See the whole Newsonic Story at: http://cosmicastronomy.com/newsonic.htm INTERRUPTION - Strike From The Dark Side ----------------------------- July 14, 1995, 9:00 AM. Friday morning. Hmmmm, ooops. The sonic experiment is temporarily off the air. Last night sometime between 3 and 7 AM, someone came in through the patio door and stole the TV converter. Channel 51 is gone ! Sob ! It came as a bit of a surprise, because last evening finishing at 2:30 AM, was a Lou Gehrig biography movie 'Pride of the Yankees' starring Gary Cooper, from 1942, which being obviously filmed in mono, nonetheless had a sound track in the living room that was resplendently stereo, with bands playing in street scenes, and dance orchestras, all playing with 'breathing' and 'hang' and long distance echoes continuing to the end of their time, and ball park scenes had R E A L D E E P throaty roars and P O W E R echoing around the gaint stadiums in this movie. Actor's voices all clear and natural etc., etc. Well, at last, I have arrived, thought I, listening to this during the movie and feeling very pleased, almost proud. Albiet, it came and went. The best goodstuff was not stable, at times female voices were back up there in high pitch, and at times the ball park stadium backgrounds sounded like frying bacon. Otherwise, when the real goodstuff moved back in, it coming and going during random household living during the course of the movie, I had to gloat to myself somewhat, that at last it seems I have arrived, sitting there looking at the sticks radiating in a 6 arm star from the center point of the array, suspended 6 inches in the air above the living room floor, each of the 1/4 inch square sticks carefully turned by 45 degrees to be parked on edge one above the other, a deft act of balance. Yes, I thought. Yes. Hm hm. Yes. It works. The landlord phoned this morning at 8 AM to pick up some rent money. I put on the coffee - the morning's daily firestarter - and went into the living room to sit down, read the paper, wait, and soon became aware of an anomaly, a gap and bare space on the living room floor, with cable ends lying there, where the converter used to be sitting in a hot spot on the carpet beside the TV. What is this? is a thought that gradually opened up in the mind. Sure enough, what it was is the converter from Roger's Cablevision is gone, along with 40 bucks from a kitchen shelf, and a small quartz clock in the front office used to time the speed of computer programs. Nothing else. Not a thing seems to be missing or disturbed. Someone came in through the patio door it seems. Both side gate and back gate in the back yard were wide open. The little brown dog named Quasar was asleep upstairs during the night so his gold watch is going to be taken away. Oops, the 3-D camera, it takes pictures that are especially processed into genuine 3-D snapshots, it too is gone from its place of rest on a utility shelf in the hall closet. Oddly enough, the most critical aspects of the environment, the very fragile hand made sonic starflakes (8 of them) stationed in accute hot spots on the table in the living room, were still in place. And the slinky array on the living room floor, now with spruce 1/4 inch strips in 4 foot lengths criss-crossed through the slinkies, was completely undisturbed, even though the stealth who stole the converter had to step VERY CAREFULLY in amongst slinky arms to detatch the converter from the TV. That was done with extreme care not to disturb the array. It makes you wonder. It sure indeed does. Good soul bad soul stealthing through the environment the night after a very important day. It sure makes you wonder. I have on hand a 39 channel Jerrard converter picked up three years ago from the flea market, to use until a proper cablevision new converter can be afforded, who knows when. .... And now, sob, to add insult to injury, the old 39 channel converter doesn't work. It wintered in the garage, and took a couple of falls to the concrete floor. And now, there is nothing whatsoever passing through it, not even power for the TV when the TV is plugged into its back. The converter is in the garbage. The cable signal straight into the TV is met with just words on a blank screen 'SIGNAL UNUSABLE'. I am officially OFF THE AIR ! Knocked off in mid stride at a critical turning point in the experiments, by a strike from the negative. It sure makes you wonder. - Finis - INTERVALS -------------------------------------------------------------- July 15, 1995, 11:40 AM. Saturday morning. The TV set is back on line, partly. Later yesterday afternoon, an associate figured out that the cable from Cablevision could couple directly to the connector on the back of the TV, a different way to connect than the one I tried trying to clip two cable ends together by a female/male coupler. Hence, channels 2 to 39 are back on the air. Unfortunately, in order to hook up the TV, it had to be moved, moving it off its point ie., moving it out of the precise point of focus to which the entire sound stream in the living room has been enhanced by all of the sonic tuning means currently erected in the living room. This includes the gathering of 4 large Snowflakes and 3 giant Starflakes plus Bird Cage and Ferris Wheel on the table in the living room, each focused edge on in the same direction toward the TV, plus the flow tube of 4 standups also on the table. These two assemblies on the table can be easily refocused by discretely turning the shelf upon which sits the above described collection. And the same for the flow tube easily refocused just by rotating the strip of balsa wood upon which it sits. The hexagon slinky array on the living room floor is a different matter. Since each stretch was carefully made, by listening accutely to sound from a constant sitting TV, it is now out of whack. So either the solution is to try to re-adjust the TV back into a precise accord position on the glass top table, or if this fails, to reconstruct the slinky array, not an enjoyable option. The fact of the matter is that at this moment the great baseball and social night life sounds reported day before yesterday (June 13), are simply not there. At this moment even a STEREO source sounds dull flat and muffled. The high end is back to weak stridencies and extreme off colors, and there are no bass resonances of any kind reverberating around the sonic enviroment. Let's put this another way, there is no bass. The 'Airframe' is practically non existent. And so on. Major problems are back in the picture. All of this, because the TV had to be moved out of point to connect a temporary cable because a negative stealthed into the middle of an extremely delicate setup and obeying 'Murphy's Law' 100 percent, took the physical device most necessary to the who of the tests. Worse harm could have happened had any of the sonic tuning devices been ripped off, or the TV set, but given the good news (they weren't) that which could most disrupt the immediate ongoings of the experiment was that which was tapped by a negative, right on target. ... One moment please ... I took another crack at it, cranking the volume and trying to re-sit the TV, with some success. I remembered that the main central slinky had a slight jog to go under the glass top table directly between the TV's two stereo speakers. By jogging the glass top around, and the TV, so as to get some overhang into the air of the right hand speaker so as to quell some hiss and high pitched rattling, I finally gained a new hot spot in the way the TV sits that regained some resonances that served to cure major artificialities in the sound, plus back in came bass resonances, and stereophonics returned to a point in the sound picture. Albiet this is a stereo broadcast. Before I started there were no stereophonics in the sound picture as of yesterday and this morning. The TV set was off all day yesterday until dinner time. So, at least, some of what was lost by a negative strike is back. Which brings to mind another aspect of such experiments, something about modern day life that is taken for granted. Last evening at 10:30 PM the hydro went out. It dimmed by about half, a moment later browned, then suddenly poof the whole was gone. The house was pitch black, motor sounds of the air conditioner grated to a halt and fell silent, the fridge, the two computers, the constantly blowing furnace, and the TV. The entire upper area of Orleans was out, except for a pocket of about 6 street lamps at an intersection two blocks away, and the central strip of Orleans along St. Joseph Blvd., it was fully lit up and all late night stores going at 110%, but the Queensway (main divided expressway into Ottawa) was completely out including street and traffic lights, and everything below the Queensway down to the Ottawa River, all pitch black. In 3/4 of an hour the power came back on instantly, 15 minutes later it was off again for 15 minutes, was back on again for 15 minutes, was off again for 15 minutes, then came back on again to stay. What to do, with everything off and the house pitch black except for a flourescent tube flashlight, the heat rapidly building up into the low 30 degree celsius range, water running out on the kitchen floor from under the fridge, traffic poking their noses gingerly into the main intersection a block and a half from here, gingerly seeing if its their turn to cross or turn. I took a chance, got in the car and drove down to the Queensway to see if I could tell how wide spread the outage was, and was suddenly brought to a new state of awareness when coming to that intersection and realized that every car in this crowded intersection was politely and gingerly taking their turn, a mutual regard for everyone else, no one risking other people's lives, crossing, and turning, in the black without a single red or green traffic light to quide a soul. And that was just one cross. We are, very committed, to a dependence on hydro, at this time in the century. Speaking about changes, yesterday afternoon I drove to a 146 acre parcel of land part owned by my land lord, about 8 kilometers east of here, just to look around to see what is happening in the countryside. What was happening is there was not a single insect to be seen, not a grasshopper, not a