the player was first turned on was as much a surprise as I got when first turning the system to Mono last January and heard the music being played at that moment stay up in the sound image area behind the window instead of collapsing in an instant into small dull sounds issuing directly from the front of the speaker box. This did not happen then (last January), the sound was sonically enhanced enough, that I immediately began to call this the 'Stereo in Mono' effects. And as said it was a very unexpected surprise. To repeat, the surprise in January was hearing a sonic recurrance of Mono sound in a Stereo effect in a large sound image area up in the air and BEHIND the dining room windows in a form of true stere imaging, rather than the expected weak dull totally local mono. Once again, (as already said), the performance of the CD player is in every way as much a pleasant surprise. There is one thing new already learned in the last few minutes. When I first turned on the CD player and the Glen Miller band sprang into stereophonic life, the East/West image was extremely wide spread. You could hear the drums and cymbols being played rearward and way out in space beyond the Right hand speaker, and a sax was playing equally out in space well beyond the bound of the Left hand speaker. In fact, what was in place was a hole, there was nothing of the orchestra being heard in the middle of the huge sound image behind the window. It turned out that one snowflake cured this. This is a single 18mm snowflake sitting on a wooden edge at the forward end of the left table on which sits the Left hand speaker box. This table has a two-inch wide strip of cedar wood along one edge, forming a back part, the table itself is press board with a white surface. This four foot table is turned with its end to the back wall so that it extends into the dining area, and sits flush to the end of another four foot table which sits against the wall and on which is the Right hand speaker box. When this single snowflake was carefully twist tuned by a few degrees in arc, the sound image coalesced, merging toward the center of the sound image, and clarifying somewhat in overall fidelity. Actually, I like it better more spread out. When focused into the middle the sound hardened and went up a bit in pitch. I think the original spread out sound is more authentic, the only reason it seems like there is a hole is that I am so close to the sound generating source when standing in the dining area. Further back in the living room area, there is no hole and the effect is of a large orchestra on stage behind the windows. So there you are. AMBIENT HANG (delayed echo responses) has benefit in the sound stream itself. For instance normally an audience's handclapping sounds like frying bacon. It crackles and pops weakly. With stereophonic presence in particular major front to back imaging, the clapping is that of a genuine audience out there in the depths of the environment where the band was playing when recorded in Mono long ago. Speaking of HANG, there are two kinds to concider; HANG from delayed musical responses as a musician plays, and AMBIENT HANG from delayed room echo responses. This second form of HANG rejuvinates the presence of a band in 3-D space after the fact, after the recording, in playback. FULL STEREO IN TWO-SPEAKER STEREO MODE FROM A MONO TAPE ----------------------------------------------------------------- In all fairness there was nothing else to do but try the original Benny Goodman tape, the one that had been worked over to the nth degree in Mono day before yesterday. And yes, I am pleased to report, it was remarkably improved. This time I played it in full two speaker stereo. It took some work, about 1/2 hour of fussing and fuming over little things here and there throughout the whole room environment until finally I'd gotten rid of most of the shrill, and figured the bass into a big spread out proper sound at the back of the bandstand, over to the right, and had the drum set sitting over to the left, with RING in the cymbols and powerful tone filled stage echoing rim shots. In terms of overall impact, it was not as impressive as swing recorded in Mono and played on the CD player, nonetheless in terms of two days ago this was quite a sound, to say the least. Now, once again, don't let me lead you astray. In terms of modern day fidelity truly audiophile this was not. On the other hand it was definately stereophonic, and the band was BREATHING front to back and East to West, though not to the same extent as the Glen Miller band, in that HANG in THAT band seems to have been one of Glen Miller's more capable orchestrating techniques. Then in the Benny Goodman tape on came SING SING SING. I think this is going to be worth more work, no matter how much it takes. I am reasoning that no matter how the thing was recorded, there has to be some mighty HANG in the echoes and reverbs happening between the different drums during those drum solos. I have just touched the hem of the garment so far. I have the drum set well back on stage and this time it is to the right on this particular recording, or at least, according to the way I have things tuned at this moment. But I am getting the hang of the room echoes, pun intended. This guy Gene Krupa sure knew his stuff. Blown up and stereoized like this, that guy was really wailing, something like the HANG Joe Morello playing for Dave Brubeck used to manifest comprising about at least 50 percent of the effect of Morello's solos, this 50% being the lingering HANG between the different echoing parts of his drum set as he played his solos, etc. In SING SING SING Gene Krupa used delayed echoes and HANGING back beats probably like no other drummer ever. You can NEVER hear this on mono playbacks, nor on any stereo sets playing the original recordings, what you would hear is lineal time and straight ahead rhythm structures, you would not hear the time delayed pauses and skipped beats wrapping around the reverberating echos unless your stereo set is capable of achieving deep front to back imaging as well as full orchestra East to West separation for a band (such as Benny Goodman) recorded in Mono. * I hear tell of a 1930's era drummer named Baby Dodds who was supposed to be so good he inspired Gene Krupa. Trouble is not much apparently was recorded of Baby Dodds (trivia I picked up over the years occasionally listening to the CBC radio) and what was recorded never captured Baby Dodds going at it in solos for an hour or more at a time. One final comment. There are problems with the sound, still. One thing I have learned is that shrill is unfocused stereo. When I get rid of shrill, I get better stereo definition, on the other hand, I can tune in more shrill of a certain kind, using just one single 18mm snowflake in fact, and get in far better stereo definition East to West, for instance, just in playing around exploring sound effects. I think there is something else which is an impression which may be correct or not. At the moment I think it is correct. Here is how the impression works. In normal stereo recordings a singer or instrument can be recorded in a separate booth and the result superimposed (dubbed) over the main tracks with the result that an arbitrary sound signal has been intruded into an original play, and this should perhaps cause certain forms of distortion, but I believe that snowflake tuning can treat the intruder as just another instrument, or voice, inserted into the band or orchestra and snowflake tuning can suitably then accomodate this. However, in the case of old style swing, recorded for the original bands in Mono, something else takes place. For instance on the Benny Goodman cassette tape are a couple of numbers sung by a female singer. It would seem that the the band was recorded first, then the singer later recorded separately and superimposed (dubbed) over the band. The result of this is a truly artificial intrusion. The effect in snowflake tuning is heard as a two way yin/yang form of big distortion. For instance the singer can be sonically tuned to sound loud and clear and alive as if standing right out in the open singing away in the huge sound image area, but then the rest of the band, the background, is shrilly as hell and very weak and muffled. On the other hand the band can be sonically tuned to have clear fidelity and live presence filling the huge sound image area including East/West separation, and the singer sounds shrilly as hell, in fact unlistenable. This duo yin/yang problem seemingly can be overcome by very deft, very careful, snowflake tuning, but I don't know yet if the problem can be entirely overcome not having had the time to play with this problem for a long spell, say two or three hours, and not knowing if the snowflake embodiments I currently have are suitably good enough. I know I am risking loosing credibility in reporting the above intruder alert. But for a fact I have heard differences. Even on old swing music originally recorded in Mono, on some tracks and in parts of certain recordings, both vocals and instruments can be tuned in or out simultaneously to better fidelity and sonic stereophonic presence, but also at times a vocalist behaves as a separate sonic entity, being clear and distinctly sonic and stereophonic as the surrounding orchestra snuffs up like an earthworm trying to bite dust. Then coversly, the orchestra is horking away loud and clear in sonic stereophonics and the singer's screetch and distortion per se is intollerable. I do not know if this is strictly a question of inept tuning on my part or the limitations of my current devices and sonic tuning objects, or if this is a quality on the monoral tape. Time will tell, perhaps. USING RADIO ADS FOR TUNING IN MONO IN STEREO ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 25, 1992, 2:00 PM. Oddly enough, using the commerical breaks, the FM radio's blurbs and retails advertisments, can be a boon when you want to fine tune Mono in Stereo effects, when the system is playing in 100% mono through one speaker. The reason why is the number of ambiant background sounds which can be heard on such ads. For instance on one of Ottawa's power pumping FM stations featuring new and old hits (supposedly the best) I happened to be in the kitchen and on came an ad for a spectular featuring a department store. The male voice was up front, yakking away about something amazing about this department store, and in the background was a noise, merely discernable, vaguely crowd-like, which sounded both like a splattering rainfall and frying bacon. During the ad, (a very long one), I managed to tune a couple of fractal sonic objects, and in came the department store. It turns out that the ambiant background for this ad had been recorded in stereo in a crowded deparment store, and there was I, standing in the presence of long isles receeding into the far distance as you would normally hear in a crowded department store, with customers talking as single point sources of sound everywhere you looked into the sonic picture, and a crowd of people clapping hysterically in a state of crazed glee after the announcer had finished the blurb. The most interesting thing about this was in hearing the rainsplatter and spitting frying bacon sounds suddenly shift around and spread out wideways and backward, to become the floor area of the huge department stores, as I carefully tuned. The echoes transformed and become correct. All of the echoes were correct. There was no question that I was standing in a department store, facing foward to a male person yakking about prices in my direction, and all around, especially behind, the appreciative throng rounded up by the ad's producers clapping on cue when the yakker's persuading blurb was finished. The point is that this was an excellent opportunity to fine tune Mono in Stereo effects, playing in 100% Mono through the Right hand speaker box of my stereo system. I have to qualify the fidelity. All of the sound range is there, including big bottom bass resonances, but it is slightly colored, as if I have something metallic in my ears. USING TAPES WITH SPECIAL EFFECTS FOR TUNING IN MONO IN STEREO ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 26, 1992, 2:00 PM. An even better opportunity for tuning in genuine stereo effects in a Mono in Stereo sound stream occurred this afternoon, playing an 11 year old cassette tape of the Pink Floyd. (This is the recording with 'Run Rabbit Run' and the cassette tape I have was taken off an LP in 1980). At one point it simulates the waiting area of an airline terminal, with a women's voice calling flight arrival and departure information over the public address, as the Pink Floyd plays around with their experimental music. I first heard this voice as an indistinct distorted noise and couldn't hear her words, but after a bit of fiddling, tuning a couple of sonic pieces, suddenly the women's voice clarified and moved far back into the deep recesses of the sound image, exactly like a voice echoing from the Public Address system from a long way off in an airline terminal. I would say a couple of hundred feet was perhaps the real sounding depth of this sonic picture. But boy you should have seen how carefully I had to tune two sonic controller objects to get that voice in the distance clarified as a precise sound picture in the holograms of the moire pattern resonating as a Mono generated source. This was a very impressive effect, both for the Pink Floyd band itself, and due to the fact that it was a tape that had aged 11 years stored in a box of odds and ends, and on my getto blaster performing in 100% Mono through the Right hand speaker. This was this afternoon. SPINNER ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 26, 1992, 12:00 AM. This evening, something else was tried for the first time. It has long occurred to me that spinning a super giant starflake at a slow speed should somehow boost the stereophonics, boost the intrinisic volume level, and improve the fidelity of the system playing in 100% Mono. I was expecting marginal improvement, but got instead so much sudden powerful bass boost through the Left hand speaker playing in 100% Mono that when the speed of the spinning super giant snowflake was set to just the right velocity it power boosted the bass so much it pushed the speaker back starting to teeter off its pedestal within a few seconds. This backward thrusting speaker was caught just in the nick of time. Now, several comments are in order. Firstly, all I could do tonight was one quick 10 minute test then had to shut down due to sleepers getting ready for a busy day tomorrow. Secondly, the jerry rigged device used to spin the snowflake took three days to get together, and as it was it was just barely useable. The problems actually had begun the day before, with no success whatever on the first attempt at spinning a super giant snowflake. The problems yesterday were as follows: The problem was to be able to reostat the snowflake's speed from zero to fairly fast with precise control. So, I got a tranformer from an HO guage railway on sale at a fantastic low price and hooked it to a little motor I had, and the thing spun so fast the snowflake was a blurr. WAY TOO FAST. I tried wiring in a reostat switch as a second control but still had virtually no control over the velocity. But also, with or without the second reostat, the HO train transformer kept clicking off about very 15 seconds and I had to wait about a minute for it to click on again. So today was phone calls, and a 10 mile trip to a hobby store, where was offering exactly the same little motor I had already tried at home. This motor came in via the X factor three years ago, at a Humanitarian Society's annual meeting, where a Holistic Physician who had bought several dozen for an experiment and found they were the wrong kind was walking around handing them out from a grocery plastic bag. The Humanitarian Society was named 'PACE'. This evening I scouted other hobby centers, and the hobby departments of Eaton's and The Hudson's Bay, looking for either a cheap HO old style steam engine where I could attach the spinning snowflake to the train's wheels, but no luck. Battery operated turbo cars wouldn't work because their hand held reostats wouldn't allow fixed settings, the velocity would only be as steady as my finger on the reostat's trigger, and assuming I taped the thing, the reostats were not of good enough quality to vary the speed through a wide steady range. So said the manager of The Hudson's Bay's toy department. Heading out the Mall door I passed a Radio Shack store. Moments later I was heading out the Mall door again with a 12 volt motor, a 100 ohm reostat, and 50 feet of thick speaker wire. To make a long story short, this worked, sort of. With the HO guage transformer turned on to its lowest possible setting, (next slightest twist and it is turned OFF) I can turn up the 100 ohm reostat a smideon and get a slow velocity, then hardly touching it, it jumps to rather fast, then really whizzes up to speed with just a slight more of a turn, so fast the super giant snowflake could literally fly apart if I left it spinning. The point is that as difficult as it was to control the slow speed, I was able to bounce back and forth over an obvious optimal velocity for spinning the snowflake. In my best careful control of the device, I was able to set speeds stablized just a bit too slow, or just a bit too fast, for the optimal speed. It was when spinning at the slightly too fast frequency (velocity) that, nonetheless, the sound stream responded to its sonic amplifying sound wave disturbances to such successful levels that it literally drove the Left hand 100% Mono playing speaker backwards in an audio thrust of extremely loud sudden turbo roar that was this time fidelic, not just a raw appalling racket previously called 'Turbo Roar' in these experiments. Tomorrow, March 28, 1992, the plan is to get a better remote variably controllable reostat to be able to slide with easy control back and forth through the optimal velocity for spinning a super giant snowflake, and also try a second spinning snowflake on the other side of the room to see what the two might do together to a sound system playing stereophonically in 100% Mono. For a fact I have already seen an improvement beyond my expections. While the 10 minute spin test was underway with the spinning snowflake, I walked around randomly disturbing objects and even giant snowflakes in major ways, and heard hardly a distruption in the sound stream. What a difference from the norm. Previously, any object if it was being tuned in the environment could take long seconds even longer to suitably tune, and snowflakes and giant snowflakes were particularly critical. With these, once in place during a tuning run, even the slightest touch could make or break the sonic stereophonic presence of the system playing in 100% Mono. So perhaps that fracturing instability problem has been solved. Time will tell. Tomorrow, with two spinning super giant snowflakes, and (hopefully) means to control their spinning velocity more accurately, I should have more to report in the way of interesting news, rather than half way there ramblings. Incidentally, for any would be or budding technicians or scientists who are at the moment amateur (said in a kind way) here is what can happen. To start with, the 100 ohm reostat was not sensitive enough to allow for variable speeds, It had been wired to the HO guage railway transformer and to the motor by my brother in a first attempt to try it. Three problems: as said it was not velocity sensitive. Also you could feel juice when touching its metal parts. And also after a moment of trying to set the HO transformer some smoke and crackling pops suddenly issued from the 100 ohm reostat. So another reostat was dug from a box of odd parts in the basement and wired up in a different way. This is the version that was used for the above mentioned 10 minute power pump resonance test using a spinning super giant snowflake whose slow velocity was only partially controllable but enough to hear good sonic results in the sound stream. Later I decided to try the original 100 ohm reostat wired up in the new way. But it was zip zero nothing, fried inside and defunct. So the other reostat (whose ohms aren't known only the words JAPAN DGATA appear on it) was hooked up again, and nothing happened, no snowflake spin, and suddenly smoke, lots of it. So it doesn't work anymore either. What's worse, something about the way it was originally wired up worked, but in seeming to wire it up the same way a second time it didn't work, so obviously something about the second wiring was wrong. But what the heck was wrong.... I don't know.... I'm inventing these hard tech skills as I go along and it seems there are definately some things that take practice when blind luck perfect intuition fails to work a second time in a row. Gotta buy more stuff, tomorrow. Fortunely, this kind of stuff (reostats plus a second 12 volt motor) don't cost very much. INTERLUDE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 28, 1992, 2:50 AM. What a day THIS has been. I am now assuming that the difficulty in proceeding to the very next step is in direct proportion to the importance of that very next step. The above remark only has one interpretation: Nothing happened today. Well, it did, sort of. More stalemate, more false news, more trips to make around town tomorrow. And not a single new toy or device in hand to use to slowly spin super giant snowflakes. One advance was made, that was in knowledge. The sixth store visited so far trying to get cheap gear together to spin the snowflakes, reasoned out that the 12 volt motor I am using (bought the day before at Radio Shack for $3.98 plus GST), was not