butterfly, not a dragon fly, there were NONE. Few birds in the bushes and small trees also, only a few could be heard. A few red winged blackbirds also called forth their piercing whistles out in the fields of weeds and hay which comprises 98 acres of this parcel of land. There has been a prolonged draught in the region. The ground is bone dry and rock hard to at least six feet down according to the region's grounds keepers. The UV (ultraviolet light index) is at a record high, and for the last two days smog in the entire area is also at an all time record high, with poisonous Ozone in the low atmophere and at ground level a major concern. But, where are the insects. Even mosquitoes have been nearly a vanished species, so far this year. No buzz bomb attacks that just won't quite. Speaking of which, how can a mosquito come in the back patio door, snake its way through the living room and up the long hall, up the stairs, and back down the long hall, into your bedroom, and aim directly for your ear drum, when you are trying to fall asleep. A half dozen or more mosquitoes have to be trapped in mid air before the ear drum falls silent, even the dog helping, every so often a loud CLACK suddenly striking the dark of the room when the little brown dog named Quasar gets one. There are none these days but earlier this summer mosquitoes did penetrate the dark of night following the glow of body trying to sleep. .... It is 20 minutes past two and I thought I should report on one more thing. I have just done a quick round of micro measure tunings and have more than doubled the rest state volume (more volume without touching the volume control). Further, a tympani in the sound track of part 8 of an 8 part TV 1 hour specials on MGM Motion Picture's history, was resonant, with the reverbs all echoing to the end of their time. Most of the sounds and sonics lost to yesterday, are back. It was done by touch tuning the node supports holding the slinky array up in the air, by touch tuning the balsa wood supporting the flow tube on the table, and by touch tuning the facet in the kitchen sink, for instance changing its position slighty, and turning ON the tap for the water filter attached to the tap. Just these small tunings opened up the sound back into a final stage of reverbs and resonances, deep bass tones, and 'breathing' stereophonics that 'hang'. Plus of course the major gain in volume. This occurred at six clicks back from maximum on the volume control. One advantage of using this MGM TV special for sound is that the sound stream switches back and forth between Stereo and Mono during different passages and film clips. At this moment, all of the tracks sound stereophonic. Like I say, I am back in business. ... It is 9 PM and Paradise in Thunder Alley has just finished. I took the opportunity to do some more ultra fine tuning of the slinky array on the living room floor, plus the assembly of objects on the table. Fine tuning the assembly on the table brought in more sonic effects in discrete ways. However it was taking the slinky assembly to task that has produced the best results. Specifically, three of the arms, plus the single invisible Star of David cross beam, were shifted by about 2 degrees counter clockwise in order to accomodate the new hot horking position of the TV on the glass top table. The uniform shift has brought back into the sound stream deep long distance reverberations which continue to echo to the end of their time, explosions from the special effects do now sound like they were recorded live, and has pulled down the female sound of voices into a complete lower octave. No more high pitched piss in their voices. And lisp, effecting male voices, making you wonder, has been banished. No lies, though. The sound as of this moment is extremely head in the vice. Just the slightest movement, such as repositioning of a hand or finger, can cause the best stuff to disappear and in some cases all convert to not even good stuff. So, the system as of this moment is very unstable. Nevertheless, the system IS in FACT horking forth the goodstuff when listening position is perfect, sitting, or standing. Good enough for now. The next jobbie is to raise the slinkies into the air as a platform spread out 15 1/4 inches in a single wide spread layer in the air. Until we meet again. Goodbye. - Finis - GETTING READY ---------------------------------------------------------- July 17, 1995, 10:15 AM. Monday morning. Well, we won't have to worry about RAIN for awhile. Last night and this morning it has been raining steadily, off and on, light, medium, light, exactly the kind of consistent rain needed to penetrate the 6 feet to the bottom layer of bone dry rock hard clay soils in the area. Some nearby yard plants are already looking as green as Ireland, as a result of the rains. I was watering twice a day everything except the grass itself so had no problems with spoilage, but did have to attend grass, in just the most obvious brown spots. The problem here in Orleans is that all of the water is metered. So an ordinary household of 4, two adults and 2 kids or teenagers, can run a bill of 250 dollars every two month billing period without watering the yard, that would add extra. The bill at this house which has the 'experiment' is about 100 dollars less, including squirting the hose at the greens of the yard daily. I decided one day last summer that the fire hydrant sticking up in the middle of the front yard was a real eyesore, despite being painted bright yellow and blue, so went out in the car and found a number of wild varieties which I transplanted around the base of the fire hydrant, including (as it turned out) some poison oak which I did not know about but which fortunately kicked the bucket, and some wild morning glory, which produced about two weeks of blooms then pettered out due to dog hits. This year a surge of new wild morning glory sprang forth, along with wild grape, so by last week the hydrant was starting to look ornate rather than eyesore, including a brief first blooming of the wild morning glory. Then the other morning I came out and the entire hydrant was painted in undercoat white right to the base, but, every piece of greenery had been CAREFULLY pulled free and laid back on the ground surrounding the hydrant so that not a single leaf had been damaged by the workers who took this care. Thanks to them. Next will be all the hydrants in Orleans painted in new bright colors, then I can resurrect the greenery wrapped back around the hydrant. Which brings us to today's report. It turns out with cable plugged directly into the back of the TV no converter that channel 22 is playing the same tapes as channel 51, except channel 22 is STEREO. So this is now turned on, ready for the next round of new tests. The slinky array on the living room floor was by this time beginning again to look quite beat up, so I dissolved it in stages, yeilding some things to report. First to come out were the 4 wooden 4 foot rods. They were by this time lying flat and off their supports one of them against the floor, and so had become spoilers. Just as I was ready to start dismantling, a transient chaotic distorting had entered the sound stream after making a micro measure small adjust to a cutout standup on the BBS and InterNet computer's table in the dining room. When in the general area of the doorway from the kitchen to the living room, the sound stream would break up into piss, rattle, and blatting all at the same time, so I turned down the volume and proceeded to disassemble the slinky array. Better fidelics came back into the picture as each wooden rod was removed, except for one. Then the slinkies were untangled, and uncoupled from their pinions by straight pins in the carpeted floor. Here is where a major change in the sound stream occurred. The stream became very artificial sounding after the slinkies were removed. Turning up the volume resulted in no chaos but nowhere near the same volume. Yes, in the overall the sound again has a kind of squeezed and twisted partial missing tonal quality, for instance cymbols sound as if hard small pieces of brass are being struck, there is no more RING or SIZZLE. Voices are very loud, but muffled. You have trouble hearing the words, even though you can hear the volume. And all pianos sound like the keyboards of crazed rock and rollers; bright, hard, the piano reverbs carrying the artificial nature, no gutsy or sweet resonances that are real in the pianos. The intention is to re-adjust the naked TV to its best sitting on the glass top table, then to re-create the slinky array, this time with each strip raised to 15 1/4 inches in the air. I will use stands made to hold the ends of the wooden rods in direct vertical support. Here goes .... Success. I have found an adjusted position and the bass from the TV has become clear again, not strong, but it got rid of the aweful noise that was supposed to be bass, and has re-fidelicized the rest of the sound range. The TV has been turned by about 15 degrees toward the kitchen doorway to get this. Well .... there goes channel 22. First, the Canadian national anthem by the RCMP band and extras plus ten thousand singing voices raised to patriotic bellow, then on comes ADS for Rogers Cable TV. What an imposition. The best thing Rogers can do is lower their rates, and start showing something better on all of the commercial stations and TV channels Rogers owns, instead of doing everything possible to force more people into the chain of video stores owned by Rogers. For instance the latest plow at money grabs is to take any movie that runs longer than 2 hours and split it into two, 2 hours showings. 