going to be able to be spun REALLY SLOWLY. The reason why, even if reostats, or even if resisters were patched into the wires, is that at the moment the motor recieves enough juice to cause it to start spinning, its bottom spin rate will be still too fast to be controllable through any useable slow range. What I need therefore, is a hobby motor with a reduction gear in it of some kind. Now, WHERE TO GET TWO OF THEM? Well, this fellow (an electronics repair store operator) suggested a dealer, one of the city's biggest High Tech and Electronics stores. And so, this big High Tech and Electronics store was open, so I drove the six miles there this evening (Friday) but the parts counter was closed. Even if opened, they could supply just about anything in terms of circuit parts and electronic items used to build something. But, oh wow hey, a complete MOTOR would have to be ordered from a catalogue, providing they could find a catalogue tomorrow (Saturday) that had such motors for sale via a wholesaler. But, it was doubtful. So said a salesperson pretending to know some things about it but invented almost everything said. This person told me he is tied in with a speaker developing project that was just written up yesterday in the Ottawa Citizen daily newspaper. Big news. It is a project that has taken over 9 years in Ottawa and includes the mighty resources of the National Research Council, and now they are ready to put a new $2500 speaker on the market. The salesperson tonight at the High Tech store told me the outfit has just tied in with a major giant in California so it is ready to take off. I told him a bit about my project. He immediately wanted to know what major firm was behind it and how many years had the research taken for developement. When I told him eight months, by myself, in the dining room of a low rental Condo, he seemed to loose interest, looked at me with one eyeball bigger than the other, and decided I had fogotten how to use a brain was the problem, I think, when our chit chat shut down to zero. It happened just after I started to tell him a few quick insights about the Mono in Stereo experiments. Wow you'd think this was another time period on a different planet. There is of course the question of Information Overload, where it seems that clerks and store owners know less and less about what it is their stores or businesses do, but know more and more about how much money and prestige it takes to start creating an impression. But the technology side of modern civilization is fast entering an intelligence crunch even faster, it seems. Trying to simply control the slow speed of a tiny motor has turned into a saga that has so far involved nine stores and four days, and I still don't know where to go next to get the simple stuff. Even something for a pulley system. Witness the description of an experiment now taking place in Europe to pin down, once and for all, the Definitive home listening stereo system. This experiment has taken years to research and put together, with specialists from all over the world working on it. They are now ready to test. And so you have the breakthrough. The listener sits entirely alone in a computer controlled dentist's chair jacked on a frame over 8 feet high in the air in the very center of a gigantic accoustic chamber, which is said to be 'accoustically' able to reproduce the environment of anything in a living room of large to small homes, etc., by cunningly moving its 32 hanging speaker enclosures around to different distances in a chamber utterly devoid of any echoes, after taking the time to program the computer to do so, for each move. I can picture it now. Test Number 24,434 - 'Feather on the Table'. Test Number 24,435 - 'Feather on the Floor'. Oops, the woman climbing into the chair just stepped on the feather, gotto do it all over again with a new canary feather, starting with the 'Canary on the Wall' test first. I don't know. It sounds like they've taken the old technology to about as far as it can go, and then have taken a gigantic leap straight forward into the absurd. Not one single six sided item can be seen anywhere in the illustration which accompanies the announcement of this elevation to new heights in research, the announcement to the world being in a one page article in April 1992 Discover Magazine. A photo shows the inside of the chamber, with a guy the size of an ant sitting way up there in the chair. 32 various sized spherical enclosures hang by wires everywhere at different heights all the way down to the floor. Every square inch of the walls covered with rectangular accoustic pieces for baffles. Everything controlled with utmost rigor and intent. The only thing I have to rigorously control is my random thoughts about what is going on out there in the world at large. For instance.... Tonight at that High Tech store, I heard a $1895.00 Hi Fi set which sounded more unacceptable than my sonically tuned $370.00 system here at home performing at its worst. Not ever since last December (except the few times it temporarily collapsed in chaos) has my system sounded as bad as did that $1895.00 stereo system in the High Tech store, being given a demo to a family of four in fact. It was the two elderly Vietnamese family members who called it quits and dragged the two younger adults out of the store. On the other hand, there was a pair of $1250.00 ENERGY speakers playing in the 'Head In The Vice' sound room of this High Tech store, which had something of the stereo presence I can get here in abundance at home with my system playing in Mono in Stereo. I don't know how the ENERGY speakers would compare at real high volume, or if being played through one side only in 100% Mono. I do know that at times when my system has hit a temporary peak in tuning it has sounded far more impressive even in 100% Mono than did the $1250 ENERGY speakers sound in full two speaker stereo. One thing immediately noticed about these ENERGY speakers is they did have a somewhat colored sound, as if I had something metallic in my ears. Too crisp to be natural. Right now, my system playing in 100% Mono through the Right hand speaker, sounds a heck of a lot better than did the ENERGY speakers, at about the same volume. But it is late at night here at home and the FM station has been slowly drifting in and out of sonic perfection. At this moment it is sounding excellent. Tomorrow I might go back to that High Tech store with the Glen Miller cassette tape and see how it sounds played through one speaker only on that pair of ENERGY speakers. There is an even bigger pair of ENERGIES, I would try those too, if I can find a salesperson who knows how to switch the stereo system playing the ENERGY speakers to Left and Right Mono. I would want to hear how the ENERGY speakers image both East and West plus front to back in Mono, and whether they get around problems of instrument shrill and boomy ambiguous bass on old original Glen Miller tunes recorded entirely in Mono. I particularly want to hear if speaker brands like ENERGY can get the HANG of the Glen Miller band, can they recreate the sonic presence of that band's rhythmic BREATHING between sections of the orchestra, for instance. I wouldn't need to say anything, or not much anyway, the point being to see how far behind or ahead I am at this point in go-it alone private home research compared to the heavies of the stereo universe in these modern day times, lets give a reasonably long time span, say, from last month to tomorrow. Speaker models keep changing faster than baby diapers when it comes to retail. ALMOST - AND INFORMATION UNDERLOAD ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 29, 1992, 12:30 AM. I got a motor that works. It is a burned out motor from a variable speed vacuum cleaner given free by the owner of a vacuum cleaner store where I went today to get new bags for the Black and Decker. (This is store number 15). This fellow likes to tinker, and once seeing my problem (I had brought along the HO guage Railway transformer and the 12 volt motor), he tried a brand new vacuum cleaner motor which revved too high, then dug one out of the rubbish box and when it was hooked up to the transformer it worked perfectly. At least at the store. And at home. But.... I haven't had a chance to try it yet to spin the super giant snowflake because when I was attempting to hook up the super giant snowflake it shattered in my hand and is sitting there waiting for the glue to dry. The second super giant snowflake is also sitting there waiting for the glue to dry. How it shattered is a different story. Two days ago in a hobby store, (Store number seven), the super giant snowflake was sitting on the cash counter while I went one last time to check through the store's residual HO railway left-overs from a giant christmas sale special, looking for an old fashion piston driven locomative model which I thought I could use in an emergency to spin the super giant snowflake. When I got back to the cash counter, someone had systematically broken up my super giant snowflake entirely into small single pieces while I was off up the aisle and my back was turned. Can you IMAGINE!. Some psychic interference crept in at a weak moment due to the fact that I'd recklessly left the snowflake in a state of implied trust on the counter. I wasn't doing anything wrong otherwise, the clerk (a keen young oriental gal) and I had been getting along like excellent friends and I certainly don't think it was her who broke the snowflake into parts. Anyway, both super giant snowflakes are being re-glued, and so any sound tests will have to wait till tomorrow due to the fact that ordinary and loud volume tests can't be done at this time of night, after the super glue hardens. How I got to Store number 15 is part of the continuing saga, as follows: Store number 10 (in Bell's Corners) had a well-stocked technical hobby counter yet a very odd place with an old fashion barber shop for crew cut men in the rear. There the keen young clerk suggested that a dimmer control switch for a dining room chandelier might work, supposedly on sale at the Bell's Corner K-Mart for $5.95. The reasoning behind this idea is that such dimmer switches are designed for light bulbs so are not heavy duty. The hardware Department manager at the K-Mart store thought it should work too, costing only $9.95, and what the heck was this idea about a sale, nothing was on sale. However, in getting the dimmer switch home and trying it out, zip, zero, nothing, deader'n a doornail. It simply failed to respond in any way at all. Store number 11 (this is all on Saturday afternoon) was the local junk yard, named Cohen's. An owner was just locking the yard gate as I pulled out of the stream of traffic into the entranceway, closing early these days on Saturday due to the recession. The owner thought they might have some stuff in the back that could solve the problem but I wouldn't get to see it till Monday. Driving up the busy street intending to head home I spotted an electrical business's sign in an industrial park bay and hoved in. Guys inside. One of them was building a robot and had had to design a variable speed 12 volt motor driver from scratch using four chips and circuits and the whole kitermaroo and so the motor could spontaneously vary through a range from 1 RPM per second up to thousands, so the fellow told me. Meanwhile the owner had gone out back and rummaging through the garbage came back with a fan motor from a Microwave oven which was mine to use, for free. Should be no problem using it with the light fixture dimming switch I'd bought from the K-Mart store, was everybody's opinion. So home I went and wired it up. Zip, zero, nothing. When wired to the dimmer switch utterly nothing happened. When wired alone to a 120 volt power cord the Micro Wave motor revved so fast its fan turned invisible. So that was the end of Store number 12. Store number 13 was a Lighting Fixture Emporium. I went in to see if they had a cheap dimmer switch or reostate used to run Casablanca overhead fans, of which there were many slowly at work in the store turning at exactly the rates of speed I wished to try for the super giant snowflakes. However the owner of this (Store No. 12) doesn't sell such things as overhead fan controls, and had no idea where I might go, they only sell the fans, along with hundreds of different light fixtures. See what I mean about modern day Information Overload (or rather Information Underload) in the world of retail. So Store number 14 came into the picture. I hoved back into dense traffic out of the parking lot from the Lighting Emporium and up the street a few blocks and into the lot to the small vacuum cleaner store. And there encountered a young owner who firstly enthusiastically let my small dog companion into the store to romp with his small dog companion, then got to work seeing what he could gerry rig together for spinning a motor at variable slow speeds. First thing tried was the motor and battery pack out of a broken Black and Decker Dust Buster. But it didn't respond to any attempt at variable speed control, it came on at one speed only and wouldn't vary. The second attempt was a new motor for a variable speed vacuum cleaner model. It worked, sort of, but came on at a very high initial speed, and besides that was VERY expensive. Then attempt number three, the worn out motor from the rubbish box. It worked perfectly and so handing it to me, laughed when I asked him how much, saying look where he got it from, pointing to the rubbish box. So, re-cycling works. Anyway, when I got home the first thing to do was to try it with the dimmer switch control bought earlier in the afternoon from the K-Mart Store. The conclusion of this is, that dimmer switch does not work for this kind of job. FUN TODAY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 30, 1992, 1:20 AM. Today was a fun day, sort of. An idea occurred to me to try the famed light dimmer switch again, this time hooked to a light bulb. It worked. Turned out it needed to be hooked up in a parallel circuit, rather than in series as was originally advised by the Hardware Department manager of the K-Mart Store. Like I say, I am picking up high tech skills from scratch on a trial and error basis. Wiring up motors and switches has never been my thing, such things I have never had to do having a more or less complete total cringing dislike for electricity and any sparks or ozone. Even throwing a tripped circuit breaker back on takes COURAGE, as I subliminally flee at top speed while standing as if paralyzed on the spot while tap dancing to desparate rhythms the instant I throw a circuit breaker's switch. Some of you undoubtedly know what I mean. What's really worse is having to stand real close to a circuit breaker box trying to read the small print. However, after the last few days, I find I can easily tap two hot wires together looking for sparks without feeling those creepy weird sensations which make your hair stand when there's no wind. Having ascertained that the dimmer switch worked, I tried hooking it up to the HO train transformer and to the burned out vacuum cleaner motor, but there was zero response. So what else to do but try hooking it up to the motor direct, using an AC power cord plugged directly into the 120 volt wall outlet. Sure enough, the MOMENT the switch was turned on at its minimum lowest possible turn, the burned out vacuum cleaner motor came on with such fierce high revs that the super giant snowflake literally dissovled in pieces flying through the air throughout the kitchen in a noisy clattering blizzard of plastic parts that lasted about three full second, which was all it took. The super giant snowflake had vanished into thin air right before my eyes. The net result of this is the super giant snowflake is tediously being glued together again one more time. Four new snowflakes had to be filed from scratch, and two of the original 31 snowflakes are still missing, lost somewhere in the kitchen. Went to the flea market this afternoon (Sunday) looking for motors or something I could use. A computer parts clearance vender at the flea market had a cardboard carton full of motors from computer power supplies but these did not respond in the slightest to DC output. (I had taken the HO tranformer along to the flea market to try the motors). A tiny fan would have been perfect, expect that its blades turned invisible the instant the most minimum of juice made contact with it through the DC transformer. Too bad, I could have had it for about 2 dollars had it worked. (Money is not a miser's thing, here, the problem here is that there is no money to spend on anything but fundamentals like food and rent). Did pick up a better quality HO tranformer, used, for 5 bucks. But otherwise, no luck. I was hoping for better, this place is advertised as the largest flea market in Canada. I am beginning to think the way to go is an auto junk yard. Perhaps windshield wiper motors may work, since they are already in the ball park, being 12 volt, and variable speed DC motors. Tomorrow I may get a chance to check this out. THERE IS LOTS TO REPORT ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update April, 05, 1992, 3:10 AM. I never did get to an auto junk yard. In the meantime there is some more to report. There is a second set of echos, which produce more Mono in Stereo. At this moment, the two speaker boxes have been removed from the table and are tied together, end to end, and are hanging from a temporary suspension in mid air from a home-made microphone stand. The position of the joint configured speaker-pair is roughly seven feet back from the patio door. It doesn't matter actually where I put them, anywhere in the room results in a sonic recurrance of sound image somewhere else but from the fronts of the speakers. At this moment, the giant sound image is recurrancing along the area in front of the North (living room) wall of my low rental condo, when I am sitting at this computer against the south dining area wall. And when I am in the living room area, the whole of the giant sound imaging is recurrance against the East wall, spread between the patio doors and the dining room windows. At this moment, only the right hand speaker is playing. It is pointed roughly in a South-East direction, toward the dining room windows. What has been learned, is that beyond the somewhat interesting but strange sounding delayed musical response of the stereo cross talk in the background (the stereo echos crossing over from what would have been captured as being up front in the other mikes), is another kind of transient echo, which when captured by sonic snowflake focusing techniques, spreads out into a very big sound image. At times this image can become big enough that it may sound like music being performed live on the stage of a cathedral, it has that kind of mighty open space sound which you get in cathedrals. When focused slightly differently, the sound can be brought into a remarkable degree of fidelity, while maintaining the open air large image impact. All of this is in 100% Mono, don't forget. I wouldn't fool you but would certainly like to try and fool a guru, at this moment. I would say that any specialist in audio coming into my condo right now, would be very hard pressed to tell if the system is not playing in Stereo, and would not be able to tell which speaker is playing anyway, when in Mono, not even if one or the other, or both. Two hand built devices are making this possible. Without them, the sound image partially collapses and it can be clear when standing in certain parts of the environment that the sound is projecting from the Right speaker, the one in the speaker-pair that faces the windows. This is when the two devices are OFF. When the devices are working, the sound moves right away from the generating source and recurrs in a giant sound image coming alive in major areas of the environment entirely away from the sound stream's generating source. One device is a spinning super giant snowflake, sitting on the table against the South dining room wall to the left of this computer I am writing on. This spinner is controlled by a 6 volt HO railway transformer set to the slowest speed possible. I figure the speed is about 2 to 3 times too fast to be at its optimal, but at this moment cannot slow its speed any further. The center of the super giant snowflake is shoved on the shaft of the moter and the thing is spinning like a slow fan. The second device is a giant snowflake (13 individual snowflakes glued together) attached by a wire shaft wrapped around a turning spindle. The device itself is the drive mechanism with tiny motor pilfered from a cheap walkman cassette player that didn't work very well. However, the drive mechanism turned out to be a self contained platform after everything else was stripped from the pocket sized walkman. The giant snowflake is set up to turn like a leaf being turned on its stem, and is rotating at a speed of about 2 turns every three seconds. I figure this is about 1/2 to 1/3 the ideal speed for the device, but at the moment am unable to get it to turn any faster. It is being driven by an ordinary rechargeable (C) sized flashlight battery. This second device is sitting on the outer corner of a large cabinate which has been sitting by the entrance to the kitchen by the doorway in the living room area. The cabinate has been there for over three months. The device seems best placed out in the open more than tucked in some corner or against the wall. What these two spinning devices do is both break up standing waves that would tend to build in a destructive way, as well, the second device maintains a wide image dispersion of the stereo signals as it slowly rotates upright back and forth, to set up a gelled giant stereo image, something