'Part 2 Continued next evening at the same time'. It means that all of the extra time for the four hour showing is made up in commercial scams. I did a quick mental calculate of extra revenues a station can get by splitting a two hour oft shown mediocre movie into a new 'special' 2-parter of two hours each. It comes to about 340 percent more revenue in ad times, if the station induces more advertisers by lower rates, for instance, say, 30 percent less, during the special, two, 2-hour specials, for a 2 hour movie. And what the hell, most of the new ads are sex hot lines, and psychic connections, the kind of connections that will change your life the moment you take the courage and MAKE THE CALL! The thing about these psychic hot lines is that they are all openly competing against each other. There is only ONE psychic hot line which is genuine at this moment, and won't you be surprised, the only one which is GENUINE! happens to be the very ONE which is advertising this VERY MINUTE!. Yes, something is happening to the mass consciousness, brain waves and synapses are being inexorably destroyed, one by one, by the billions. The mass consciousness is becoming more and more controlled by the negative. Incidentally, have you taken a look at those psychics, some of them look like animals. Talk about poisons polluting the egos, instead of purifying the inner higher consciousness. ... How about that! channel 23 is now broadcasting good music, in stereo. At least I have something to work with. Here goes. First, I have just done a quick test holding a 4 foot wooden rod into the sound stream from the front edge of the TV and glass top table on which it stands, and have learned that: The sound is more energetic at the 15 1/4 inch height, the height from floor to top surface of the glass top table, but is more pure an inch higher - the height at which the centers of the TV's two tiny speakers are generating the sound stream. This is good, because in order to re-create the slinky array, using the wooden rods, the top layer of the array, the upper rod, will be about 1 inch higher than the bottom rod. Let's have some fun. Time to make the supports and create the new array. Here goes .... Hearing can get really accute. I have just laid out the first arm for the new slinky array. This one a central cross piece, one of the two that will pass in front of the TV instead of under it. I held the slinky dangling like an Austrailian earth worm in the air, as much of it stretched as I could manage between two outstretched arms, and at a height of roughly 15 1/4 inches in the air, heard what seemed to be unmistakable improved good stuff in the sound stream, the music for this the new ultra modern 4 bar beat rendering of Dave Brubek's 'Take Five' currently in use as the theme song for 'The Secret Life Of Machines' from Great Britain. It is on one of the good listening background music tapes which used to come on daily on channel 51 before the converter (with scrambler for the extra channels) was stolen. The new position for this arm was rotated counterclockwise by what looked by eyeball (after the fact) to be about 15 degrees. Since the original pin used to pinion this arm to the floor near the wall was still in place, I was able to measure, using the giant 10 inch protractor, the counterclockwise shift in the angle. It turns out, to all extents and purposes, to be in fact 15 degrees, an angle 100 percent conducive to fractal geometry 6 sided harmonics. Thought I should mention it. I have just pinned the first slinky into place, and already there is more ring and sizzle in the cymbol being used for a big band orchestration of the Moody Blues 'Knights in White Satin'. The center node, where criss cross of the three slinky arms will occur, is already raised to 6 inches by one of the six sided ornate vinegar bottles. It was the raising of the center node which restored some of the sizzling vigor to the cymbols. And the bass is starting to resonate again, revererating with a trace of long distance gusty echoes. Just thought you should know. .... The fucken stands won't support the wooden rod! No way. The two just bend and fall over! No way! What a bummer! Thought I had it aced. No way. They just keel over like long strands of stiff looking rope. Yes ziltch. These stands are pointless. So back to square two. What to use to raise the slinky array high in the air. Any ideas. I don't have any, except to go to the real extreme of making stands which look like radio transmission towers, guy wires stream down to the floor to hold the thing in upright but even then no guarantee that the verticle wire shaft itself won't bend from the weight. I am going to go for a chinese smorgasborg lunch, and think about it, since a few bucks happen to be sitting around left over from the weekend. .... This is not one of my better days. I went out and got into the car, backed down the driveway. When shifting the automatic to go forward the engine coughed and quit. That was a half hour ago. At the moment the car is sitting two feet out from the curb, on the wrong side of the street, in front of a fire hydrant. I have a fake note in the windshield saying it quit due to getting wet from the rain, just in case coppers happen by wondering who abandoned the car and what they were fleeing from. It was just little old me, with an engine that just won't quit, wrong, the opposite, not even a single fart in the past half hour. However, I did walk across to the White Rose Nursury (my original intended first destination) and have found they have a good supply of steel wire tripod stands used for supporting memorial wreaths. These will work as a temporary measure to raise the slinky array high into the air. The only problem is cost. 6 tripods will be needed, at a cost of 2.48 dollars each, plus GST and taxes. Quite the day. Completely stuck in the mud when wanting to go one step forward. This is now day three of adversities, starting overnight, between July 13 and 14, when the converter was ripped off by prowlers. A neighbor turned up the next afternoon with a few goods found stashed behind her fence next to the park. Amongst the goods was a computer disk with my name on it so she knew where to bring the stuff her kids found stashed behind her fence. I did not know that amongst the grab was an overnight duffle stuffed in the front hall closet which had a few goods, including two disks with physics I had written to give to a fundamental particle physicist from the National Research Council. We did not meet at the sports complex so the disks were not handed over and had remained in the case in the hall closet since mid March. Now, my neighbor was handing them back to me at the front door. She reported having observed two prowlers scooting between her house in the middle of the night, which is why we now know there were two teenagers in on the caper. But, I digress. That fabulous sound that had occurred on the evening of July 13, with the new use of wooden rods of 4 foot lengths to raise the slinky array 6 inches into the air, is long gone. And it looks like it is going to stay gone for awhile yet, can't afford the cost of the tripods at this moment. Hmmm, perhaps there was something in that fabulous sound reported for the evening of July 13, that was just too close to the core for the negative to appreciate. The problem being that the worse the sound of modern day reproduction systems, the worse the aweful noise that can be passed off as modern music, expecially rock and roll, heavy metal, and rap, these musics all have low frequency carnal inducing ingredients, and when heard clearly, are intolerable, but not when heard in junk systems that somehow make these aweful rackets pleasurable in a very perverse way to those types of souls who just do not listen to what is happening within themselves. To add insult to injury, this is the first time in four years a car has failed to start for me. No lunch for a reward today. ... How about that! Channel 23 is now broadcasting a French talk show. Now I have nothing to work with, and no car. Like I say, this day is starting off rough. At 1:45 PM an associate dropped in, very concerned about the look of the car abandoned facing the wrong way in front of the fire hydrant on the street, wondering what cops would think of 'THIS' situation, if passing by. So the two of us, grunting and wheezing for breath, were able to push the thing back up the slight slope into the driveway to leave the car sitting looking like it should, parked on a driveway. - Finis - CHECKIN' IT OUT -------------------------------------------------------- July 18, 1995, 12:50 PM. Tuesday afternoon. So, yesterday turned out to be the coldest July 17 on record in this region, according to a late afternoon news broadcast. Today, there have been intermittant sun showers of very warm, heavily polluted water, off and on. But, the temperature is much higher. It seems the stalled car, sitting demurely in the driveway, is not getting spark. It is getting lots of gas but an attempt to start it again this morning led to not even a single cough, and holding a spark plug cap over the spark plug gap, which should have resulted in a spark shooting into the plug when the engine cranked, resulted in nothing whatever. Unfortunate, because costs are going to escallate in this, before the car is running again, first but not least a tow to a garage. And then garage persons coming to a consensus as to how expensive the fix will be. Quite a whollop when there IS NO MONEY to play with. I am getting tired of being poor, really poor. The disadvantages are just too numerous. The main problem is there is not much a human can do that is in 100 percent accord with humanitarian law that can earn income without contributing in some way to the negative, the options a pure soul can do on this planet are not many, when it comes to earning daily bread. The first tripod apparatus is erected in the living room, and is working much better than expected. Two memorial wreath wire tripods, which stand to 24 inches, have proven more than suitable to raise a hexagon slinky in the air to 15 1/4 inches. Thin brass jewellry wire was used to create slings for supporting the two ends of a wooden rod (4 feet long) running through a slinky, with two straight pins at either end where the stretched slinky ends were pulled down to the floor, to pin the slinkies in stretch along the wooden rod. This apparatus can be easily moved around and at the moment is in an extreme hot alignment as a lateral arm bridge on the floor and out from the TV, (picture a rudinemtary sky crane used for constructing tall buildings). The last step was to stretch the two slinky ends out from the ends of the rod, at an angle, to the floor. The result has been better stuff all the way around in the sound stream, top to bottom. More bass reverbs, long distance