like how a motion picture projector creates an illusion of motion by projecting a number of still frames so fast the eye links the images together into one picture which is fluid. In similar kind, the upright giant snowflake rotating like a leaf by its stem, throws sonic images back and forth through a range which becomes merged into one giant image by the ears. If listening VERRRY carefully, I can hear the image shifting back and forth East to West very subtly, which is why I think it is spinning just a bit too slow. If a little faster, I should not be able to hear any fluctuations in the pictures within the sonic image. I should mention that at this moment the DBE (Dynamic Bass Expander) function is ON. About three weeks ago during a new round of tests I lost the ability to generate big bottom bass with the DBE function OFF so since then have done everything with the DBE function ON. At this moment, when the DBE function is turned OFF, most of the bottom bass vanishes leaving just a barely discernable trace of the lower ranges in sound. MORE IN THE SAGA ----------------------------------------------------------------- I have a third device driver, which doesn't work because it turns an upright giant snowflake too fast. This is another stripped out drive parts from a cassette player, this time from a costly stereo, but given to me by a small electronics repair dealer in the local Pinecrest Shopping Mall, rumaged from the junk box on a shelf in the rear of the store. This cassette driver couldn't be stripped down to the bare essentials so lots of extra clutter surrounds the drive parts I actually wanted. Despite this, as said, even with its gear and rubber band reductions and so on, the thing is still spinning much too fast to be useable. However, after three days, it was the only piece of useable junk I could find. I was on the phone calling every electronic repair place and major stereo dealer in town. Most places do not keep unrepairable stuff around, it gets pitched. Stereo dealers send their stuff to the repair dealers, so stereo dealers also do not have stuff sitting around. One big dealer, a fello I happen to know, pitched a high quality walkman two days before I asked. The area's biggest electronics service outfit pitched over 100 cassette decks in various pieces of scrap the weekend before I called. I then reasoned that the cassette drive needn't come from walkmans or stereos. It could be from anything including a telephone answering machine, or even a dictaphone. No luck on old telephone answering machines. The service manager of Dictaphone laughed in the sheer humor of the situation when I told him what I had in mind. It seems that just SIX HOURS EARLIER the service staff had been called together for a meeting, instructed to bring sledge hammers with them, for the semi annual trashing of non-working Dictaphones, and sure enough, 20 of them had been smashed up in a frenzied fun spree just six hours earlier. So that is how my luck has been in the past three days, trying to lay my hands on drive mechanisms for cassette tapes that I might use for spinning more giant snowflakes. No luck as yet. But perhaps luck is coming in the form of variable speed motors. It turns out, so I have been told, that to drive a small motor at slow to standstill speeds you need to PULSE the current, up to a certain speed before full DC clicks in, and the pulsing requires the design of circuitry. And so an ally, the head technician of Ottawa University's Physics Department, is putting together a circuitry and within a few days we should have something here to try. This fello came over the other day and the significance of hearing Glen Miller's orchestra via original Mono recordings circ. 1938-42 playing in stereo in my living room (despite the fidelity) did not escape him for an instant. Hence the offer to cook up circuitry to drive small motors at very slow speeds for better tests. GIANT SNOWFLAKE MOBILES ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update April, 15, 1992, 1:30 AM. A lot has changed around here in the last few days. There won't be a variable pulsed circuit designed to drive a slow motor slower. Unexpected ill health has derailed the offer, but an old gear motor with a gear reduction box was handed to me and it does work at the right speed, even though its worn gears grind in a most sound polluting way. One of the more important changes is a rebuilding of all of the stands used to support the giant snowflakes in an upright position. I went to a business which rebuilds motors and rewinds coils, and bought a pound of 13 1/2 guage copper wire (about 15 feet) and used this to make an entire new set of stands. Basically, I started each stand by folding a strand of the wire around the six sided circumpherence of a large plumbing nut, then bent the wire at a 120 degree angle, then bent it back by a 30 degree angle, forming a stand with a long horizontal shaft on which to support a giant snowflake. I picked up a tiny drill bit (from a surplus discount store for 89 cents) which is just the right size to drill out the hole in the center snowflake of a giant snowflake to just the right size that the giant snowflake fits tightly on the copper wire shaft and stays EXACTLY in place where put or turned. This has at last solved the long time problem of things bouncing around out of focus the moment I tune in something really good. With the new stands, it is possible to mount and tune a giant snowflake and have it stay exactly in place where tuned, irregardless of strength of bass output. This was a boon because the giant snowflakes were always bouncing out of precise focus by the sound stream and were taking constant retuning all the time. With the giant snowflakes stablized it was quickly possible to aduce two formerly unknown variables, which have both been resolved. Firstly, the overall sonic ambiance and result is better when all of the giant snowflakes around the room (the whole environment) are turned like upright doilies or stop signs to be facing face-on to the sound image area. A test, turning all of the giant snowflakes to focus edge-on to the sound image, resulted in the sound getting more and more strained and squeezed until when all of the giant snowflakes had been turned there was utterly no fidelity whatsoever in the sound stream to play with. The second variable is that TWO giant snowflakes definately work better than one, per stand, but not two together as was tried over a month ago in configures called Sunflowers. What really works is to have the two flowflakes, er, snowflakes, separated as far apart as possible on the shaft of a stand. Furthermore, the snowflake pointing closest to the sound image seems better focused on a vertical axis (ie., one of the outer snowflakes points straight up) with the second giant snowflake sitting behind turned by 30 degrees, so that if you brought the two together they would form a twelve sided geometric image. All of the single snowflakes have been removed everywhere from the environment. It turned out that they had become more so than ever extremely sensitive to any minor change in the environment, such as a coffee cup left by chance somewhere on the kitchen counter, and so required a great deal of fussing and retuning just to try and maintain some temporary reasonable fidelity. On the other hand, the double giant snowflakes (let's call them 'flowflakes' - because this new configuration seems to act like flow channels for certain aspects of the sound stream's image projection), seem to be good where they sit. That is, once focused, it is possible to leave them just as they are. TWO WORKING MOTORS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Which brings us to two big boosts in the experiment. I now have TWO small motors which can be spun at very slow speeds, and have new easily handled ways to power them and control their velocity. The solution came rather unexpectedly. Firstly, a multi-changeable AC converter was picked up at the Capital City Surplus store in Ottawa at a low price, which has an array of difference couplings, one of which I can tap easily with two alligator clips. (A second one of identical make and model I didn't know I had, turned up in a box of rummage in my basement) The rest of the 'solution' came as a find; a box of reostats complete with wires and a knob and selling for a dollar each in the Capital City Surplus store. These turned out to be real bum double control knobs for front and rear speakers or both on car stereos. When used to hook up a speaker they sound retched, static with occasional touches of sound as you turn the knob. No wonder they were selling for a buck. But as DC power reostats they are perfect, with the power converter switch set to 1.5 Volts and using the reostats I can turn two separate motors at any speed, all the way down to zero, with complete ease. One motor is the teeny motor and two drive wheels reduced to two different slower speeds by pullys, all attached to one small flat flatform, stripped from a cheap walkman cassette player. This one is driving a bird cage with the birdcage's shaft still thrust into a piece of sponge twisted into the center of a hydro extender and by putting liquid honey on the bottom of the hydro extender I can stand it on one of the platform's spinning wheels and by fussing a bit can stablize it staying upright enough to spin it at up to, say, 3 turns a second, but find it works best as a sonic booster when turning very slowly at a speed of about 1 revolution every two seconds. The other motor came from a tiny corner of an electronics repair place run by Lebonese downtown. This fellow had over a dozen motors for sale one of which was supposedly a variable speed so I gave it a try for seven bucks and it worked. It is spinning two super giant snowflakes pressed together on its shaft to form a 12 sided snowflake which is spinning at a rate of about one revolution per second like a dutch windmill. It does not matter entirely where these spinning enhancers sit but two good hot spots have been found for them. One is on the table along the windows, with the spinning birdcage about six feet from the front of the Right hand speaker (more about where the speakers are located in a moment) and the other (the dutch windmill) is on the right side of the table against the South wall of the dining area, about two feet to the right of the computer I'm using to type these reports using an editor called 'Ringworld', devolped by mysxelf during an earlier hopeful but unavailing project about four years ago. As for the two getto blaster speakers, they are still tied together back to back, mounted on a homemake stand not quite in the center of the main floor area of my low rental condo, biased a little toward the East rather than right in the center of the room. The two speaker boxes have been strapped end to end with thin cord and are supported underneath by a stick something like a piece of yardrule, such that rather than being lineally end to end there is a bend of about a 15 degree angle between the two boxes so that each points upward ever so slightly. Also, they are hanging suspended by twine and front to back are cammed at an angle of about 30 degrees relative to a pure North/South alignment parallel to the wall, so that for instance the Right speaker is pointing roughly toward the South/East corner of the dining area. Having the speakers hanging aligned perfectly parallel to the North/South wall was tried for a couple of days, and was found to be quite impressive when doing full two-speaker stereo tests, but these got boring and for several days I have been running the system entirely in 100% Mono mostly through the Right hand speaker. In Mono, having the speaker's hanging slightly cammed is more effective. The result of this arrangement is that, no matter where I am in the main floor area, the sound is projected into a giant sonic image somewhere in front of me, and well back and spread out behind the hanging speakers. For instance here at the computer, the sound behind me is spread out entirely in the large area behind the speakers, occuring in the whole of the region along the far back living area wall. If I am in the living area up by the front door, the sound is again entirely behind the hanging speakers, all in an area which ranges from behind the patio doors to around the L-corner into the dining area and out behind the dining room area windows. In the main, no matter where I go, the sound recurrs in a full image behind the hanging speakers, and swings around to maintain that perspecitive as I walk around, retaining its fidelity throughout most of the sound area. However there are peaks and valleys in the sound, in that you can find a few bad spots for listening by walking very slowly around to oddball places in the environment. NEW WAY OF LISTENING ----------------------------------------------------------------- I have just in the last three or four days picked up on something new to listen for when tuning things up and finding positions for the flowflakes (two giant snowflakes on a horizontal shaft). Originally, when Mono in Stereo was first determined last January and February, it was found that a faint transient signal in the sound way in the background in the distance behind the main sound could be strengthened by tuning to become quite distinct. This was deemed to be transient cross reflections picked up as 'cross talk' between the stereo mikes and now heard coming through the speaker channel figuratively representing one mike only. In the earlier setup, with both speakers sitting apart on the table, and playing around with one speaker working in Mono, it was enough of a task just to be able to bring out the cross talk effect so that it was obviously noticable. With this new setup (all single snowflakes removed and the speaker boxes strapped together and hanging by twine from a single stand) it has been possible to play with this cross talk effect to such an extent that it can become isolated, and operate almost as a 'second city' sound happening as if on its own independently in the deep background behind the main sound signal, in Mono in Stereo tests. This is actually quite a weird and unnatural effect, because the main foreground sound can be made quite fidelic, with this very different ghost-like sound echoing from very far away in the deep background of the sound image and actually delayed behind the main beat of the music. At this point, it seems, there is no coupling between the foreground sound, and its background delayed sound echo, this 'second city' effect. On the other hand, with this new setup, I can marry the two sounds, so that the strange transient cross talk effect in the background disappears entirely and the cross talk sound becomes married into the same recurrance as the foreground sound, sounding like full stereo in its tonal quality, but with the proviso that the instruments or voices represented are performing at a lower or weaker volume, is all. TWO NEW WAYS TO IMPROVE THE SOUND ----------------------------------------------------------------- Two new sonic boosters have been experimentally added into the system in the past two days. Five days ago a small ornamental 'holigram' mobile consisting of two pieces of six sided shape and costing $4.95 in a downtown hobby store was tried and found to give a kick, expecially in the volume of the bottom bass range, depending on where it was hanging suspended by a thin brass wire, or lying on its side (for instance on the wooden base of the homemade stand from which hangs the two speaker boxes). Because this little mobile seemed to give such a kick to the sound stream, two more were made using the original as a template, drawn on stiff paper and cut out with a pair of small sewing scissors. However, it turned out, that originally when the setup was badly tuned prior to creating the new flowflake support stands, these little mobiles did give a good kick, but when things got more finitely tuned using the flowflake embodiments for handling the giant snowflakes in rigorously tunable fashion, it became apparent that the little mobiles had become spoilers except when positioned just so in a very few precise locations. But the idea itself seemed good enough that a larger mobile was made, drawn using a compass and straight edge, modelled approximately like an actual snowflake but actually comprising the absolute blueprint of a Cube and Sphere as can be gained by turning a spinning transparent Rubic's cube on two axis and seeing six sided geometry and a Star of David forming in the outlines made by the spinning Rubic's Cube. The template for the giant mobile was cut out with an exacto knife and an inner Star of Dave bonded to an inner hexagram frame by dabs of honey, and the resulting 2-piece mobile was tried by holding it up in the air in different locations around the enviroment. This larger mobile turns out to have a sonic kick for the better no matter where it is in the room, but serves best when hanging suspended out on front of a speaker, like a carrot dangling from a stick in front of a donkey. So it now hangs out there in front of the Right hand speaker, held in place by a hanger made simply of a long piece of 13 1/2 guage copper wire which is snagged into the twine used to hang the speaker boxes in midair. The second improvement (sonic boost) came by chance. I had today picked up a broken Sony Walkman. This was once a better grade device with AM and FM radio, as well as cassette tape stereo recording capability via self contained mikes, plus ability for plug-in stereo speakers, and external stereo mikes, and earphone. The story on devices like this is when they break down, it is too expensive to fix them due to the elves micro-bit sizing of the parts, etc., and usually they simply get thrown out. This one had made its way to the upstairs service department of Neighborhood House (like a Salvation Army sales outlet only bigger, in Ottawa) where it was being stripped of parts (the AC converter plug socket had been stripped out of it, for instance. I got the rest for 2 bucks). Its motor and drive assembly turned out to be unusable as a one piece motor assembly, but out of it came... ...a thin square piece of clear plastic in a thin metal frame about 1 3/4 inches across which turned out to be a S P E A K E R. It further turned out that this little wafer could take the same juice as one of the getto blaster's speakers at ranges up to 50% gain on the volume knob. And so it is now sitting suspended in air out in front of the Right hand speaker, attached to another home made floor stand, wired upright in place by a piece of the 13 1/2 inch copper wire. What this little open air resonator does is quite interesting. In tuning the system for Mono, I can currently get pretty strong responses through all of the sound range down into deep bottom bass but in order to get impressively obvious East/West separation plus a certain other open air presence I like, I can end up with a sound that is fractionated, that is, there is breakup of fidelity here and there all the way through the sound range. This little wafer resonator put in place and wired for its tiny piston to operate in synch with the Right hand speaker, cleans up the fractionating rather handily. Its best location seems to be slightly angled, sitting upright about seven inches out from the piston of the Right hand speaker, in a direct line to the Right hand speaker's piston. However this location may not be necessarily stamped in iron. A lot has to do with just where the large mobile is hanging nearby. And a quick test standing there twisting the little wafer resonator back and forth definately indicates that having it moving back and forth is the way to go, once I can figure out a way to have it slowly occilating back and forth in the air. This is just the start. It is clear that I will have to try a bigger wafer, once I can find one, and see what it does in the sound stream similarly located, and also figure out how to wire it to a reostat so I can control its volume independent of the Right hand speaker whose signal I am tapping to drive it. So far, reostat hookup tests have been unavailed, either I get nothing at all, or a loud raw power buzz from a short circuit going through even the Left hand speaker which is turned Off. Ouch. Anyhow, this is the Update. Here is a summary. At the moment there are five flowflakes stationed around the environment. The two giant snowflakes of each are roughly five inches apart, which is interesting because they were all independently tuned but each seems to work best with the two giant snowflakes about 5 inches apart. Two other new stands were experimentally made with short shafts so that the two giant snowflakes on them are about 2 inches apart. It seems that longer shafts work better. I have one other flowflake which is quite different. It is a super giant snowflake and a giant snowflake mounted about three inches apart on a horizontal shaft. Without question this experimental embodiment works best with the smaller snowflake up front facing closest to the sound generator. If I turn this thing around so the larger snowflake faces the hanging speaker boxes a lot of good stuff in the sound stream is lost. I can see from this a future test in which a number of different sized flakes are spayed out along a shaft proceeding from smallest to largest snowflake the further away from the generating source. Perhaps. No sure way of telling if this is a good idea until it is tried. I might (instead of doing the tedious work of filing and gluing a couple of hundred more single snowflakes) try a test using cut out paper images similar to those already used for making the large mobile. It will be easy to draw these as geometry contructions, and to cut them out with an exacto