echoes, high end discernment, and fidelity throughout. Not bad. Not bad at all, for the first raised hexagon slinky. The new situation is still very fragile. The sling apparatus had to be coaxed and fine tuned into a proper setup for kicking the sound stream with major goodstuff. And slight disturbances to the enviroment can cost in the form of micromeasure chaoses which expand into major distortions. However, all in all, it can be said that in the overall this new setup is quite stable. For one thing, it is no longer crisp crazy as a 'head in the vice' catastrophe. Moving around can result in minor gains and drops in the sound for the living room. But for the time being gone is the environment which wobbled like a sonic washboard, as you moved a foot at a time through the room. - Finis - TIME OUT -------------------------------------------------------- July 19, 1995, 11:45 AM. Wednesday morning. The last day, starting the evening of July 16, has been spent dedicated to the task of producing an interrum update and revision of our program named Virus ALERT. Since I was reponsible for the color and push button ingenuities of this well known program, all of the source codes for the entirety of Virus ALERT's menus and support programs are here in this computer. A new version is in the works. Three programmers and a designer are handling the whole thing, so I am out of the loop. At last. But since the new version is being written in C Language and Assembly, progress is a mite slow. So, in the meantime, a temporary version is intended infusing the existing ALERT menus and structures with the new version, using the existing ALERT to drive the new modules. Which is where I come in. The whole of ALERT was constructed upon a jerry rigged adaptation of a psuedo C Language program which used Batch file syntax, and I was able to find numerous undocumented features and codes within this compiling system, which came from New York State, to advance the ALERT menu almost to standards typically concidered entirely in a C Language. Unfortunately, it seems I am the only one who can handle this jerry rigged coding and compiling system currently in use for ALERT. So it is up to me to perform at 120 percent and cook up new codes and modifications to drive the brand new version of ALERT for a short while, until the main new C Language drivers are ready from the programmers. Fortunately it does not take me long to completely modify menu displays, and to recode push buttons, etc. I am being fed the new menus one by one by the principle designer, and just, patch them in, using my own coding techniques after being given the facts of what is needed in results. It should only take another two to three days to finish this tasking, and then it will be back on the ball full time with the sonic experiments. In the meantime I should have some free time, off and on, to do further tests, and will report as they occur. The one thing to announce is that the defunct car has been towed to the garage and the good news is it was easily fixed, the bad news being the cost is over 250 dollars, for a complete re-wiring including plugs, major tune-up, etc. This is not all that unexpected since this car has been running daily for 3 1/2 years and only in the past 3 weeks was retired to second car status, but during that whole time never had a tune-up. Apparently, rain got under the hood and did the final deeds to render the car off line. I am not sure that RAIN could do major misdeeds to the car, but do know that luck has been with this car for some time regards keeping it on the road without under the hood repairs. It is nine years old. And has clocked over 295,000 kilometers. The next thing is to wait until bucks are coaxed out of the wall to pay for this. It is 1:15 PM. What is on is 'Like Glands Through The Hourglass, So Are The Days Of Our Lives', on CBC, Canada's nationally funded, federally owned, television network. Heady stuff, for those who don't pay attention to their own inner thoughts, emotions, or feelingss, those who let it all be given to them by the police state that hates Christ Energies. Now, let's not go wonky. This is not going to degenerate into a mindless rant about matters irrational. It only happens that when opportunity allows, it is a responsibility to point out alternatives in religeous cum political points of view. You have been reading a few of mine, is all. I don't believe in police states as having anything of value to contribute to human kind. And see no relief in religions that can't take anyone by the hand and lead them straight back into the realms of First Cause and Reality. So, let me state a poke or two against the negative, when mood and confidence permits. Thank you. Otherwise, I am just biding a bit of time, waiting for some more work to do to finish updating my share of the ALERT program. P.S. finally got to the Chinese smorgasborg, for lunch, today, just got back in fact. .... Well it is 4:40 PM and there has been some time off this afternoon, so I took the opportunity to play a bit with the tripods and now to report the result. At this moment I have high end fidelity, low end resonances, clarity thoughout the sound range, and 'Airframing' all the way to the front of the house. The only thing I do not have is deep bass reverbs, and so of course no Bottom Bass. Otherwise, woowie. What brought this about was by moving the existing tripod apparatus supporting a 4 foot wooden rod, and slinky, into alignment straight out from the front of the TV. Once a radiant alignment was found, I then very carefully raised each end of the wooden rod until the purest sound was heard. To my surprise this did not raise the stick to the height mid center for the TV's two tiny speakers. Instead, it raised the bottom of the wooden rod to be in a horizontal line straight to the top surface of the glass top table. The wooden rod is rotated by 45 degrees so it is the lower square facet of the rod that is perfectly heighted to the surface of the glass tabletop, to miracle height of exactly 15 1/4 inches. I am going to have to cut the lower portions of the three thin steel legs of one of the tripods to use it directly in front of the TV. At the moment the tripod there juts up a few inches into the view of the screen. Trouble is the metal tripods are made of STEEL and I don't have anything to cut with at the moment the hacksaws are somewhere in the garage under a ton of boxes. What is playing right now are TNN's Top Ten western video hits. The broadcast is of course in Stereo. So this is the first time I get to report that fidelity is really good, in fact superb, in a Stereo broadcast. In fact I guess without stretching the mantles that this is the best sound ever, so far coaxed from these tests. The sound had to be coaxed with a few last minute VERY minute micro measure tunings of about half a dozen random objects, including the facet in the sink in the kitchen. The sound stream is very very fragile to any kind of chaotic disturbance, so this great sound will not last for more than a short while before it deteriorates. - Finis - EDITORIAL ------------------------------------------------------- July 20, 1995, 10:50 AM. Thursday morning. I have just done a few minutes of tests, and have learned nothing new, but have re-affirmed a couple of opinions. First, it seems there is a major dominant six sided fractal geometry pattern within the whole moire pattern of sonics dominating the sound stream in a room. This is been suspected, but this morning has seemed to have been confirmed, in an easily described way. This morning I set about to erect a second tripod apparatus with wooden rod running through a stretched hexagonal slinky. The project only got so far as to position the two new tripod stands, with results worth reporting. I simply took one of the steel wire tripods and moved it around in a general area where I thought it should go, and heard better discernment in the sound stream in a certain position, and dropped it there, stood on the carpet. The same was done for the second tripod, on the other side of the existing erection which runs straight out from the TV in an alignment that aims directly to the center of the TV to between its two tiny stereo speakers. The second new tripod also passed through a small area of attenuated performance when being dangled in the air from finger tips, so was also dropped into this new hot spot location. To all extents and purposes the alignment of the two new tripods crosses the central erection at a 30 degree angle. I then took one of the ornimental 6 sided vinegar bottles and ran it back and forth along the wooden rod of the current erection and with eyes closed, heard an attenuation toward better good stuff in the sound stream at a certain location, and placed the bottle to the floor at that point, and opened my eyes, to find no surprise, the bottle was right at the node where the alignment of the two new tripods crosses the existing erection. In other words, the size and scale of the existing erection has created an artifact that is large, twelve sided, and fractal, in the sound stream, and simple listening tests adding new apparatus in to the erection, can bring into visual manifestation aspects of the sonic 12 sided moire pattern artifact. What I mean is, that I just did exactly that, let listening be the bottom line arbitrator, and listening led to the placement of three new objects that fell into place in a true and perfect accord with a presence in the sonic sound stream, a presence that is a dominant 12 sided geometry. (12 sided figures comprising 30 degree angles, are inherent within the basics of any 6 sided matrix. In fact, 144,000 give or take a few, are the actual number of facets that can be manifested from a simple 6 sided embodiment, such as the Cube and Sphere of the Supreme Creators who at the present time are to be known as Alpha and Omega). That takes care of the first 'EDITORIAL'. The second is an opinion. I am coming more and more to the opinion that a MONO sound source produces a better stereophonic reproduction. The main gain is in the sonic presence of 'space' in and around sonic images, which can be clearly sensed in mono sourced re-creations of stereophonic images, but is not seeming present in