knife. What makes this idea feasible is that paper objects turn out to work most definately as tuners and can be quite snowflake-like in their flat shape. One other thing may or may not be becoming apparent. This is in the nature of air molecule resonances vrs solid matter resonances, as effecters of the resulting quality of sound. In earlier tests lasting through the winter, with both speaker boxes on the table placed about six feet apart in typical stereo fashion, a better sound quality could be gained by placing some snowflakes and sonically tuneable objects in direct contact with sonically resonating solid matter. For instance pinning the single snowflakes with dabs of liquid honey to the surface upon which they sat produced a better overall sound. (Incidentally I never thought to mention - I leave the liquid honey in the lid of a jar sitting on the kitchen counter. It gets stiffer hence stickier so works better when left sitting around in the open air). However, with the speaker boxes now tied end to end and hanging suspended in mid air, a better overall sound seems to occur with any sonically responsive objects being loose, or even hanging by string, such as the mobiles. CONFIRMING BASIC PRINCIPLES ----------------------------------------------------------------- In the meantime, the little 1 3/4 inch wafer speaker was put to another use this evening with excellent results. It confirms the whole point of this story; that stereo sound whether a Mono or two speaker source is a recurrancing energy principle, and that the sonic controller room tuning of the environment gained by the various snowflake and six sided fractal based embodiments is in synch with inherent fractal based properties intrinsic in the propigation of sound. The proof? The Right hand speaker was disconnected and only the little wafer resonator was working. By itself held up in the air its sound was very feeble and its faint response could be heard only when held close to the ear. And then the following quick tests took place. The little wafer resonator was held in front of one of the flowflakes (which was sitting on the corner of the left table jutting into the living room area and aligned to point into space behind the dining room windows), and a boosted 3D sound image appeared in the area behind the dining room windows, a recurrance leap of about 6 to 7 feet. Mind you, the sound was very weak and all high end but was better at this moment than did the little wafer sound in its original use in the Sony Walkman, by far better. In other words the so-called 'flowflake' acted like a flow channel funneling the sonic signals to at least six feet away from its source before the sound appeared, and spread out the sound from a generating 1 3/4 square inch flat surface, to a greatly boosted sound image comprising many square feet in area. Plus, it was a stereophonic image with Front to Back and Left to Right locations in the image, albiet there was no bass and very weak mid-range, and the higher end was not razzle dazzle, there was no fidelity in this sound. Sorry, it was nothing like musicians playing live in a room. In fact it was nothing like good stereo. On the other hand, what an improvement in sound this little wafer speaker recieved irrespective of the fact that it was also precisely flow channelled by the two giant snowflakes. Secondly, the little wafer resonator was held in the vacinity of the Right hand speaker's front, and when held in a certain proximity near the large hanging mobile, a boosted sound image was reported by my brother to be heard recurring in the living room environment along the kitchen wall to the left beside where my brother was standing holding the little wafer resonator in place. Whereas I was standing on the other side of the setup, facing my brother, and heard the sound image appear in the living room area directly behind my brother. In other words, the tuners which embody six-sided and Star of David fractal image principles are evoking the effects, including major displacements of the sound image according to the listening position of an observer, entirely independent of any given sound generating source. IMPROVING THE LITTLE SPEAKER'S EFFICIENCY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update April, 16, 1992, 1:45 AM. Last night I was telling you about a tiny wafer speaker (pulled from a defunct Sony Walkman which was being sold as the big ticket item for walkman's circ. 1982) and is now being used as a hand held sonically boosting resonator in certain tests in Mono. Tonight I improved the efficiency of the little wafer speaker by an enourmous amount, by the simple expediency of gluing a hexagon shaped metal ring to the back of the wafer's piston house using a few tiny dabs of stiffened liquid honey. The ring is the kind used to attach switches to High Tech equipment, or sockets or switches, for instance at the back of Radio Shack amplifyers or FM tuners. It turns out that one of these hexagonal metal rings found in a box of clutter lying around the joint here is exactly the right size to fit atop the back of the wafer's piston house. By holding the wafer in the air near proximity to some flowflakes to get high sonic amplification I was able to easily tune the hexagonal ring on the back of the wafer to a point where in a cassette tape of Golden Latin Favorites I was suddenly able to hear TONE in the congos and latin american instruments, as being played entirely from this tiny little flat thin wafer tweeter, held upright by fingertips. You have to understand that ANY TONE AT ALL is a minor miracle for such a tiny speaker held between the fingertips in the open air, so the TONE I got was nothing like high fidelity. Nevertheless, this little speaker is now performing at about twice the volume level and twice the frequency range of before the act of gluing the hexagon ring (colar) to the back of its tiny piston. Of course I didn't get bass, but I did manage to get bass resonances coaxed into this little wafer's sound stream, after one more modification. This was to wrap an extremely thin grade of brass wire (jewellers wire) around the piston housing, and the end extending about 7 inches straight out into the air behind the wafer. The wire is so thin it is just barely able to support itself as a freely extended strand in the air without bending over under gravity. I tried several thicknesses of wire, including versions wrapped around six sided objects such as the handle of a craft hammer and pulled them to create spring-like coils, but found that the thinnest wire sticking straight out was the producer of a very resonant response, relatively speaking. And so my little modified 1 342 square inch wafer speaker is on its way to becoming something of a roomy sounding tweeter. The so-said bass response can be imagined if you picture your cheap TV set with the sound track of a movie including tympani drums (kettle drums). On normal TV tweeter speakers you can tell that kettle drums are playing, even if they do not sound like real kettle drums at all. This is what I am now getting with my bass responsive tiny wafer speaker - bass indicative sonics - after modifying the wafer with a collar and cat whisker; a hexagon ring attached to the back of the tiny piston housing, plus a strand of extremely thin wire sticking out freely about 7 inches in the air behind the wafer. Ideally I picture in the mind's eye six such cat whisker wires sticking out in a hexagonal array, each wire about 3 1/2 inches long. In fact I started out trying the idea, since it happened that as I was holding the wafer in my fingertips listening to it play, I saw through periferal vision a thin brass wire sticking out, but upon looking right at the wafer saw nothing, then looking away again saw what seemed to be a shimmering gold strand extending in the air behind the wafer. This subliminal clue was of course enough to result in the idea to try a cat whisker. I cut a set of six wires and tried gluing them in place with ZAP-GAP brand crazy glue, even to the extent of brushing baking soda on the glue to instantly harden it, but couldn't get a wire to stay in place, so gave up on the idea of a ring of cat whiskers before I ruined the speaker, and wrapped only one wire around the piston's housing so it would stick out as a temporary sonic asset anyway, called the cat whisker. (I've forgotten to mention that the aforementioned head technician of Ottawa University's Physics Dept. had told me about a better crazy glue named ZAP-GAP you can buy in any hobby store. This is true, the stuff bonds like steel. Giant snowflakes formerly bonded with ordinary crazy glue or gell crazy glue would shatter into many pieces when toppled or getting knocked to the floor. But with ZAP-GAP, if any damage occured in a knockover, it would more than likely be a single snowflake itself breaking in two, if in fact anything broke. Even when a flowflake (two large snowflakes mounted on a heavy copper wire horizontal stand) got knocked over by a sleeve or something, it could crash to the floor and bounce in the air with no damage. Further, you can use baking soda simply brushed on in haste with a cheap water color brush to cause the ZAP-GAP to dry in a few minutes. (This needless to say dramatically speeded up repair time in the experiments. I could glue back together an assembly and use it immediately, no more long or overnight wait. But, the ZAP-GAP is a lot harder to handle than the gell crazy glue, in that the ZAP-GAP creeps around when you are using it. I keep a wet paper towel on hand to immediately wipe fingertips etc., the moment the glue makes skin contact. I accidentally blobbed a big squirt from a partially blocked spout onto my big toe fortunately the wet paper towel trowelled most of it away at once. Otherwise I would have been four toe joe for awhile until the old skin wore off). AIR RESONANCES VRS SOLID MATTER RESONANCES ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update April, 19, 1992, 1:30 AM. With this new type of setup - a wafer resonator, and a slowly spinning windmill made of snowflakes - I think I may have learned something more about air resonances vrs the resonances of solid matter. If my suspicians are correct, it seems there are sonic hot spots in the sound stream of an environment conducive to enhancing techniques used to directly excite the open air resonances only, and other hot spots which respond to kicks connected directly to the resonances of solid matter. What made me start to be more fully aware of this possibility is the little wafer resonator. Last night with my favorite FM station playing at low volume for background sound, I took the little wafer resonator and moved it around the room and suddenly found a hot spot well away from the suspended speaker boxes, which gave a super powerful kick to the bottom bass frequencies when the Right hand speaker box was playing in 100% Mono, and the little wafer resonator was patched in to the same wires hence also a right hand 100% Mono channel. The only difficulty was in fashioning some kind of support to hold the little wafer resonator up in the air where it could be moved around and focused through small iotas of place. So I left this as a project for today. Well, as luck would have it, as soon as I tried to attach the little wafer to a makeshift support made of bent 13 1/3 guage copper wire, the thing fell over and both the hexagon washer plus the cat whisper, er, whisker, of super thin brass jeweller's wire, fell off. I was lucky because the accident could have punctured the mylar plastic diaphram of the thin wafer resonator. Anyhow, this time, when I put back on the hexagon washer and the cat whisker, I played with it until suitably tuned, holding the wafer between fingers in the left hand and tuning the sonic booster objects being attached with fingers of the right hand. When the sound took a major jump in both volume and range I said okay its back in business. Then I noticed that the cat whisker wire was not making contact with a corner of the hegonal washer. In the previous setup, the cat whisker was touching the hexagonal washer. However this time the cat whisker was sticking out from the top of the wafer, rather than from a rotation of 60 degrees to be sticking out cammed from the side. In this top alignment, the sound was far superior when the cat whisker stuck out in the open air, and much was lost when it was made to make contact with the solid of the hexagon washer. It now makes sense to me that some sonics are better when the resonating enhancer (whatever it might be) is kicking the open air, as opposed to solidly pinned in connection to some solid object or surface. I had first begin to test this quality of difference several days ago when finding that heavy objects placed on the base of the stand from which are hanging the tied together pair of getto blaster speaker boxes could cause a seeming major boost to the solid power of the bottom base, but the airframe presence of more realistic room echo sonics, (almost a pressure) was snuffed out. Further, some of the higher end fidelity (such as there is) was hurt when boosting the bottom bass by use of solid matter making direct contact with solid matter. Another example came by using a small hexagonal mobile (as mentioned a few days further back being picked up in a downtown hobby store) added kick to the bottom bass when set in certain positions on the base of the speaker stand, however it added an even better more room echoing quality to the whole sound stream when suspended by wire from the speaker boxes to hang just an inch or so above the base of the speaker stand. So here were two clear cut examples of excitement in the open air working better than solid matter contant vibrations. Plus, now, the third example per the little wafer resonator and its all in the air only cat whisker. PLAYING WITH THE TV'S SOUND ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update April, 19, 1992, 1:50 AM. At the moment I have another little experiment under way which is working with interesting results. To bring you up to date, my brother and I are moving, so at this moment the main floor environment is a choas of boxes and clutter. That which had been formerly my more or less rigorously controlled sonic environment is no more. It happens that Global TV.s channel 3's sound is also available at the far left end of the FM band. And so I have on, a late night turkey movie hosted by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. The flying saucer which landed in the lake was described by her as a flaming paper bag - god what an awful movie. In case you are curious, it is 'The Day It Came To Earth', made in 1877, sorry, 1977, and stars George Gobels as a professor who holds fort in a lecture hall. One thing I have already learned from this experiment, is that Elvira is recorded in stereo when doing her in-between scenes remarks. PREVIOUS UNAVAILING TEST ----------------------------------------------------------------- Something else of conciderable importance was also learned with the experiments involving channel 3 on the TV last night. One day last January my brother tried a quick test to see if my speaker experiment would kick ass the sound of the TV set. But it didn't. All that happened is that a couple of things got knocked askew and something delicate got broken, no fault of my brother. The point is, that having the sound generating from two independent electronic sources (the TV set, and the FM radio of the Getto Blaster) had no effect on the overall sound of Global TV except to amplify it. Tonight the effect is entirely different. The difference is because I also have the little wafer resonator set in place to kick ass the sound of the Right hand speaker box of the Getto Blaster, both playing the Global TV sound signal through the Right hand channel from the Getto Blaster, and I have sonically tuned the enhancing snowflake based devices currently still in use, to the sound of channel 3 on the TV, which is Global TV and is the same as on the FM radio. The result of this three-way kick is a boot right up the stairs. The TV set is responding all the way down to earthquake-like low frequency rumbles. Whereas every tiny sound in the sound stream is a distinct point source and highly discernable. This is the TV already mentioned, 23 years old, a mono set. The TV set's sound in fact is deeper and more resonant than is the sound from the Right hand Speaker Box. In most places in the room the sound can be heard to come from the TV. Even here at my computer against the south wall in the dining room area the sound is clearly wrapping around from the far rear corner of the living room area and sonically has the characteristics of being very 3-D, obviously stereo. Now, in this instance, the stereo is not like fire truck sirens slicing through a sound wall all the way from the far left to the far right. The East/West space separation is not very good. Nevertheless you can hear echoes properly moving around a sound stage, making the difference between, say, a person standing at the front of a lecture hall talking, and listening to the same voice with one ear covered and standing behind a glass wall. At this moment the TV's sound is not like that at all, it is all right out there in the open with an obvious stereo awareness, the lecturer is way up at the front of the large lecture theatre with voice balls banging off the walls, just like in real life. In other words, the timbre is now correct. Which proves a point. Mainly, there is only one little Mono tweeter operating for the TV set, and the FM radio's TV sound track source coupled to two other speaker sources (the right getto blaster box and apart from it the upright wafer) and so coming from the other speakers, give the TV its kick, even though the two other speaker sources are also playing in 100% Mono. But anyone coming into the room at this moment would not know it is Mono sound they are hearing, since the sound is filling the environment everywhere throughout, with localization in the larger vacinity of the TV set, with authentic stereo echoes, etc., as well as a big gutsy large sound range, which includes bottom bass. Interestingly, when in the main floor washroom of the condo with the door closed, conversations on the TV sound like people standing in the living room talking. There is a peculiar enhancement of a certain kind of sound quality coming through the door and walls of the washoom which makes the sound of the TV even more fidelic and resonant in its recurrence principles. I should tip you off that the usual rules apply. That is, that in order to get a decent sound from this three-way Mono/stereo resonance with the TV set, I have to carefully room tune at least a few small random objects in the environment. For instance, when sitting in the easy chair facing the TV set, within reach is the TV Guide rolled up in a little stand immediately to the Left of the easy chair, and this object takes extremely delicate tuning by moving it around ever so slightly to cancel a spoiling effect and open up a more fidelic very sonic TV sound. Also, an ashtray on the floor immediately to the Left of the easy chair is particularly sensitive to spoiler vrs enhancer effects, depending on how it is room tuned through moves perhaps as small as a 16th of an inch. Plus the easy chair itself; moving it around by a few inches can make or break certain levels of resonances. Mind you, these three objects seem to be about all it takes to cancel major spoiling effects in the sound stream and open up its sonics for the TV. THE FERRIS WHEEL ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update April 26, 1992, 4:00 PM. A new sonic enhancer tuning device which is called a ferris wheel has been introduced into the experiment. ... was able to tune in and out, turntable rumble on my favorite FM station. The station was playing 'Love Me Tender' by Elvis Presley. There was some slight distortional static in the background. By chance, I found that with extr-e-e-e-mely delicate tuning, that the static clarified or faded, and when clarified, clearly was very low frequency turntable rumble, plus of course, high frequency needle noise. This ferris wheel is entirely experimental. I made a hexagonal six sided frame of 13 1/2 guage copper wire, using the same matrix as was originally used to make the two earlier reported bird cages, neither of which exist at the moment, both spun off their supports during tests and sometimes when landing landed intact but unfortunately both took spills which causes them to crumple into useless twisted up garbage. This is because along the way, I had clamped a large snowflake into the metal six sided frame using an elastic band to hold the large snowflake in place and this worked fined, the elastic band supported the flake in place although it did not much improve the birdcage's performance, what did go wrong is that when the birdcages toppled over, the elastic band had enough tension to cause the whole thing to scrumple up when the giant snowflakes broke, first the one, then a few days later, the other. But, back to the ferris wheel. Six giant snowflakes were placed around the six sided circumpherence and the aforementioned super thin jeweller's brass wire was used to hold the giant snowflakes in place, stringing the wire though centerholes of single snowflakes. The thing was, that to get the giant snowflakes supported properly, it took three stringings of the thin brass wire, creating three new straight 6 sided rings. Well, that provided the opportunity of wiring in a Star of David made of the thin brass wire into the center area, plus the opportunity of wiring in a paper Star of David also in the main open center area and turned to a 30 degree angle. As it sits, the device looks something like a ferris wheel. Extremely