full two speaker stereophonic reproductions. At the moment the sound stream (from channel 5, broadcasting good listening music in Stereo) is fidelic and so on, but lacks the SONICS, the ambiant live sound stereo presence I have mentioned so often in tests throughout the past month and a half. There is little depth perception present in the current sound stream. All of the sound is obviously heard to eminate from a region surrounding the TV set, but there seems to be little in the way of long distance depth deep into the far background behind the TV, and further, there is nothing in the way of a kind of surround sound echo which denotes 'live'. This is absent, in this stereo broadcast. This 'liveness' has been absent from any stereo broadcasting tested with this TV set. One other major fact concurrently pointing out the lack of 'live' presence is that all hand claps so far heard in stereo broadcast do not have intrinsic long distance delay. In other words all handclaps are on the beat, rather than a half a beat behind. Whereas, in Mono broadcasts, hand claps are intrinsically half a beat behind the music when stereo sonics are properly in focus. In a club setting with hand claps surrounding a performer these can pulsate with secondary echoes, in a properly attuned Mono sound source. In the main, the 'Hang' and 'Second City' delayed reverberations are also missing from stereo broadcast sound sources. It is a combination of all of these ingredients which make the stereo broadcasts seem impure, compared to mono, even though the stereo broadcasts can be very fidelic in terms of natural sounds, and so on. It comes back to the fact that two-mike two-speaker artifacts are arbitrary implimentations. In fact, one mike recorder of sound patterns regenerated as a sound stream coming from just one speaker, into an artificial environment, can recreate echo reflections and reverberations which are picked up by the 'two' ears of humans to re-manifest stereophonic sound. Two mikes, and two speakers, are not needed, to re-manifest stereo. In all of the tests, and subtle re-tunings, done since the TV converter was ripped off, cancelling access to channel 51, I have not been able to crack open the sound stream into having the ingredient I have all along being calling 'sonics'. The 'sonics' are a particular kind of presence, which is missing in the sound stream from full stereo broadcast sources at this time. I have had 'sonics' to play with in brief occurrences in movie and TV episode reruns that were originally recorded in Mono, in the past several days, unfortunately nothing that I can play with all day. And, now, duty calls, I have to get back to work updating and re-writing codes for the new temporary version of the Virus ALERT computer antivirus program. Goodby. - Finis - HMMMMM ------------------------------------------------------- July 21, 1995, 9:25 AM. Friday morning. This seems to be a period of diminishing returns. Yesterday afternoon, when the front door was open, a gust of wind from a passing small thunderstorm blew through the house taking one of the giant starflakes perched picariously on a glass soda dish, on the shelf on the table in the living room, onto the table, smashing it to smithereens. It exists now as a tangle of brass jewellry wires holding together still glued fragments of the original giant star. It is in 7 separate pieces, held together in a meaningless tangle by its wires, which originally formed hexagon frames around circumpherences of this giant starflake. Then this morning, a few minutes ago, while taking a few seconds to carefully adjust a starflake raised to 15 1/4 inches in the air above the shelf, another starflake toppled, causing a cascade through the array on the shelf. I managed to grab the two remaining fragile and vital giant starflakes in mid air, saving them. Five objects in total toppled, including the ultra fragile 'Bird Cage' which got messed up a bit. But only one object, a large snowflake, suffered damage with one of its cartwheels snapped off. However, the array on the shelf, which took the weeks to gradually focus into micro measure hot spots, no longer exists the way it was. As I just said, this seems to be a period of diminishing returns. I will deal with the situation later. In the meantime, back to work. At this moment I am working on the revised INSTALLATION routine for the new temporary version of the Virus ALERT computer program. - Finis - HMMMMM AGAIN ------------------------------------------------ July 25, 1995, 12:20 PM. Tuesday afternoon. I forgot to mention that the steel wire tripods (six of them, two per square wooden rod) have three sides, with legs that extend down at close enough to 30 degrees that any difference is not worth arguing. As luck would have it, the tripods have been made in the Orient with the right kind of angles. It has been quiet around here the last few days. The updating of the program has been in fits and starts rather than one all out assult. There is still a bit to do later today, but yesterday nothing was done, and only a few minutes were spent updating on Saturday. The weather has been hot and muggy (very humid) and cool and muggy, the temperature shifting back and forth irregularly. Over the past several days, the sound stream was inexorably sounding more and more strident and sour, particularly in the increasingly feeble high end, and fractionalized, plus hardly anything more than muffled indications with an occasional reverberation in the bass range. One thing noticed is that the fidelity quality at times seemed better in a Mono broadcast, but at other times the mono sounds seemed as if only half there, twisted sideways (if that can be an image) you could hear a sound start than vanish before finishing its simple time, and no long distance reverbs echoing to the end of their time. Stereo too was lacking long distance systaining power. Very noticable lacks. A mystery was solved late yesterday afternoon with the discovery that all paper cutout sonic objects which had small metal slinkies stretched across them, had warped, due to the humidity. Pulling all of these out of the picture, (disassemblying them), and tossing the parts in a banker's box, resulted in the sour sounds vanishing. But there was still no real grunts to the fidelities. A couple of the warped paper pieces had folded almost in half by the tension of the metal slinkies. And so, all of these damaged devices have been removed from the sound stream. This includes all of the platforms originally used to produce long distance 'Airframing' from a controlled means a few weeks back. These platforms had been standing around on their 'Indian Rope Trick' support stands up at the front of the hall, and in the front office. Now, all of them have been removed from the sonic picture. Today a new experiment was done that has regained fidelities. It started with brief tests over the past couple of days with the raised star array on the living room floor in front of the TV, raised with the handy assist of 6 steel wire tripods got from the White Rose Nursury super store. It was found that the sound hardened if any of the wooden square shaped rods touched each other at the center node where the three rods criss crossed. So each rod was raised to be just slightly above the other. However, the effect was not as expected. There was no explosion of wide open new sound, nor any major impact into new ranges of fidelity. In fact many of the usual problems still seemed to be plaguing the sound stream, just more amplified. Micro measure tuning was needed throughout the environment to coax any goodstuff into the sound stream, and micro measure tunings at a long distance away, for instance in the dining room, or up the hall, were needed to get any usuable sound. However, the mind never stops working, even if slowly. Today it was decided to try raising the wooden rods high enough in the air so that none of the hexagram plastic slinkies made contact with each other at the center node criss cross. And this has worked. The upper two wooden rods were raised by about 3 inches each above the other, with the bottom wooden rod still staying horizontally above the floor at 15 1/4 inches to be parallel to the surface of the glass top table on which sits the TV. At once the sound stream became more open and roomy, and just a few adjustments to the array, in particular stretching the end pieces of the hexagram slinkies further out to be pinned to the carpet floor with straight pins, has brought back the goodstuff, plenty to play with, a more natural sound, more fidelity (less distortion), clear high end dropped into a lower register to be more philharmonic, and bass enough to start re-producing reverbing long distance echoes, though, as yet, no mighty bass impacts of the kind that can cause the materials of your clothing to vibrate. 