modist ability tests have indicated that the thing will impart a particular boost when slowly spinning around, like a ferris wheel. At the moment I have no means whatsoever to be able to spin it so but am thinking about ways. The point is that the intant the ferris wheel was made it made a major difference in the sound stream. How much, and what kind, I really don't know yet, because it came into being just as the carefully controlled environment was starting to be dissolved by the packing getting ready to move. (Current Update - circ. June 9, 1992. The ferris wheel is still packed away somewhere in one of over 250 apple and tomato boxes currently stored in a rental storage compartment. As is ALL of the rest of the experiment, including the getto blaster. We had to move the stuff out of the basement of a house we were expecting to move into, the move not happening due to morgaging problems in the current recession. Who knows how long this current state of affairs will last. But we're working on it, hoping that a place will open up suitable and big enough and private enough to allow the sonic exeriments to resume into the next phase, i.e. inexpensive products for sale). TEMPORARY NONESENSE, AND MORE NEWS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update May 13, 1992, 1 PM. Nothing major and new to report except a few trivialities. Mainly, there are a few new things to report in the sound experiments. But first: We have moved. At the moment my brother and I are holed up in a small hot basement apartment near the downtown of Ottawa, waiting for circumstances to clear around a very large suitable house so that we can move in permanently and get to some really positive creative outputs. We have been in the small apartment for coming on two weeks, with possibly having to stay put for another two weeks or longer. All of the goods regarding the sound experiment are stored in boxes in the basement of the new place, sitting there where we have not been able to access, for coming on two weeks now. It wouldn't matter anyway. There is no way that anything of use regards that former level of sonic experimenting can be resumed in this little basement place, even temporarily. However, I did have the presence of mind, when the last residues were being packed away in boxes before moving day (May 1), to put three single sonic snowflakes in my jacket pocket. So here is the result of that. In this new temporary place, the landlord gave us a small clock radio to use, and from him we bought a used RCA color TV which currently gets two channels via arial, the arial consisting of wires dangling from overhead steam pipes, plus the rabbit ears one of which is missing (broken off), and metal wand and floor cleaner attachment of a large industrial wet vacumn cleaner a contractor has stored here for when some minor alterations on this place are completed after we leave. We get a decent picture on both english language channels when the broken rabbit ear makes contact with the metal vacumm cleaner wand standing upright behind the TV set. Okay, so, how do the three single sonic snowflakes come into the picture. THREE SONIC SNOWFLAKES ---------------------------------------------------------------- The day after we moved in here (May 1) I started playing around with the small clock radio. The landlord had already determined the previous day when bringing it over that it sounded best sitting on the fridge. I began to play around with tuning the darn thing, putting a couple of circular objects on the frigde beside it, another small thin tall circular vase on the window ledge behind the sink, and an empty calking tube on the steam pipes running at right angles over the kitchenette area. All of these things worked to boost the sound range and fidelity of the tiny flat clock radio in noticable ways. On the other hand, a snowflake sitting upright on a certain sonic hot spot on the speaker slats on top of the clock radio or another snowflake sitting elsewhere on top of the fridge, did something else. The characteristic roomy ambiant more natural echos I have been talking about all along are indeed coming from the input interferrence and rejuvination inherent in the six sided configuration of the snowflakes. This is the kind of echo where you can hear things BEHIND a single point sound source, even in Mono. It is not specifically the configurations inherent in these exact snowflakes that are at work producing that roomier sonic echo effect (such as achieved with the small radio on top of the fridge), since the snowflakes are at the most only temporary convient tools that can be used because they are six sided and chisled by hand filing with six sided based facetings. As for the TV set, one more snowflake sitting upright and room tuned on a precise hot spot right at the far left rear corner on top of the TV set (immediately behind the set's vent slats), makes a tremendous difference. I am now able to tune the TV set, (which has only a single small tweeter speaker venting from the lower right corner of the TV set), into such an expansion of sound that tympanis (kettle drums) and other major strike instruments, can sound something like the instruments, despite that we are otherwise getting wispy rasping weak sound signals from the antenna, a poor poor sound which I can clean up and strenghten with the snowflake plus a bit of room tuning of arbitrary objects, for this mono TV. For instance, two small brass curtain rod braces, sitting in certain hot spots on top of the TV set, can boost the bass response by another whole octave. The result of this is verry interesting (to me). For instance with a bit of tuning, I can stand in the kitchenette area and facing to the TV sitting along the white painted old brick wall, hear a huge sound bubble taking place above and around and beyond the TV set. Whereas with a bit of less successfull sonic tuning, all of the sound comes from the little front speaker port no matter where I am in the room. In keeping with these observations, some very careful tuning can lead to TV sound tracks in which footsteps of people scuffling in a large room, and the hiccups and clinks of glasses with ice cubes, etc., are clearly heard, in echo, as if in a large room, though of course highly colorated in the sound itself. Otherwise, without the tuning, such sounds are nothing more than hardly a bit of static clicking and spitting in the background of the main dialogue. In other words there is a tremendous difference in sound quality imparted by the sonic snowflakes, thus proving their mechanism in principle. Ie., there is an essential character imparted into the sound stream which is simply not there without the snowflake-type device's input. Even if Mono (which is the case with the TV) and even if distinct sound sources are not perfectly separated in left to right imaging, the sonic echoing introduced by the reflectivity and recurrancing princples intrinsically managed by the snowflakes, adds that extra flavor that makes a big room sound like a big room when people are moving about in it on the sound track, for instance. As for the little clock radio on the fridge, it has revealed another potential. It is going to be possible to devise a shelf or support for such small radios (or tiny portable TVs) that will boost the sound quality to such an extent that people will pay money to have such a device. The reason why I can say this is because I know something I did not know before moving into this tiny basement apartment temporarily. The fact is, that I have converted the area above the fridge and back into the corner where the fridge sits alongside a bathroom wall in the kichenette, to a large loudspeaker. The whole area above the fridge, a large sound cavity, has become a loudspeaker, powered by two tiny one inch tweeters in the clock radio itself which issue from the top of the radio, these are the sound generating source, and that's all they are, the generators, and the stereo sound itself is recurring out of the large open air sound cavity above the fridge. The gist of the above paragraph is that ANY stereo system, including audiophile and top dollar expensive, in which a sound is heard to manifest in space between or behind or all the way across and around the speakers, is purely and simply a recurrancing of sonic energy, since the sound itself is not heard coming directly from the source of the sound itself, (the fronts of the loudspeakers), ie, these are merely generators to initiate the sound stream. All loudspeaker systems in which the sound is NOT localized specifically to the very source of the generator itself, is operating on recurrancing principles. I am kind of hammering this point, because I do not recall ever reading or hearing elsewhere, that stereophonic sound for instance, operates on principles of the recurrance of energy. If nothing elsewhere has been noted, it means that scientists have been asleep regards the existing of such a large field of activity regards recurrancing of energy principles as modelled and exampled in the many various characteristics of sound itself. And yet, there is no logical question otherwise that sound after the fact of its generator loud speaker sourcing, is a pure form of energy recurrancing over a measurable distance from the source itself of the sonic energy. Now, getting back to the two simple experiments underway regarding the TV set and the radio, the experiments as they sit are extremely unstable. Once set up, anything, repeat anything, moved or changed in the environment can though not necessarily will, spoil the sound. Given that a given tuning will be stable for a short while, for instance until my brother and the little brown dog return, I can play with the radio until I can hear RING echoing in the cymbals (rather than tight little pssts), and can start to hear TONE and HANG, and more than an octave lower, in the bass parts of the sound stream, instead of merely hot little paps and taps, and vibrations which are merely distortion with no sonic character respresenting where the bass sounds are supposed to occur. Another quality magnified by experiments with the small clock radio, is that without anything being done, with no room tuning or snowflakes, all male vocals can tend to sound the same, and the same for female singers, the way to tell who is actually singing is to know that Neil Diamond has done this song and Julio Uglacius has done that. And the same for female singers, for instance Ann Murray songs are usually easy to recognize. Otherwise, with most music you are unfamiliar with, you cannot tell which singer is singing, they all sound more or less the same when male, and similarly for female. You cannot tell by any characteristic in the tones of their voices in singing that this one was done by Julio Uglacius because, say, there is Julio Uglacius's characteristic tone. And so on. However, with tuning and use of the snowflakes, then important uniquely distinctive sound qualities are present there in major amplification in the voices, as recurrancing out of the induced large loudspeaker broadcasting forth from the larger open air sonic cavity created, (the whole chamber above the fridge), by proper management of recurrancing energy principles in the open air area over the fridge. This is not new or unique in fact. Anyone who has, say, put a small clock radio in, say, the corner of a room because it sounds much better there, has in fact induced a larger resonating cavity within which the sound recurrs with more presence and fidelity, even though corners (well known by sound buffs) are not the only way to induce more sound from a poor sound generator. Savvy? I hope so? TIMBRE, VRS COLORATION ----------------------------------------------------------------- I jargonned and blathered my way through the above descriptions because they are actually not so easy to describe in a word or two, and I have not thought of a suitable metaphor to give you the whole picture in an instant via your intuitive factors as regards open air resonating sound cavities. But here is a partial try. The earphone plug of a cheap walkman radio, held in the open air away from your ear, vrs both earplugs humming away inserted in your ear openings: With the earplug held away from the ear, most musics and most male (or else female) singers will sound the same, with the music merely indicated by the vibrations, which is how you can tell if male or female singers are involved, or rock, or swing orchestra, or symphony. Otherwise all of the music is nothing more useful than a range of differing vibrations when an ear plug of a walkman (or an earphone) is held away from your ear. With both ear plugs in, then is when you can hear tones and kinds, in the musics and vocals and so on. And so it is with the small FM clock radio on top of the fridge. Without the tuning and snowflakes, its output is mostly vibrations. With the environmental modifications (the tuned nearby objects and the two snowflakes) its output merely becomes the generator source and the resonating open air cavity above the fridge issues forth the nuances of singer's voice and different orchestras, etc. There is one other character, which I probably should call timbre, which is not yet cured in the experiment with the radio and I do not know if such can be cured from such a radio at this time. Time will tell. In the meantime, here is what I mean by 'timbre'. Even with the radio's output sonically boosted to a large area recurrancing above the fridge, there is a distinct coloration in the sound which is definately the way that radio sounds, even when not modified and is producing only interpretive vibrations which have to be translated into such and such musics in the mind. As tuning takes place, and more and more of a sound range begins to be heard, including another whole new lower octave showing for the bass range, the 'timbre', the distinct color in the sound of the radio itself, also gets amplified in equal kind. In other words the fundamental 'timbre' of the generating device itself is not changing, at least not yet within the scope of this little experiment over the fridge. TIMBRE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Now, 'timbre' can be best be identified by listening to two oboes. (Oboes, in case you do not know, are the instruments used for the sound of the duck in the child's symphony named 'Peter And The Wolf'. TIMBRE in an oboe will be learned after playing two oboes. Two different oboes playing one after the other by the same musician will not sound exactly the same. And the same oboe played by two different musicians will also not sound exactly the same. On the other hand, a grand piano played by two different musicians could sound exactly the same in overall tonal qualities, the difference then being only in nature of the output due to each musician's differing techniques. However, ragards two different oboes, the shape of each musician's mouth, their different hands, arm's lengths, and way of standing and even the differences in the chest cavities regards their breathing, and instinctive pressuring of their lips on the reed of each oboe itself, will all add unique colors to their resulting sound when they play each oboe. That resulting uniquely characteristic part of the sound can be called a 'timbre' in the sound. As well, there is also unique subtle differences in the instruments themselves. These comprise another 'timbre'. For instance, two grand pianos, made by the same master's hands, using the same woods and metal parts and so on, will not sound identically the same, no matter how much the master builder may tinker and fiddle, due to minute variations in the degrees of sanding and planing of the various woods used, plus minute various differences in the degrees of tightening of the fittings and support parts, and so on. So in grand pianos, there is also a distinct characteristic in each piano of a kind which can be called a 'timbre', In fact, 'timbre' effects what you hear in anything, in terms of sonic responses. And so 'timbre' is there for the moment in the radio, for instance, and is due to the way the radio is constructed, and due to where it sits on top of a fridge which itself is against a small corner wall in a kitchenette area of a small painted brickwall basement apartment, and so on. This is not the same as coloration. Coloration can be changed, by moving things around in the environment, for instance. I may or may not be going against the prevailing will of the industry by saying that what I call 'coloration' and what I am now calling 'timbre' are two distinct characteristics which are obviously there in any sound stream from any sound source. COLORATION ----------------------------------------------------------------- Coloration is what I get and can change, when playing around with various tuning technigues and can change characteristics in the sound stream in noticable ways, for instance, highly compressed or even squeezed sounding, vrs roomy or open air or even echoey as if with a Dymanic Bass Expander (DBE) ON or OFF, the similar effects to either ON or OFF achievable by room tuning and the use of sonic enhancer devices such as the snowflakes, vrs, merely turning the (DBE) function ON or OFF. I once changed the voice of singer Ann Murray, from that of a man, into the voice of Ann Murray singing, then back to the voice of a man, one day during a particularly bad bout of out of control sound using the 23 year old Quasar mono TV as a sound source. Coloration that day could change that much. This was before moving into the small basement suite now being used as a temporary accoustic lab. Coloration can even be added to the list of more obvious sound characteristics, for instance obvious Stereo vrs obvious Mono as what you hear in the sound stream. Coloration which both audio engineers and amature loud speaker builders mutter over as a problem in one or another of their designs, is overcome by trying different drivers, or stuffings, or woods, and so on, within the enclosure, but can also be overcome by changing the environment itself where recurrs the sound stream, for instance by room tuning the environment and by use of sonic enhancers such as the snowflakes. SUMMARIZING SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN 'COLORATION' AND 'TIMBRE' ----------------------------------------------------------------- For instance, I can overcome a lot of bad coloration from the radio on the fridge by changing the environment, but at the moment cannot at the moment overcome the 'Timbre'. The 'timbre' is a constant, coming from such sources as the shape of the radio's tiny one inch stereo tweeters, from the flat shape of the radio's box itself, and the resonance frequencies of the plastic used to make the radio's box, and so on. Looking in another area, the shape of the snowflakes and how they are positioned (for instance lying flat vrs standing upright) will effect the 'Coloration'. In contrast, the way they have been chisled by hand, and the material the snowflakes are made of (the particular plastic) can effect the 'Timbre' side to the sound stream, constantly imparted into the sound stream by the snowflakes per se. There is almost an overlay in the sources vrs kinds of effecting results regards 'Timbre' vrs 'Coloration', but not quite. There ARE two distinct areas of effect in a sound stream, and a challenge in future sonic experiments, to see if both kinds of effect ('Coloration' and 'Timbre') can be favorably controlled by external enhancing resonators based on the existence of six sided fractal and Star of David matrixing in a sound stream. In other words, the REAL challenge would be to record a same musician playing two different oboes one after the other, then two musicians playing the same oboe one after the other, and with the same thing done again with different recording techiques, then the results played back over two different reproducing systems, for instance two different kinds of stereo sets, and see if the ongoing sound experiments as herein described up to the present and expanded in the future, can produce a resulting authentic reproduction of the original oboes. If one of the oboes can be made to sound the same after the fact of reproduction respecting different musicians and recording means, and different playback means, then it will be demonstrated that sound is a result of intrinsic steady fractal moire patterns based on mechanics inherent in the energy principles of recurrancing, rather than as a resulting effect of merely the resulting present environment and intervening electronics, etc. I think it should be possible to project (recurr) the original environment and sound source, as an energy principle picture, into a present environment. (If you are thinking ahead, you can see in scientific ways how, for instance, Cosmic presences can project into lower levels (to the 3rd dimension of Earth) and still be seen as heavenly presences, or appear with altered projections to appear more Earth-like (hence more comfortably compatable with the inhabitants of Earth), to do a job, as wanted or needed). In discussing the projection of sound per se in the 3rd dimension, better sonic experiments might successfully translate from the end environment (in which recurs the resulting sound steam (or image)), back to the original environment in which (for an example) an oboe was originally played and recorded. In further abilities, the present environment can of course also be modified to vary the original projection any way needed or desired to come up with something more suitable or more capable of doing a necessary job in the immediate present, for instance in projecting a sound across a distance to a new area, providing such projection is not ever used for military or destructive purposes. Anyone who would want to do military would be attempting to destroy a lot of good things that are attempting to be done for the planet. A SUMMARY OF A QUICK LAST MINUTE EXPERIMENT DONE BEFORE MOVING AT THE END OF APRIL, 1992, AND WRITTEN UP IN MID-MAY, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update May 15, 1992, 12 PM. A quick experiment was done on the spur of the moment in being able to project a recurrancing of sound. It was done at the last minute before everything was dissolved and put into boxes getting ready to abandon the low rental condo. The experiment used a small pink getto blaster of, say, a $69.00 Canadian price range, bought from an electronic repair shop for $2.00. This litte getto blaster was one of those kind which needs two large (D) sized batteries installed before the getto blaster's power cord works when plugged into a wall socket. Since I didn't have batteries of the right size, to get around the program I clipped four AA batteries into a charger holder, and taped wires from the charger's snap-in sockets to the snap-in sockets of the little pink getto blaster to get it to work. The experiment itself was to see what the little square wafer tweeter (described before starting with the topic): TWO NEW WAYS TO IMPROVE THE SOUND would sound like resonating in the open air in conjunction with such a simple device as the little pink getto blaster. Playing in mono, the little square wafer speaker was patched in via the Fisher 8400 getto blaster's right hand speaker lead. The Fisher getto blaster's right speaker itself was turned off (not connected). The little wafer had been, as mentioned before, modified by me with a couple of small techniques to produce over two times the volume and over two times the sound range when held up in the open air. The experiment intended to investigate sonic projections, testing a pure recurrancing principle. It was simple enough, as follows: The little pink getto blaster by itself had a dismal strilly noise when playing all by itself, with all of the sound more or less emanating from the two speakers right at the front of the getto blaster. The getto blaster was sitting near the front edge of the table, the windows of the dining area spreading to the right behind it. Holding the tiny square wafer in the air in various locations around the little pink getto blaster produced various improvements in overall sonic effects in the sound stream, enough to be impressive in the overall. A couple of flow tubes (each comprising stiff 13 1/2 guage copper wire horizontally supporting two giant snowflakes, with the two snowflakes spaced about five inches apart along the wire), were positioned on the table in front of, and just to the right of, the little pink getto blaster, so as to be set in a straight line of four snowflakes pointing toward the far right rear corner of the windows area. By holding the tiny wafer in a certain location in front of the flow channel consisting of the tube of flowflakes, the sound (otherwise normally localized to the immediate vacinity of the little pink getto blaster), suddenly vanished and a much larger sonic image just as suddenly re-appeared in a huge (relatively huge) sound image area over to the right and over back there with the image both in front of and behind the windows as if the windows were not there. In other words, by using the tiny wafer held gingerly in my fingertips, (positioned in a certain place and at a certain angle at the front of the flow tube comprising four giant snowflakes standing in a line like stop signs), the sonic image was channeled over a very long distance and recurred amplified up there and out in the air as a far more authentic stereo spread, with both width and depth, and a greatly enhanced sound range, especially in the bass range, six or more feet away from the little raspy sound generating source (the little pink getto blaster). Nothing could be heard coming from the little pink getto blaster itself, at this moment. All of the sound image was coming from away back over there in the image area of the windows. In regards to bass, what had changed is this: the little pink getto blaster of itself had no bass. When playing by itself the bass was not much different than the slight bass indicative beat which can be heard with stereo clock radios. There was no tone, and no depth, at all in the bass. With regards to the tiny thin flat wafer tweeter playing by itself, it had no bass at all and very little sound until modified by me, and when held by itself in the vacinity of the front end of the flow channel made of four snowflakes, a projection of sound could be hear up in the air by the windows over the table several feet away, and you could hear indications of tone as well as basic beat, consitituting the bass range. In other words the resonance properties of bass signals were inherent in the sound stream, even if not heard at all until somehow excited, as by the sound signal passing along the flow channel (ie. flow tube) consisting of the four giant snowflakes. The quick little experiment, lasting only about half an hour in total, was more than enough to demonstrate and prove that mechanical properties operate within the principles of ordinary sound, such that images can be totally projected to long distances from the sound generating source, and recur in the new location as a completely independent image. I could, when leaning close, hear sound around the tiny thin wafer tweeter and around the vacinity of the front of the flow tube and generally around the vacinity of the little pink getto blaster, though not, per se, from the little pink getto blaster's two stereo speakers. It was when I stood up and leaned back that the much bigger image was heard to recur entirely from the long distance projection over there up in the air by the windows. JUST THE THIN WAFER TWEETER ITSELF ----------------------------------------------------------------- In fact, just the tiny thin wafer itself, having an almost inaudible sound when held in the air (except when held in certain locations using the surface of the table itself as a baffle), could project a substantial sound into the far distance windows area, via the sonic flow tube formed of the four giant snowflakes mounted standing upright in a straight line. The fact that the tiny thin wafer was playing in Mono (the right channel only) didn't seem to matter. The sound image recurring up in the air over by the windows seemed stereo enough to fool a guru, so to speak. The recurring of the sound image over long distance was in fact somewhat stereo, even though the sound source was 100% Mono. Now, once again, I have to (upon rereading the above paragraphs) point out that there was nothing resembling fidelity in the above experiments using the little pink getto blaster, and the flowtubes using just the little wafer held by itself in the fingertips. What was relevant was the amount of new sound range, and volume, and large sonic sound area, which came into the picture a long distance away from the sound generating source, using the flow tube principle to play around with. Some were quick tests done with the little pink getto blaster shut off completely. The point of mentioning this was that just the tiny wafer, in position in front of the flow tube made of snowflakes, converted the assembly into a fully functioning loudspeaker source which was actually quite a bit more efficient than, say, just the right hand speaker of the little pink getto blaster itself. There was more sound overall with the tiny thin wafer and the snowflakes, comprising an entirely difference kind of loudspeaker source, one that resonates entirely in the open air rather than in any kind of enclosure or box. Different also than an electrostatic loudspeaker per se. FINAL UPDATE ??? ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update June 10, 1992, 12:10 PM. This may or may not be the final Update. As you can tell, the discipline is no longer there. The writing is getting a bit scrambled. The environment here (in this basement two bedroom apartment) is not conducive to high frequency flow of creative juices, augmented by the fact that notes, records, papers, computer disks, and other things from other projects are all stored away in 250 apple and tomato boxes comprising about 4 tons of cargo, all of which has to be moved out of the storage container, looked through, then cargoed by hand back into the storage bin, just to find something, the kind of something that formerly could be found in a few seconds or moments when the creative environment was existing in the low rental condo. So, other pressures are starting to move in. New software for retail sale in stores is now in the works, being done here in the basement apartment as a temporary hole-up until better digs can be located at a rental price that isn't through the roof. Oddly enough there are thousands of places for sale, some at rather startling bargains, but this area (the Ottawa region) has the lowest rental vacancy in Canada. It means you will be paying a great deal more for modest rental than for morgage payments for a great piece of property. The sucker punch is in qualifying for a morgage to buy such a great piece. So, here it is, then, as the British like to say. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Smile when splitting lips over the teeth is more like it. AN OPEN AIR RESONATOR ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update June 24, 1992, 5:00 PM. Amature science marches on. Youngsters across the street were having a kids yard sale. A small stereo record player sitting on the steps was blasting a trumpet straight across the street into my open basement apartment door. To make a long story short, their dad dug a dust covered oldie stereo record player out of the basement and sold it to me for $7.50. That's the neato of the situation - fundamental research continues for a grand total of $7.50. This old Philips stereo record player, vintage 1962, has two small speakers that act as clip-on covers for the consul and turntable changer. These happen to be the old style portable kind of speakers which have no back, the back is completely open, with a small oval tweeter bound to the enclosure frame by a plastic grid shell at the back. I have one of these enclosures hanging from a sling made of a long telephone extension cord, looped through two former water pipe holes in the 6 inch plank beams overhead. The enclosure is thus suspended, facing upward, hanging in the air about three feet above the floor. I happen to have five single snowflakes on hand (found a pair glued together in a jacket pocket). The three single flakes are placed in hot spots around the room, and the double is sitting on top of the enclosure, rouphly over the tweeter, but a little offset from being directly over the piston. The result of this is the Lighthouse LP, the only one I have and borrowed from the gentleman across the street (a Carlton University professor) and the system sounds VERY stereophonic. (It turns out the trumpet I heard from across the street during the yard sale is actually a trombone on the Lighthouse LP. It sounded just like a trumpet here in the apartment until I got the five snowflakes set up to sonically sensitize the environment.) At this point with the experimental setup in place, from the front of the living room area, by the front door, the orchestra sounds well back behind the bathroom walls, for instance. You can hear tones and echoes in the instruments coming from long distances on the band's stage, and the handclaps of the live audience are well behind the beat of the orchestra echoing forth toward the listener, proof of genuine stereophonics. The point is that this is 100% Mono. The stereo set is from Eerie Indiana. To wit: one tiny flat open backed speaker enclosure hangs face up suspended by telephone wires, in mid air, the other enclosure sits on the floor, its speaker lead dangling over the front of it, definately not plugged in. The landlord came in yesterday afternoon to hear a demo, and after duly noting that the whole thing was impressive for sure, concidering the amount of BASS and STEREOPHONICS coming from such a small record player, he then paused to inquire (while casting dense glances at the obviously inoperative enclosure sitting eerily on the floor), 'but, where is the other speaker'? I pointed to the other speaker sitting on the floor, its unattached speaker leads in full view, which seemed to suffice as an explanation for the time being, but the last thing he said upon leaving and pausing to listen one last time to the sound experiment, was to ask once more; 'but where is the other speaker?'. This is proof that the principle in a snowflake styled sound pattern control and mediator, using fractal snowflake embodiments, even just five, works, the five snowflakes are more than enough to overcome the influence of two bulky old easy chairs and other big room disrupters, and to cause the sound stream to project in a recurrance back into a verisimilitudinal approximation of the original music prior to recording, ie, a live band in a large audience setting, rather than the usual weak little semblance of sound from a small old transistor portable record player (1962 vintage). The whole thing, including automatic record changer and two speaker boxes, when closed together for carrying, isn't any bigger than two brief cases strapped together. Lets not go hog wild, here. There is fierce interharmonic distortion here and there in band widths throughout the higher ranges of the sound. And the bass is barely just there, hanging in there by a thread so to speak. At least however there IS bass. The original system (without any room tuning or snowflakes present) had no bass at all even in full stereo. The drums were tiny little 'pok and pak' taps with no tone and no bass drum whatsoever, and the electic bass instrument was a very faint extra sound in the background of the racket this system produces on its own. With room tuning, and sonic snowflakes present, and in 100% Mono, with only one speaker at work effectively acting as an open air resonator hanging in the air, the system produces two full octaves lower into the bass range, for instance. There IS NO QUESTION that sonic projection and recurrance principles based on six sided geometry and related fractal pattern geometries comprise fundamental mechanical attributes in the nature of sound. And that these fundamentals in sound can be tested as properties controllable by six sided faceted objects such as the sonic snowflakes. The fact that five single simple snowflakes are more than enough to overcome the cluttered environment of a small apartment (for instance there are two 386 computers sitting on apple boxes used for producing disks of software for sale in local stores, plus two dreadfully junky old easy chairs which were here in the appartment when my brother and I moved in, plus the record player iyself which sits on an area of the floor cluttered with power cords for my computer plus a small Bionnair Negative Ion Generator, etc, and the speaker hangs just off the end of an open kitchen counter which separates the kitchenette from the livingroom area. Like I said, it is very much a cluttered environment. But with only a few snowflakes, the sound (when the two speaker enclosures are on the floor and playing in full stereo) leaps up from a tiny area down there near the floor up into a large sound image spreading out well beyond the rear wall. And standing in the kitchenette area (with the speakers again sitting about two feet apart on the floor immediately in front of the kitchen counter room divider, the sound conversly spreads forth across the whole of the front of the apartment. This wider dispersion I assume is due to sonic sensitivities imparted into the environment by the five snowflakes. At nowhere can the sound be heard to be issuing from the locale of the speakers themselves. In the Mono embodiment, in a range of about two to three feet from the hanging speaker you can hear that it is the main sound source, but any further back and the sound becomes that from a bandstand, recurring entirely at long distance away from the hanging speaker. Thats with just three single sonic snowflakes and two more forming a piece glued together. In fact, in this room, it only takes THREE single snowflakes to project the sound rearward into a giant sound image entirely separated from the sound generating source (the speaker per se). The snowflake pair added into the setup by being placed on top of the hanging speaker, adds a whole bunch of POW! in the bass kicks, and tone and echoing in the drums including the bass drum, and clears out some of the interharmonic distortions of the basic cheap old Philips portable stereo record player. This is when the pair is placed in a hot spot on top of the hanging speaker. In fact, with a little bit of experimental tuning with the three snowflakes in hot spots around the room, it can be made to appear that the further you are from the hanging speaker, the further back in the opposite direction on the opposite side of the hanging speaker does the sound image project. It is as if a mirror image is being created between you and the sound, with the speaker in the middle being the mirror. Furthermore, the sound rotatates around in the room as you rotate in the room around the hanging speaker. There is no such thing whatsoever as a 'head in the vice' effect. Anywhere in the room is good for listening to the sound projecting from afar way out there on the opposite side of the hanging speaker. Not a bad definative research experiment for $7.50. Who needs a grant when this type of opportunity is available. Bonjour, forsure, monsieur and madmoiselle. FINISHED CONFIRMING THE PRINCIPLES ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update July 1, 1992, 11:20 AM. The importance of an idea, particularly if it alludes to or harks upon principles, is that the theory has to stand the test of grime. Yesterday evening a friend bought over (to our temporary dismal dark basement apartment in Ottawa's Sandy Hill area near downtown) a portable AM FM radio and tape recorder, about twice the size of a text book, AIWA the brand name. You should have seen the thing. The front piece covering the tape cassette deck was missing. The back piece was hanging loose, Its screws gone, It dangled by a wire coil stretched out from the antenna to the circuit board. To plug the radio in, I had to dig around in the back to find the little plastic piece where you plug in the power cord into the radio. It now hangs out from the open side of the unit. It has one small three inch tweeter generating the whole of its sound. In other words, this was a 15 year old piece of junk our friend had rescued walking past a pile of garbage on the street somewhere. The purpose of having it at all was the chance (it did) of pulling in major league baseball games broadcast on FM from Smith Falls, Ont., about 45 miles from here. The sound of the FM ballgame was hardly more than a perceptable hiss as far as crowd noises and ball park stadium authentic sounds were concerned. Oh, yeah, there were shorts in the switches - to wit, no volume, loud volume, crackle no volume, every few seconds. Today my brother went out early this morning on routine business rounds and so I had a bit of spare time with nothing urgent to do, so I hauled out this radio and set it up on the TV set and started playing around. I immediately found that the volume short was in the FM radio button ON/OFF. By tapping it with a forefinger crooked like a spider's leg a couple of times, on came the volume to stay. First problem solved. The antenna sticking up was touching the overhead thick steam heat pipes. I moved the antenna away from THAT hissing screetch. Second problem solved. To make the long story short (an hour has passed) I have BASS, yes those L O W tones, growl in the bass fiddle so to speak. I have sonic s p a n g! in the drums, the echos rolling forth from both the snare bangs and the bass drum pedal. I have cymbols - I make claim here because prior to the hour there was no cymbol at all, nothing but high pitched piss. Yes there is stereophonics. Not much worth noting in terms of real East/West instrument point source separation. Rather, this Stereo in Mono is in the form of a very large image balloon up in the air surrounding the vacinity of the unit, and sonic echoes are authentic, ie. hand claps come in delayed, progressively more delayed the further back or aside from the main sound source prior to recording. Footsteps walking across a stone courtyard sound like footsteps out in the open rather than as clips or clacks. Mind, you, of course, there is coloration. Not nearly so bad though as with the $7.50 record player described in the last previous update. I even have some AIRFRAME. Not bad, for a unit that is exactly 3 inches thick, 12 inches wide, and stands upright seven inches tall. I have to let you in on some little secrets. The Stereo in Mono comes from snowflakes. A single and the glued together double are sitting in strategic hot spots on top of the radio itself. Another single is sitting slightly forward, on the front edge of the top of the 23 year old Quasar TV set. Sitting to the right on top of the TV set is the shell from the mobile hanging lamp. In case I didn't mention this, it is about 14 inches across, 9 inches deep, pincushion shaped, made of stiff plastic paper stamped at a factory into patterns which clip together to form a twelve sided ornamental lamp shade. I picked it up for $2 from a local Neighborhood House bin. It provides a lot of the bass boost. And about 12 feet away, where hangs the record player's speaker from the 6 inch beams of the roof is a plastic clam-shell-like case which contained something bought at the