'Airframe' is excellent. There was good listening music playing in stereo when I started typing this update, but now, at the moment, is a French thing, with actors saying preposterous sounding noises in French, on a stage, and dressed as puppets. The echoing sounds of the voices on the stage sound like, from here in the dining room, that the stage is actually around the corner through the kitchen and back to the further corner of the living room. The quality in the sonics that makes sound seem to be from an 'alive' real time source, is back. Although, in truth, the sound is slightly tinny, as if you were hearing the voices through a large metal duct rather than directly in front of the stage. Nevertheless, there is nothing of mere ordinary 'broadcast' in the nature of this sound. So, back to another experiment, started yesterday, then temporarily abandoned. Yesterday, the old 1940's style wooden portable Philips test tube radio was taken from the top shelf of the bookcase in the living room, and hung by its leather strap handle from a laboratory stand in the living room, and NOISE was the result. I do not know why, but 60 cycle buzz permeated the whole of its sound, and only two stations could be tuned in on the AM dial enough to be listened too. After about half an hour of fruitless attempts at fine tuning of sonic devices, and other micro measure alterations, it was found that placing of those small hexagon shaped extenders for coupling computer cables and devices to the backs of computers, when placed in strategic hot spots on the radio, and on the base of the stand under the hanging radio, helped to both diminish the buzz, and increase the volume of the radio, and improve its fidelity somewhat, but did little to increase the radio's range. The sound stream was more or less bereft of any low bass. It was found that three of the pulsed-second clock disrupters placed on the floor in close vacinity to the radio, caused the bass range to finally open up. Some micro measure fine tuning did the rest. The pulsed disrupters have small paper tripods taped to the second hands so the tripods steadily twirl around in the air in circles taking one minute per revolution, staggered second by second .... .... to the point where sonics and sterephonics indeed came in to the sound picture, if you listened for it. What was mainly in the sound stream was two sounds, one from the radio itself, and the other from room tuned sonic resonances. The radio sound still was rift with buzz and rattle, whereas the room resonating sonics and stereo was very thin and fragile, at times you could hear something, such as a background effect in a commercial recorded live in a shopping mall, and seconds later the background effect was completely gone, and seconds later you could just barely hear it again, and then hear it clearly, and then it was gone again. The test tube radio was shut off. The next test on tap is to try the radio in a different position in the living room. It might be better now, for instance, since the whole of the sound stream has now been improved by the vertical rise changes put in place in the slinky star array shortly before noon. I will give an AM radio report when ready. Goodby. .... Okay. First thing is I got rid of most of the static. It is now 1:10 PM. Yesterday, with the Philips radio hanging from a lab stand positioned in the middle of the back wall of the living room, between the TV in the corner, and the end of the four tiered book shelf, that static increased to raw racket if I touched the aerial lead. Hooking the end of the roll of thin brass jewellry wire to the aerial lead and placing the roll of wire on the top shelf of the bookcase helped by diminishing the static but not hardly clearing it, in fact . And there was a persistent 60 cycle buzz which was mostly diminished by use of several carefully placed tiny hexagram extenders, and the three mentioned pulsed-second clock drivers. Today, in its new position alongside the fire place and sitting out by about a foot from the wall, the faint buzz that first came in was completely eliminated by moving one of the pulsed-second clock drivers to nearly under the radio, and it was noticed that the thin brass jewellry wire had little effect as an aerial but if I held the aerial lead, the static would vanish completely. Don't forget, this old wooden portable radio is about 50 years old, circ. the late 1940's. It is 100% Mono. It has one speaker. And its one dial is AM. So I got from a shelf in the hall closet a wound up length of electrical appliance wire which when tried yesterday, made the static worse. Today, it took my place, it now hooked to the aerial lead, has more or less irradicated the static and boosted the AM radio's volume. There is still a trace of a 60 cycle static, but no 60 cycle buzz. .... If the radio is slowly rotated back and forth sweeping, say, a 30 degree arc through the air, the whole fidelity of the system noticably improves by a factor of about twice. In other words, MAJOR fidelity, compared to the rest state sound stream, results when the radio is intermittantly moved in a constant way. P.S. I have bass drum. Yes, I have bass drum in the sound stream. Lets be honest, this is weak bass drum, but it is of the reverating kind, not a pok or a thump, it has TONE. Quite an improvement over a radio that on its own produces nothing but high pitched mantle radio qualities, with 60 cycle buzz, and sound that crashes in meaningless distortion whenever the volume is cranked. I have the volume cranked right now, and no crash. In fact, it is cranked right to the top of the wooden volume wheel. .... It is 1:45 PM. Here is an example of which kind of sonics are being coaxed from a sound source, such as this old wooden portable mantle test tube AM radio. On at the moment is a talk show featuring 'Dr. Laura'. A male caller phoned in from a phone booth. As he was talking the usual non entity nonsense, I did a bit of discrete retuning of the three pulsed clock drivers on the floor in a small equalateral array in front of the radio, and low and behold coaxed SOUND out of the background low volume static. The SOUND was background noises, coming over the pay phone. At first, there was nothing there but the male voice, and then presto the long distance background sounds being picked up by the mouth reciever of the telephone. Many voices, etc. Who would have thought such sounds would be coming over the AM radio. I would like to be able to wave this radio back and forth slowly through the air due to the degree to which fidelity improves, and lower toned sonics increases, by this slight occilating motion imparted to the radio and its single 5 inch oval tweeter. Without this motion, the voices of the talk show, though loud and clear, are somewhat distorted, not of a pure sound. And power punch material, for instance the push in gain of a commercial with the music cranked to full at the last few seconds after the commercial's punch line and slogan, this extra volume causes collapses in the sound balloon comprising the radio's sonic and stereophonic imaging in the living room. Another thing is, this setup with the radio is extremely head in the vice, about as bad as it can get. Any motion seems to effect the sound stream. By moving around, for instance moving from living room to the kitchen, you can hear the major stereo ingredients come and go, a flat sonic, then a very roomy deep and wide spread sonics with long distance echoes continuing to the end of their time, then muffled again, as you move through the room. In tests with the TV set, the head in the vice was more in the way of overall fidelity and point source displacements in the stereo sonics of the sound stream. In the case with this radio, at this moment, the large stereo sonic sound image itself seems to collapse and expand as you move through major head in the vice peaks and valleys in the sound stream of the environment. Here is another example of this kind of head in the vice. The radio's speaker at this moment is about knee high, whereas the sound image itself is about chest high, and shifted over about three feet to the right from the radio itself. But I have found a sonic weak spot where, though still sonic and resonative, the sound source itself is roughly from the vacinity of the radio, rather than the balloon up in the air, and shifted over about three feet. I have only found the one weak spot so far, coming through the doorway from kitchen to living room, there the sound image displaces down toward the sound generating source itself. - Finis - PUZZLE ------------------------------------------------------- July 26, 1995, 9:45 AM. Wednesday morning. Today is scheduled back to the grind. Some extensive modification is needed to one of the modules (the RECOVERY DISK) for the new Virus ALERT program, so this is going to keep me busy for awhile today. But there are a couple of things to report. First, is that 'Airframe' is excellent with the new array raised in horizontal layers starting at 15 1/4 inches above the living room floor. In fact there is no change in volume at all when walking from the living room through the doorway into the kitchen. In all previous tests with the RCA 28 inch stereo TV the volume dropped, at times by as much as to 1/2, when leaving the living room. The living room in prior times was the principle enclosure, within which was produced the major sound stage. This has now changed. The sound is 'Airframing' intact in volume beyond the living room, so the hexagon slinky array raised in a star array (six arms) has fundamentally changed the characteristics of the 'Airframe'. The sound is still artificially toned, however, not so much bright as brillient. What this means is, it is not hard, but rather colored, more toward that of an electronic sounding reproduction, rather than reproduction coming from test tube amplifyers. The puzzle is how difficult it is to get bass, let alone reverberating bass, expecially the kind with deep long distance echoes. At this moment, there is hardly any sign of bass at all. There was last evening, until a small disaster occurred involving the ever careful little brown dog named Quasar. Lying in state in his custom made cushion, he got to his feet and one paw got thrust through the end piece of a hexagram slinky stretched toward his cushion and pinned to the carpet. He has done this before, and simply carefully stepped free. This time, last night, when stepping, the slinky slipped up his leg so a couple of quick tugs resulted in the slinky and its wooden rod slipping off its slung wire supports, and crashing another. Two were down, and the wire support of one pulled free from its winds around a small stick-out shaft on its steel wire tripod, so that the wire strand stuck out in the air. The details reported are important, because it meant it was impossible to reconstruct the array back to its original formation. The result is that whatever was tuned and aligned in such a way as to produce credible low bass notes, is gone. I have fiddled a bit again today, as I did last evening, with no luck. At the moment there is no bass. But why there should be no bass is beyond my guess, at the moment. At this moment I do not know of any particular tuning technique or focus needs, that will give the system its missing bass. A puzzle. .... It is 11:30 AM. Here is a confession. I am totally lacking motivation to get into the dreary tedius grunt of the Virus ALERT Recovery Disk module update. In times past this would have been enthusiastic work, done without any hestitation. These days I have not the zeal or pep to go for it. The work has to be done, and at the moment I have the blueprints for the interrim module, so responsibility commands that I follow through without any thoughts of escape. Except .... So, I have been fiddling with the high wires in the living room and have back the bass. It was brought back in by tuning to channel 17 the CBC all news channel, whose broadcast is in Mono, then fussing and fiddling in very fine tuning and micro measure focusing ways with the six tripod stands being used to raise the slinky array high in air. I found that by extremely discrete moves of stands, and some very slight raising or lowering the end of several of the wooden rods, that all of a sudden bass echoes began to return to the voices of the various announcers and stringers on the CBC news channel, including female voices, which finally began to drop into a new range of resonances that was a full octave lower in tone than before. It was ultra fine fiddling with the tripod stands of the array that turned out to be the secret to more fidelity, more sonic range, more stereophonics. It turned out that the technique was to go around and around the circle, re-adjusting the six steel wire tripod stands in increasingly micro measure ways. At one point some solidification in lower point sounds suddenly appeared, and then, suddenly new sonic echoes also began to gell. The transformation has carried over into full stereo broadcasting. For instance channel 23 at the moment is broadcasting good music and jazz in stereo, and here is heard accoustic bass, sax, piano, cymbols, and so on, with reverberations and long distance echoes. Kablamos are starting to pound in the rooms, once again. The 'brillience' reported two hours earlier, has been dissolved. It was all done by ultra fine adjustments of the tripods that lift the hexagon slinky array high into the air. .... It is 11:00 PM. Allright. I was going to wait until tomorrow, but... Yes, tweaking the very molecules of the raised slinky array produces all of the important ingredients; sound, volume, fidelity, bass, reverbs, long distance echoes that HANG; and so on. Tweaking the slinkies produces even more. That is the something NEW that has been learned today. It has to be a particular kind of tweak. Tweaking means to pick it like a guitar string and let it vibrate slowly for about half a minute. During the slow vibrations, changes in the sound stream are heard. Each of the raised hexagram shaped slinkies has two end pieces that extend downward from the ends of wooden rods, to be pinned to the carpet. When any of these ends is tweaked, so as to vibrate back and forth along the vertical slope of their angle, the whole of the sound image IMPROVES. Tweaking the slinkies sideways, or up and down, does not do it to the same extent as tweaking them to occilate back and forth along their main axis, in this case, sloping angles. The result of the whole combination, the array itself, and the brief duration tweaking gets, makes me believe that apparatus is at hand to recreate the Glen Miller orchestra, live, on stage, in a large room, working from 100 percent Mono tapes of the original band. What I intend is to have a high powered system, so that lots of gain is available in terms of volume, and two speaker sound generating sources, and TWO arrays of slinkies, one in front of each speaker, and some means to tweek each of the slinky ends in a repeated constant way. I believe that this, along with suitably located large snowflakes and the giant starflakes, plus a few other sonic tuning devices stationed around the environment, could be enough to produce a convincing demo of the Glen Miller band in terms of re-creating the band as if it was performing 'live' in the room. I will not be disappointed if the band sounds colored or too bright or brillient, or metallic, as long as the ingredients of stereophonic sonics are in evidence, east to west separation as well as deep depth, and HANG and breathing PULSATIONS in the 'second city' sounds of that band, reproduced in Mono from non digital tapes. That has now become the plan. The wish should be easy to fullfill, to see if it works. Someday soon. Somewhere. Thank you. - Finis - PULSATIONS IN THE HANG --------------------------------------- July 26, 1995, 1:50 PM. Thursday afternoon. I got it ! I got it ! Pulsations in the HANG of 100 percent MONO music. Yes, Elvis is singing 'Good Luck Charm' on the AM radio and just one more ultra fine tuning of a random object in the environment, clarified some background rumble, and out it came, into the open, Elvis and the boys recorded live in a recording studio, the music, and the backgrounds, all co-operating together to produce a big deep rhythmic puslating HANG in a huge sound stage there rocking with old fashion rock and roll boogie. And it was quite a nice suprise because in all these years I never knew that Elvis had recorded his early stuff with such deep wide spread dynamics due to the fact that it had been recorded in Mono sound. But today, there it is, a huge sonic window of Elvis sound. Step aside, Glen Miller, that experiment can come later. The experiment today has produced results that were predictable, albeit it took several hours of really fine coaxing and molly coddling to get there. What it is, is TWO radios, both playing the same AM station, the one radio the old wooden Philips portable radio with test tubes from the 1940's. And the other a near new REALISTIC Radio Shack el cheapo getto blaster someone here had bought one day to listen to ball games in a temporary computer work station in the basement. I had played with this getto blaster one day, about 15 minutes of tests, and found that its native reproduction was very hot and bright, without a trace of low notes, no bass, no kabloomos on the drums, no nothing, just hot and bright. I can't see what else is in there by taking a quick look through the front's tiny holes, but can see two speakers of about 2 1/2 inch diamaters inside this getto blaster, and perhaps that is all there are, since the case itself is just big enough to house the two speakers with cassette drive and radio dials between. Today, everything has changed. With the old Philips wooden mantle radio hanging about 16 inches high in the air from its leather strap on the far side of the living room, and the getto blaster hanging by its handle from a smaller laboratory stand on this side of the living room, both together, when focused in a certain way toward the rear wall of the living room, has produced a HUGE sound balloon that HANGS in the air in the living room over the hexagon slinky array and far distance deep into the background beyond the array, behind the living room wall. Fidelity was the biggest problem. At first the whole of the system was so highly distorted it was almost impossible to hear the announcer's voices, until it was learned that the tiny hexagon metal extenders used to couple cables to computers did wonders to open up the sonics, while clarifying the fidelities, when placed in strategic places, for instance on either laboratory stand under the two radios, on the table on the other side of the living room (where the flow tube and sonic snowflake arrays are stationed), and out here in the dining room. What was heard was a kind of distance echoing that first entered a female announcer's voice, when the tiny hexagon extenders were being placed, and from there, long distance tuning, for instance up at the front of the hall at the front of the house, and in the kitchen around the kitchen sink, all each included a bit more depth and fidelity in male voices, plus the bass range of music. This station plays Golden Oldies all day, that is its advertising 'feature', the Golden Oldies, so a lot of rock and roll music gets played that was originally recorded in Mono. So I had no lack of test subjects. Not to mention the station plug, which comes on loud and noisy in places such as malls, and the street, and dubbing with many sound sources dubbed over to produce background while the station announcer's yelp. It was heard from the start, that these station breaks were fully stereophonic, but very distorted, until the fine tunings mentioned above clarified the images into stereophonics, broadcast in 100 % Mono since the station is AM. Bass, for awhile, was puzzling, because it would be there, then it wouldn't, no bass, but eventually the bass became stablized by the random fine tunings of many different objects of any different kind, including three mechanical pencils on this work table in the dining room. It was in attempting to more finely tune the fidelity with this stablized bass, when suddenly near the beginning of an Elvis song, a bunch of weak background sounds opened up into a huge male chorus singing the 'doo waps du waps' in the rythmic boogie music called 'Good Luck Charm'. The giant male chorus was just a part of it. Some of the instruments charming away there in the background of this music were very wide spread in placements when originally recorded, and these opened up to contribute to what suddenly became a huge pulsating reverberating orchestra of music as Elvis sung, it just suddenly gelled out into the open from the swimming dim background effects until now always heard for this mono record. The music of Elvis literally seemed to breath in the air, it was so gigantic when it opened up into fidelic 'philharmonic' stereo. Oboy, enthusiasm can get wordy. Anyway, TWO mono sound generating sources, using a SINGLE AM radio station, works to produce large wide-imaged live philharmonic stereophonic sound. Step aside Glen Miller. Today I have something NEW to play with. All from just three tiny little speakers. Watch out, Dr. Bose. Here comes 'Big Grunt and the Mighties'. .... 