hardware store. It is a thick clear package, and I have it spread open at a 30 degree angle and sitting thus open like a stood up book on top of the dangling speaker enclosure. The fourth single sonic snowflake is sitting on top of the hanging record player enclosure, right near the hinge where the clamshell opens. This clamshell arrangement is providing some slight elements of fidelity, thank you. It was found to do so simply by playing around with just about any idea that came to mind to try to get rid of the hideous high frequency cross harmonic distortings that were rattling fiercly in the ears until I came across this clamshell arrangement. And so there are three different things going on in the room at the moment to produce this acceptable level of stereophonic fidelity being produced by this old throwaway piece of junk called 'the radio'. You wouldn't believe it to see it. The radio looks just like a piece of demolition, its back hanging loose and open, no tape cassette cover, covered with dust and grime, etc. A 'write protect tab' for an IBM 5 1/4 inch computer disk is ticking out from the front of the top of the TV set and helps to break up the final residues of the original sharp high pitched cross frequency clashing harmonics. The point is, that all I need is a sound generating source. It doesn't seem to matter what kind, be it Mono or Stereo, and some play time, to reproduce stereophonics at an acceptable fidelic level, no matter the environment, no matter the 'junkiness' or 'feebleness', of the sound generating source. THREE HOURS LATER ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update July 1, 1992, 2:50 PM. A couple of people have come and gone into/out of the basement apartment. The original old radio experiment reported immediately above is no more. The loose socket for the AC current has been glued back in place by my brother, worried about a 120 volt short was the reason. And so the back cover is back on, with no more inners hanging loose out the side to further clutter the look of the room. A quick new test has produced MORE stereophonic sonics, and more roomy bass, then before. It is this: The twelve sided mobile lampshade is now about 15 feet away sitting on the kitchen counter. Most everything in the room that can be turned to face toward the main sound image eminating from above and behind the litte radio has been turned to be thus focused to the main sound image. This includes the four snowflakes now sitting in hot spots around the room, plus pieces of paper, pens, knives and forks, coffee cup handles, the works. And that is it. It took three quarters of an hour to room tune the little small (student's) apartment environment. WHAT COMES AROUND, GOES AROUND ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update July 6, 1992, 2:50 PM. The 'piece of junk' radio is gone. Our friend came by and took it back. Why he wanted it back I can't remember, except for the moment there is nothing to play with except the record player and the TV set, so nothing is being tested since I am fed up with marginal gains, and complete collapses immediately after, for instance in disturbing the room's sound matrix merely by making a peanut butter sandwich on the kitchen counter. The SLIGHTEST change in the environment can spoil the fragile sonics of any test. There is a little cheap clock radio in one of the boxes of odds and ends stored along the floor against one wall of the living room. It is a box which had computer stuff in it, which is why it is here in this dim pit called 'the apartment'. This clock radio is perhaps one of the worst sounding small things I have ever heard. I got it out, plugged it in, turned it on, shut it off. About 15 seconds passed from start to finish of THAT test. HOW DO PROPIGATIONAL WAVES LINK UP ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update July 10, 1992, 12:20 AM. There may be more to the THEORY involved in these experiments. Today I was playing with that cheap clock radio again, and learned something new. To bring you up to speed, here is a CITIZEN clock radio, flat, thin, white plastic, curved sides, 5 inches wide, 9 1/2 inches long, and 2 inches deep, with just one two-inch speaker grill cut as slits in the top typical fashion, bought at a discount store for about $13.00 six months ago by my brother to listen to baseball games while working on the computer and never used due to the really bad accoustics the thing produced, it was impossible to listen to it for more than about a minute without the brain feeling fried, plus it couldn't pull in the station that broadcasts the Blue Jay's games. Since there is only one tiny speaker, it is impossible for this to be in any way fidelic when working on its own. There is more sound presence in FM then in AM, but that is all. And neither FM or AM can produce volume, in that at anything more than minimum audible levels this thing gets intolerably hot with hisses and pisses and tight tinny sounds, and any bass is a barely audible pap pap pap .... You get the picture. Today it sounded different. Notwithstanding the difficulties, there was conciderable sonic presence that was stereo seeming. There was some East/West separation but very head-in-the-vice in that you could move through the room and hear the East/West (such as there minimally was) come and go as if you were walking past a large scale interference pattern like a spectrum. What was significant was the FIDELITY. For this little thing it was major. In fact fidelity-wise you could say it matched the fidelity of the Fisher 8400 Getto Blaster when it was operating at say lesser potential at average medium volume not unlike what I sometimes had going when doing sonic experiments with the getto blaster a few months ago, during the advent of initial Mono in Stereo experiments. Here is the key thing: in a test, this little CITIZEN clock radio was cranked right up to full top on the volume knob, and out came sound, more and more of it as the volume was turned higher and higher. The sound just didn't quit, harden, or break up, It just got better and better the louder the volume. Entirely the reverse of what it is supposed to do. A friend was by at just the right moment late this afternoon to be able to happen to hear a demo of this situation. This is an engineer with a local major High Tech company and a fellow somewhat aquainted with Hi Fi and stereo. He couldn't help but notice right away the VOLUME, and commented. What he didn't suspect in the least was that it was playing an AM station. He automatically assumed it had to be an FM station, and also further heard stereo for the FM, clock radio fashion, super boosted by my sonic setups in the room to produce that kind of sound. It was in getting this sound that leads me to suspect something further going on in the fundamental nature of the propigation and projection recurrance principles of a sound image. For instance, the rather giant sound image was in no way able to be associated with the tiny little port grill on top of the clock radio from which the sound stream was issuing. At this point, the flat radio was sitting on top of a Mac's Convenience Store coffee mug, which substantially boosted its airframe performance, sitting in a hot spot on top of the 23 year old Quasar TV set. Another concideration has become very important in the last 24 hours. Yesterday I went to our storage bin (the rental locker) and rummaging through some of the appoximately 250 boxes in storage looking for the computer modem (couldn't find it), I came across a box that had the sonic 'windmill' also called the, 'ferris wheel', plus five of the sonic 'flow tubes'. The 'windmill consists of six giant snowflakes positioned around a hexagon frame about 9 inches in diameter, which sits up in the air supported by stiff copper wires stuffed in a six sided hydro extender post. Very thin jeweller grade brass wire has been threaded around the rim of snowflakes, making a device that does not look unlike a ferris wheel. The sonic 'flow tubes' are two of the giant snowflakes slid onto a thick horizontal copper wire through the centerhole of each centeral snowflake, supported by a stand made by bending copper wire into a stand shape, with each of the snowflakes as a pair on each assembly anywhere from four to about seven inches apart, and so can be sonically focused simply by aiming the device in the direction of the sound source, or parallel to it. If you put two daisies on a wire running through their centers, and set the daisies about six inches apart, and bent the end of the wire so you could hold the daisies out in front of you to point or aim them like the lenses of a telescope, you will have modelled the essential mechanics of these sonic 'flow tubes' I keep talking about. Aimed at the source seems to work best, at least in the living room of this small apartment. In other words I focused the 'flow tubes' by aiming each long axis toward the region of the sound source, and similarly for the 'ferris wheel'. So around the room are five 'flow tubes' sitting all pointing toward the general area of the TV set, which sits about 2 1/2 feet out from the middle of the long wall of the livingroom, and upon which sat the clock radio horking away at loud volume. Now we are getting to the central point, here. It took me about two hours to set this experiment up, using the clock radio, in that very tedious focusing and refocusing had to be done over and over again to finally start getting TONE into the bass range, so that for instance, kettle drums (typanis) sounded something like kettle drums when a symphony was playing on CBC FM. What I noticed is that because the sound source itself was relatively so WEAK, (concider it being just the tiniest of two inch tweeters [one only] in this flat chincy made-to-sell-cheap CITIZEN clock radio), that therefore I had to do tuning over and over again, around and around the room, including a good number of random room objects, more so than usual, before finally starting to get a sound that I could tolerate. What became apparent, once the main improved sound started to come into the picture, was that I was able to twist tune the sonic objects by only very minor amounts, hardly more than a touch, whereas I could slide them forward or backward along an axis focused toward the sound image), by much larger lengths with not much noticable change in the sound quality. The greatest care had to be taken in the twist tunes, however, once really good hot spots had been found to locate the devices. What I mean by careful twist tunes is perhaps at most 1 or 2 degrees either way compared to twisting all the way around a 180 degree arc. It was in developing the patience to go into such hyperfine tuning that I started finally to coax some intelligence out of the nonsense of this clock radio. Which got me to thinking. How come? Why such fine articulation in terms of hyper narrow focusing ranges, expecially to get something really good out of an AM radio signal. As I twist tuned each of the sonic devices by tinier and tinier amounts, I could more and more hear better qualities of sound come and go in instances, as if there was a spectrum made of very fine lines through which I was focusing each device in and out of phase. But spectrum interference patterns are not what we are dealing with, in these experiments. What we are dealing with is moire pattern-like steady state manifestations of energy excitements hanging solidly invisibly in the air, like lace doilys, or flat pancakes floating around like plate sized snowflakes or whatever, (maybe really tiny snowflakes - without being able to see them I can't tell), and all of the patterning six sided, in basic. Who actually knows what size the snowflakes actually are in terms of being there in the air, the pancakes themselves connected three dimensionally including up and down, in arrays like layers of a crystaline matrix, perhaps. My original imagined perceptions had always been these floating snowflakes comprising sound recurring hot spots resonating away like pulsating oemebas, with the sound responding equally away in all directions from fractal pattern finger tips, which include vertical and angular directions assuming also a crystaline structure in the air in the matrix and in the solids of the walls and room objects. This may not be so. The sound may in fact energize more briskly through a longer length axis, and energize sideways in extremely narrow bands of re-enforment in contrast. Certain things would be manifest in this picture. The East/West stereophonics could be contained in very narrow spectrum-like vibratings, in particular. I got this idea from hearing both sonic fidelity, and semblence of East/West separation, by the tiniest of descrete twist turns of the sonic devices, but gained the major boost in VOLUME and overall audio fidelity by the longtitudinal focusings per sliding the devices back and forth along axis focused toward the main sound image area. I can psuedo picture it in analogy to magnetic lines of force. There are many very long lines linking the North and South poles of a bar magnet, for instance, but the lines themselves are not far apart, they line up like pick-up sticks lying closely together in approximate parallels. (This is the case of a bar magnet. In the case of the Earth the pick-up-sticks are curved). So, using this analogy of magnetic lines of force, I can see that the vibrations carrying the East/West stereo separation may be very close together and so comprise tranversal propigations of very high frequency comprising the cross harmonic linkups, compared to the longtitudinal vibrations which carry the main signal's power and operate at much lower frequencies. In other words the fractal snowflake patterns comprising the moire pattern do indeed hang there in the air, but the side to side vibrations in the moire leading to sideways excitements tend to act in a much higher frequency, and so are smaller in wavelength vibrations then are the forward and back vibrations to and from the sound generating source or main image area. This thinking makes sense from another concideration. I have just checked some fundamental parameters of one of the 'Flow Tubes'. In this one, the two giant snowflakes are exactly seven inches apart, sitting facing the sound image area, each flat face of the snowflake represents about three fractal facets related to the six sided geometry in the thickness of the giant snowflake, which is only about 1/4 of an inch thick at its maximum. In other words this is, say, three sonically interreacting facets separated by a longtitudinal length of seven inches along the stiff copper wire which holds both the snowflakes upright like sunflowers. However in terms of cross sectional area, there are at least 27 facets encountered in a range only 3 inches across, where the three inches is the cross sectional diameter of my hand made giant snowflake. So you can see in very loosely stated pro rata terms, that the transversal width of the device will be very actively engaged in precisely tuned sonic interractions, which indicates a hyper fine frequency response in the encountering and focused interraction of East/West wave effects. Concider a silly metaphor image, a musician playing a bass fiddle, drawing long sweeps of the bow across the visibly vibrating strings, turned sidways to the conductor, and at right angles another musician drawing a small bow across a lively violin, with the violin bow passing back and forth at right angles to the conductor's baton. These two effects (the bass bow moving in and out from the conductor, and at right angles the violin bow as if playing the conductor's nose), combine to produce the sonics, and in particular have a great deal to do with the proper phase polarization of the cross harmonic frequencies, which give rise to East/West separations in single point source sound generating sources of a sound's after-the-fact artificial reproduction, such as through the silly little clock radio. But this two-musician metaphor also seems to work for ordinary sound. For instance, in this apartment, I can now play with ordinary room sounds. For instance just by twist tuning one or two of the four single snowflakes sitting around the room, I can make the voice of a person who is standing in this room and speaking, seem to become very clear, or seem to muffle up as if wax has just crept up an ear canal. Similarly, the obnoxious rattle of the cheap fridge can be made to become deeper and louder, or muffled and further away, just by twist tuning a snowflake. The quiet blowers of the two computers can also be similarly effected, sound wise. In fact I can make random noises in the room take on sonic qualities similar to the kind of heightened sound effects you get in a shower or an enclosed indoor swimming pool, (though nowhere as heightened) just by a bit of playing around tuning the snowflakes. I can make the background room noises very fidelic and easier to hear, as if I have suddenly acquired acute hearing, or make the room itself seem muffled, so to speak. It is almost as if playing with so-called white or pink noise filters. And finally, once I have set up a decent sonic vibratory ingredient in the room conducive to making the ridiculous single-speaker clock radio sound like a getto blaster, the silly thing can be carried around by hand, and LO! the sound can still COME OUT OF THE LARGE SOUND AREA hanging up in the air over and behind the TV set and spread out along the living wall behind the TV. Now THAT was a suprise! When I heard this, that the sound picture itself really could be made to stay put, locked and stable in a focused place entirely independent of the sound generating source itself moving around long distance in the room, I figured we are really starting to talk new sonic principles in a definative, demonstratable, way, when I learned this. I learned this because my brother tripped over the radio's power cord and the thing crashed from the TV set to the floor. My brother picked it up and while talking, walked around with it still working in his hand, while I sat at the computer, suddenly listening. What I heard was the sound all of it coming from the same big sound image area to my right over and behind the TV, while my brother was standing by the back of an easy chair about nine feet out from the sound image, holding this tiny little flat clock radio in his hand that was producing all of the big sound I was hearing in the air to my right. Oh ho, I thought. Yes. Hmmm! I am sure I am going to have some FUN, playing with THIS prospect. My brother at that moment wasn't part of the experiment, he was simply looking for some place to put the radio down so that the power cord would be out of the way of his feet as he walked around. UPDATE July 12, 1992, 7:00 PM. ----------------------------------------------------------------- But, as luck would have it, play was not FUN. I didn't get around trying a test for a couple of days, and by that time all of the room's randomness had varied, except for six of the original ten sonic tuner devices which were still in their same places. I set up the silly little clock radio supported on a cup on the arm of an easy chair, and tuned it to a French AM station. What happened right away is some reasonably good sonics and fidelity, but no LATERAL long distance image projections. What I mean by LATERAL is for an image projected at, say, right angles relative to a direct line between me and the radio. In short, sitting at the computer, the sound came from an enlarged sound image area directly behind the chair, ie., a straight line between me, the little radio, and further back a big sound image, rather than LATERALLY off to my right by the TV. After a few minutes I got around to adjusting some of the sonic tuner devices which had not been touched for a couple of days. And presto, the whole of the sound prescence vanished. Suddenly there was poor quality normal one-speaker chincy clock radio sound coming directly from the radio, no matter where I was in the room. A few minutes of playing around with tuning proved that for sure, the sonically exciting aspects of the environment had just been wiped away. In turning back on the TV set, which, immediately prior to this test had had a somewhat roomy boomy reasonably big sound projecting in the air behind it, came back on with nothing but weak muffled stuff issuing straight from the speaker's port on the lower front of the TV set. Rattles, pisses, lisping, muffle, and high pitched presence were back to par, normal TV mono sound. In other words, getting a SOUND, then getting a LATERAL projection, is not an easy task done in a moment by setting a couple of variables via the sonic tuning devices ('Ferris Wheel', 'Flow Tubes', and single snowflakes). All of the good stuff reported so far in this 'Sound3.txt' file were gained after long tedious sieges lassting two to six hours, of hyper fine tuning, and, as just said, the whole of it can be lost with the simple moving of a couple of the tuned devices. But, I DID hear that LATERAL projection when my brother had held the silly little clock radio in his hand, and so KNOW that the principle of LATERAL sonic projection exists. But, not today. Physics is restored to normal society beliefs again. The AM radio sounds like normal AM radio. And the TV set sounds like a normal TV. I spent only about ten minutes fooling around with the setup today, and less than five minutes more after the whole sonic thing collapsed. And that was the end of my patience for today. Pissed off might better describe the mood. The nice thing, is, these days, I can treat it like a hobby. If the will to persist is there, good, if not, its okay. Every time I get the will to persist I seem to find something new. The interesting thing is that usually I do not know what the new thing is until after I have found it, by the will to persist. What I learned in the last two days is that AM radio can be used as a sonically energetic sound stream source and become alive with 3-D echoing effects and Airframe, just as can FM when played through a single speaker. And LATERAL image projection is possible, although this is iffy, if by chance the room had been co-incidentally tuned to about a final 1% needed to conduce LATERAL projection. In which case, getting LATERAL projection again may turn out to be like chasing a golden carrot on a stick, until something can be defined that assures LATERAL projection will always occur. UPDATE CONT. July 12, 1992, 7:00 PM. ----------------------------------------------------------------- And yet, you never know. For instance, today, just a few minutes ago, my brother tripped over the power cord of the silly little clock radio once again, sending it crashing to the floor once again from its perch on top of a Mac's Store coffee mug on top of the TV. My brother picked up the radio, and plunked it in annoyance on a cardboard cartoon sitting on the floor about six feet out from the livingroom wall, and walked away. Meanwhile, I'm listening once again to the unobtainable. I am suddenly hearing S O U N D from the side, coming in a large but weak volumed sound area off at a right angle toward the living room wall in difference to a straight line between me, the radio, and a sound image somewhere behind it. LATERAL projection, in other words, gained by chance by my brother's aimless plunk motivated simply to get the radio picked up from the floor to somewhere else and out of his hand as fast as possible to get on with other things. A couple of quick checks has confirmed something about this LATERAL sound. It is very peak and valley, is the main observation. It means that I can stand in one part of the living room near the kitchenette and hear the sound appearing quite literally in a right angle from the radio over to the living room wall. But moving only a few inches bounces the sound image to a new location well back behind the radio in a straight line to me. Then a few more inches and the sound image has bounded again to a LATERAL location, this time, say, more of a 30 degree bend laterally, to a far rear corner of the living room from where I am standing. No matter my location, the sound is a big image up in the air, weaker than before without the bass presence it had before falling from the TV the first time. But at no time can the sound be said to be generating from the silly little radio itself, until I approach to within about four feet to it, and then suddenly there it is, swopped right down like a jenie sucking back into its bottle to be coming out very unfidelic directly from the top of the little radio itself. Interesting. To be continued, perhaps. TWO AM RADIOS - A new experiment ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update July 30, 1992, 11:00 AM. Okay, there is more to report. For the last few days I have been playing with TWO cheap clock radios, both set to the same AM rock and roll station, both with only one two inch tweeter (stereo thus impossible), the two radios set about seven feet apart, both sitting on the floor with speakers facing straight up to the ceiling. In other words two little radios, both playing the same mono. It took over three and a half hours the first day to get what I was looking for into the sound stream. But now I can set it up in about five minutes, now that I know what to listen for with this kind of setup. What it is is a stereo image recreated in big open air, spaced up in the air between and behind the two little AM radios, using these two MONO sound sources in tandem. The sound has an echo in it, wherein instruments rebound rather than crisp, and so on. This extra ingredient gives authentic East/West wide image sound separation, as well as major depth separation. The long distance h a n g in the echos is the key to getting the right sound. When properly focused, (via six snowflakes, five flow tubes, and the 'ferris wheel'), the sound expands enormously in range as well. For instance where normally there are faint rattles contaminating the AM sound, these suddenly open up into T H E B A S S, for instance. The thing about both the bass, and the stereophonic East/West image, is that I seem to get both at once, when properly tuned, or neither. It is easy to get a big noise, or even a big sound image area, up and over the two radios sitting on the floor. But this sound will be squeezed, compressed, strident, muffled, roomy not boomy, with the instruments and voices coming from more or less everywhere at once in the giant sound image. It is when extremely fine, or hyper fine, tuning of the sonic snowflakes and devices becomes ACCUTE that the better stuff suddenly abruptly gells into the sound stream and you hear the STEREO, with point source instruments and voice locations echoing in an authentic long distance way within the giant sound image, and so on. ACCUTE means just that!. It means practically no more that TOUCHING a snowflake or flow tube, and waiting four or so seconds for the sound response to gell, in order to hear the proper sonic qualities suddenly start to home into the sound stream. After that, it is just a question of hyper fine re-tuning for a little better fidelity. I say all this because once the sound quality which can be gained from two such little clock radios in unison in AM is learned, (mind you highly colored at best), bringing in the greater stereophonics can be rather easy and quick. This is said after the fact, due to the fact that the first time I got stereophonics into this play-time experiment it took, as already said, well over three hours to get the thing to start working in a likeable way, and this included very minute ACCUTE fine tuning of just about every random object in the environment, as well as the sonic devices themselves. Well, not quite EVERY object. But believe me, touch a power cord on the floor with a big toe to alter it fractionally just enough to improve the sound was important. Touching a piece of paper also. Twisting a coffee cup so that the handle cut in (rather than cut out) some of the backwaves, was very tedious. Many dozens of random objects were touched and moved around by iotos the first time the experiment was tried. And now, today, a good sound was had in less that five minutes. It started today with picking up one of the clock radios which was lying kicked aside at random on the floor, turning on its volume, then laying it down speaker up in a sonic hot spot, then doing the same with the second little clock radio, then going around the room subtely adjusting only one flow tube, two snowflakes, and the 'ferris wheel', to get the stereophonics into the giant sound image. There is still some work to do if I want more bass, but this is just for background listening while working on computer software and shareware on the computer. The problem is that a single radio is just not satifying, and has to be tuned and retuned in a very unstable situation which constantly changes, to get any sonics or stereophonics into the sound, whereas with the two radios in unison, the sound seems to stay stable reasonably enough, and is acceptably fidelic including some deep bass, once focused. A new device by the way was learned in the last few days to help stablize the sound. This is the simple expediency of laying an ordinary yellow Eagle six sided lead pencil along the length of a flow tube, the six sided pencil being supported in a cradle via the two giant snowflakes constructed of 13 ordinary sonic snowflakes glued together in a six sided pattern. Simply laying the pencils in place (two of them are at the moment cradled in two of the flow tubes), seems to instantly stablized some otherwise very difficult to control transient cross harmonics leading to stidency and lisp in the high notes and muffled rather than tonal bass. The pencils per se are spoilers. Ie., in earlier experiments involving the Fisher 8400 model getto blaster it was soon enough found that pencils could distort rather than improve a setup that was already reasonably fidelic, but concidering that the two 'el cheapo' AM/FM clock radios playing in AM in unison are so unfidelic to begin with, in this case the added ingredient added by the six sided shape of the pencils is an improver, rather than spoiler. AMBLING ----------------------------------------------------------------- That's it for now. Our new software product is called 'ALERT', or more officially it is called 'VIRUS ALERT'. This is an anti-virus software. The engine itself that contends with finding and cleaning IBM computer viruses comes from Europe and is considered at this point in time the world's best by testing labs in such criteria as number of viruses found and cleaned, speed, and so on. Our input is a front end push button menuing system to drive the whole thing so that Mr. and Mrs. Radio shack, and their kids, can check and clean their computers with the same ease and assurity as would a technical expert working for the government making sure that federal government machines don't reach out and erase everyone's income tax records. The insider's buzz word for such technical types is 'propeller heads' and the problem with anti-virus softwares has been that it has tended to be very technically oriented, despite the claims of being 'user friendly'. We on the other hand, me in particular, got annoyed with having to try and remember facts of use and the time wasted looking for technical steps in the documentations, when only wanting to spend a quick moment in checking my computer, and lacking a photographic memory to get around the problem so designed a menu, using batch file techniques to drive it, which turned out to be user friendly enough that both ordinary Joe's and Jo-anna's as well as propeller heads, liked it, enough for us to package the thing as a shareware and sell it for low prices and minimum profit in computer stores. This takes it back to a year and a half ago when our first such output hit the stores. This venture has expanded to where we have North American rights on a particular anti-virus software developed by a European in the last year to contend with hundreds of new viruses filtering out from the ex-communist nations now that the barriers are down. The particular anti-virus software has been done in Europe and was not being marketed in North America, but since the author saw our menu designs, and liked my twin brother's business ideas, a deal was struck this June and the thickly accented author cooked up a customized version of the engine per our recommendations and now we have a beta test product on shelves in local stores as of this week, with activities underway to launchpad the product into the United States within a month or so. Keep your fingers crossed. The point of this short story is that the whole of the (quote) product, was developed in this small basement apartment, with two Dos computers literally set up on apple boxes (Rucaray Chile Apple Boxes, in fact, cardboard cartons) picked up from beside the baler in the back rooms of a super market. What has happened in the last two and a half months, is that product design and preparation has had priority over all else including sonic experiments. What it has meant is that, say, two hours could be spent by me setting up a sonic experiment, then a moment later the experiment's devices literally kicked aside or the sonic tuners swept away with a sweep of the arm, to get back to business, as in back to the computer to work on the product. The software developement work is mostly over for the moment, now it is mainly disk production; producing disks in quantity for the store packages, or peeling labels off high quality pre- formatted disks but which came back from discontinued software such as disks with Dos 4.01 labels, and sold in boxes of 1000 for a song by a company in Toronto. Etc. Lots of work of this kind in starting up a new product level with practically no money. All this will change this weekend when we make the move to a medium sized 5 year old house in a satellite city named Orleans, immediately east of Ottawa. This has a two car garage, full basement, nice view including a park at the rear and open space within for a home otherwise sandwiched between two other new ones with only six feet between them. It is like a condo or townhouse, but peeled apart and separated, with a wide garage for two cars built across the front next to the entrance to give it style. But, the rent is right. And the owner/renter knows us and our business and software, even though we have just met and knew not of him beforehand. We knew a good friend of his. It is over. The fantasy of swank living at low cost in fancy digs across the Ottawa river in a 30 year old architect built house of 3200 square feet upstairs and the same amount of space in the basement, on 1 1/2 acres of land bordering a golf course, with swimming pool, and tennis court, an amazing property that fell through the cracks and became a power of sale from a bank's head office in Montreal, we almost swung it but couldn't secure a small second mortgage needed to pin it down. It has been sold, the buyer a young contractor and family, the contractor well aware of the minor problems needing immediate correction in the place and is ready to forge ahead to the big stuff and spend an immediate $50,000 to fix it up. We were going to wait for money to be earned by software to tackle the big stuff. One thing we DIDN'T know about until day before yesterday, the terrible secret that NO ONE including the Real Estate agent was willing to talk about, is that the whole of the house has aluminum wiring. This includes the heating which is all by 220 volt baseboard heaters. But now that hydro is so expensive the contractor is going to install two heat pumps and duct work, one for the upstairs, the second heat pump for the basement. The pumps themselves are going to be outside behind the architectural structure used for the swimming pool, well away from the house proper. But the very first thing he is going to do is replace the wiring. So the swank estate is unquestionably out of our hands, now. The contractor says the swimming pool is going to be left until next year. The giant pump for the pool is totally seized, and blue tiles are falling from the edges of the pool. It has been in-operative for three years (like I say this property was distressed, it sat empty for three years until we stepped into the picture and made an offer the bank liked). The new owners were there (ready to move in in two more weeks), to help us move the last of our stuff we had in storage there for two and 1/2 months, this being the case after we thought we were moving in and then ran bang into mortgage problems. The new family's three year old kid immediately pitched in to help move small items out through the five car garage up the driveway to the rented eight foot cube van, the kid putting each item securely in a totally safe totally proper place ready to get loaded into the van, the mother watching in absolute amazing, seeing her kid do something she never thought any kid, particularly her own, could ever do at that age, that is, to voluntarily pitch in and work without instruction nor coaxing for two and a half hours enjoying the effort the whole time. And using intelligence. For instance the little boy started pushing a file tray with six drawers on coasters out the garage across a strip of plywood to the drain slats whereupon the coaters snagged in the slots between the slats and pitched forward with a crash. I immediately came out of the garage to the rescue to reassure the kid that it was okay, not his fault, that the wheels had got caught between the wood. He was happy. He struggled and got it upright on his own and pushed it unerringly up the sloping driveway to the van, the job down. A half hour later another item on coasters, this time a typewriter table, began to get pushed out of the garage by the kid. This time, as I watched in silence from a discrete distance away, the kid got to the wood drain slats, carefully guided the wheels between the ruts, then stopped, reached forward, and tipped the thing back to lift the front wheels over the slight concrete edge at the front of the drain slats, then carried on up the driveway totally concentrating on the business at hand, everything done exactly right, entirely on his own. Wow talk about a fast learner. The kid is actually about three and a half years old. You have to marvel when you see this in children. All we have to do is get the parents to wake up, world wide. The newts are still under the spillboards at the front of the garage enterance, and in the swampy mixture called the swimming pool. Oh yeah, one last thing, the racoons are out of the basement ceiling. The family was holed up there during the winter and wouldn't budge when we started stomping around the place in the spring. They were up in the roof under the work area in the basement and we found where they were getting in, it was a small rectangular opening cut into the thick cedar wood in the side of the house up under the lower flushing, the cut as if chisled by engineers, a perfect rectangle with precise right angles and little teeth marks all away around the edges of the rectangle making it unquestionably clear it was intentionally cut this way by the racoons, a perfect rectangular opening about 6 by 8 inches. They literally chewed their way into a sealed house. We learned something about racoons worth reporting, one afternoon when over there cutting the lawn as a favour for the Real Estate agent in return for letting us store our bulkier belongings there. It was this: that afternoon the hydro winked out for the street the moment I went in to look for some scientific notes somewhere amongst 250 cardboard cartons that were stored in the basement at that time, so that the basement was pitch black in the utility area where in the ceiling overhead were holed up the family of racoons. (What a nose wrenching stench! incidentally). Anyway, we could walk around in the blackness and hear the racoons moving along very quietly ahead of us up there in the ceiling. But pull out a Bic cigarette lighter from the pocket and fire it up and instant bedlam, the racoons racing wildly back and forth in the roof in panic gabbling and clamouring in wide open racket but wouldn't leave the house since it was broad daylight. What was learned is that they can see infrared light, even just the tiny amount from the weeny flame of a cigarette lighter through the thick roof of the utility area was enough to throw them into racing gabbling panic, back and forth, back and forth, up there in the ceiling. But us moving around in the dark only caused them to quietly sneak out of the way as we passed underneath. Interesting. A week later we moved the load of 250 cardboard cartons to an 8 by 10 foot rental storage container, and the work tables, desks, filing cabinates got moved the other day to the same storage place, as is being reported above to comprise this short story. Incidentally, when we found out that mortgaging problems attempting to finance that swank estate at such a low price were going to be insurmountable, there were a few hot words expressed venting private concerns and frustrations over here in Ottawa and at that same moment over there the water supply for the whole of the city of Aylmer went down when a major pump feeding the filtering plant failed. It was eerie, like it was more than a co-incidence, like, when was the last time the whole of the water supply for Aylmer failed, well, actually, never. It was like when the power went out the day I intended to get some scientific research papers from the basement, when I walked into the house and started down the stairs with single minded intent to find those notes, that is when the power blew out for the street. It took two hours with Quebec hydro trucks rolling slowly back and forth past the trees and gardens and landscaping looking for the cause of the power failure, some blown out fuse on a pole in the area or something like that. Anyway, it was hard to find. And now to the present, the last day of July. This afternoon the basement floor in the five year old new house in Orleans gets painted by my brother and me and day after tomorrow we move production from here (the basement suite) to there. Happy day. But not for everybody. Right now here in the basement suite in the Sandy Hill area of Ottawa the property manager and one of the tenents living upstairs on the third floor are outside painting what was an attractive brand new staircase and decking with natural light green wood finish which made the old brick joint look modernized, now being painted with a flat grey paint which makes the place look instantly old again. No choice, apparently the city came by and said he had to paint. Too bad. Too bad, the place now looks awful in comparison but at least some lesser intelligence in the Ottawa city bylaw criminal mind structure is feeling assuaged in the career urge realms of the emotions, to everybody else's loss. As for us, once in the new house over this long weekend, and the pressure is off, I hope to get back into some more heavy duty sonics, going back and picking up where I left off last spring with a Sony 1 1/2 inch square wafer-thin tweeter made of mylar resonating in the open air, and testing cardboard cutout sonic mobiles made of six sided shapes. Incidentally my twin brother just came out with a joke he heard earlier today: "What do you get when you play Country and Western snivel and whine music backwards? You get the dog back, the car back, the kids back, the wife back..." NEXT FILE...............SOUND4.TXT