2:23 PM. One thing noticed I should report is the 'Airframe'. The 'Airframe' is good, though not excellent. The sound volume drops by about 25 percent when walking out of the living room, but carries on more or less intact on up to the front of the hall. But outside the rear, in stepping through the patio door to the back yard, the volume drops completely almost to where the sound inside the living room cannot be heard, unless cupping the ears, then about 25 percent more volume comes back. Also, there is no 'wrap' outside the patio door in the back yard. Walking laterally back and forth, even with ears cupped, produces no improvement. The sound volume drops right out to near zero the moment I move away from a direct audio line from the patio door into the living room. In this instance, today, the 'Airframe' outside is the very reverse of 'Airframe' tests done earlier in this house, where TV sound was heard outside, clear across 118 feet to a neighbor's fence on the opposite side of the small park, even with the TV at normal volume inside the living room. This was back when the 25 year old 24 inch Quasar TV (now defunct) was the principle sound source for sonic tests. - Finis - QUICK NOTE 1 ------------------------------------------------- August 2, 1995, 10:15 AM. Wednesday morning. Just a couple of quick notes, of social, and sonic content. I just went to roll a tube of pennies and noticed two things. First, the penny can is more than two thirds full. This is a sign of the times, that things are marginally better. It has been about three months since rolled pennies were needed for groceries. In times past sometimes all of the pennies tossed daily from pocket change into the old coffee can were needed, rolled for milk or a loaf of bread. Often, only 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 dollars would be present in the can. Today the can is nearly 2/3 full and I only needed one 50 cent roll. How about that. Things are looking up. The sonic notice occurred when I put the penny can on the glass topped coffee table beside the stuffed easy chair in the living room to roll, and soon noticed that the TV set was rattling. The rattling vanished the moment I removed the coffee can (nearly full of pennies) from the coffee table. That little disruption in the sound stream caused the rattle. The particular glass end table has a square top and of two in the living room in a matching set with the circle glass topped end table upon which sits the TV, the surfaces all at a height of 15 1/4 inches. When first hearing the rattle I was slightly concerned, until I thought, hmmm, removed the heavy coffee can full of pennies, and away went the rattle eminating from the TV. In this prattle, just thought I'd mention it. It seems rattle in a sound system may be mostly a question of spurious disrupts and not a fault in a system's wiring or design. In my case - the tests and experiments in the living room - all instances of rattle have turned out to be environmentally caused, and persistent rattles, for instance with the former 24 inch Quasar Mono TV in use for a while, a particular sonic device that conveniently intermittantly broke up standing waves, ended the Quasar TV's dominant rattle to the point where very low and even bottom bass sonics could be reproduced from its single tiny speaker. But only when the device was stationed in one exact hot spot on the floor to the left nearly under the glass top table upon which the 24 year old Quasar TV was sitting. It was one of the pulsars, comprising a paper cutout tripod mounted on the second hand of a battery operated pulsed clock motor that slowly revolved one jump per second click, click, click. - Finis - 'FRACTAL' - A NEW WORD ----------------------------------------------------- August 4, 1995, 1:35 PM. Friday afternoon. I have to coin a new word. The new word is 'FRACTAL'. The new word is 'coined', because I now have an experiment I can demonstrate to any snob, academic, or nay sayer. The demonstration is simply this: Walk along the driveway toward the house, walk along the sidewalk alongside the brick two-car garage, instead of going in the open front door, instead, walk around and alongside the house to the right, in the narrow 3 foot allowance between this and the next door neighbor's house. Anywhere along that walking you will hear stereo eminating from the front door of the house. About half way back in the narrow gap between the two homes you will hear stereo around you, from a combined sound coming from both the front and back of my house through the open patio door at the rear overlooking the small park behind. As almost just said, toward the back of the narrow gap, you will hear stereo wrapping around from the rear of the house, coming out from the open patio door. In the back, for instance anywhere in the back yard, you will hear stereo wrapping out into the yard through the open patio door, from the living room. Back at the front of the house, you can walk into the open front door and hear stereo coming from down the hall around the corner into the living room. You can walk down the hall and into the living room and hear stereo. In fact that is what someone did a short while ago, a fello who had a van parked in the driveway two doors over and was in fact installing a stereo set in the van at the very moment I walked up to the van door and said: "I need a witness, do you know anything about stereo"? "In fact I do", he replied, "I'm installing a stereo in the van right now". Good enough. We both departed, and as we walked back to my place I quickly explained that I was doing experiments with stereo and needed a witness but told him nothing else. As he stepped into the front door of my house he remarked: "That's pretty good stereo". We had not yet turned the dark corner inside to go down the hall. When we got to the living room he just stood and listened, looking around from one side of the room to the other, obviously impressed by the stereo fidelity, presence, and volume. So I explained quickly and do not know if he got the gist, but do know that he was hearing something totally unexpected due to the hardware that was producing the stereo. In the living room he heard something NEW ! 'FRACTAL SOUND'! Let me continue. As of this moment .... Where ever in the living room you MOVE, you will hear sound images change position, wide spread instruments and sound sources will bounce around, here, there, all over the place, sound sources that MOVE around and shift space, when you move. Forget about fidelity. It's not happening. This Fractal sound is noisy. Otherwise ... Again, we pick up with the fellow from two doors over, and me doing my demo, for which I needed a witness, as follows .... Me, the demonstrator, went over to the far wall and unplugged a plug. And instantly 'SLOOP! ALL OF THE SOUND DISAPPEARED ! Instead, all that is left is a tiny dull puke, coming from a cheap getto blaster lying on its side on a glass end table against the inside living room wall from the hall. That tiny dull mortified sound is pure MONO, yes, it is a genuine Mono sound from a 100 percent AM frequency MONO radio station in Ottawa. It has all of the ingredients of Mono sound, no stereo, no reverbs, no projection, only dull puky sound eminating from its front, and nothing else. It is very unexciting indeed. Now, let me plug back in the plug, and PRESTO! back in place is that HUGE FRACTAL SOUND just described. It is the same AM mono radio station, this time also playing through two tiny speaker boxes of a $49.95 Prosonic getto blaster bought yesterday from the local Giant Tiger store down the hill on St. Joseph Blvd., in Orleans, east of Ottawa. Three sound sources now comprise this AM stereo; the two tiny enclosures set wide apart on an orange painted BAR, and the two permanent physically attached speakers of the 69 dollar dirt cheap Radio Shack getto blaster. The difference is that the Prosonic system has been set up with its two tiny almost weightless enclosures set on a flat BAR raised 15 1/4 inches in the air, and stationed to respond at right angles to the main slinky coming out from the RCA TV to form the star array on the living room floor. The Prosonic device has been coaxed and room tuned for four hours to produce better sonics, stereo, and reverberating resonances using stereo tapes (Frank Purcell Orchestra, and Golden Western Themes), plus the oft mentioned Glen Miller tape of mono recordings from the late 30's and early 40's. I want to digress and tell you where the 'BAR' came from, that is supporting the two Prosonic speaker boxes. It came from the man who is in charge of assigning radio broadcasting and television frequencies for the Federal Government, as well as military, satellite, and all other broadcast bands the Federal Government uses and allows. In the early 80's he took on a project to do a number of art works and paintings, as a hobby, using modular construction strips of lightweight wood stapled together with an electric staple gun, and wrapped in canvass, and painted with acrylic colors, he created over a hundred pieces of art, and when finished, lost interest, he would not sell these many pieces, so called over friends to cart home two or three pieces to whoever accepted the gifts, thus emptying his studio, and his attic. I carted home two such pieces of art. One ended up gracing the walls of the head office of short lived 'Blue Chip Computers', in Ottawa. And the other has been in my hands, in storage so to speak, since 1985. Today I needed a piece of wood about 5 feet long and 4 or 5 inches across to experiment with the new Prosonic getto blaster and instead dug an orange painted bar from that piece of art, from amidst a bunch of clutter and empty cardboard cartons in the garage. It, painted orange, at the moment, is supported on two laboratory stands, set to a height to support the two tiny speaker boxes of the Prosonic getto blaster at a height of 15 1/4 inches in the living room. The original artist, actually a Phd in physics who is senior man in the federal government's division that allocates broadcast and frequency bands, lost interest in art when buying a Commador 64 computer and started, instead, to spend all of his spare time, writing programs with music and twitchy graphic stick figures to illustrate certain religious ideas he had. I got the piece of art by luck, happening to drop by the house in Almonte, Ont., on a matter of other business, right at the time he had decided to give away his make-art period of his life. The thing about the art is, that it was VERY GOOD STUFF, and could have commanded high prices in an art gallery, had he chosen to sell. He did not. He simply did not want to become pegged as an artist and had done the hundred odd pieces as a simple demonstration to someone with whom he was in argument, that anyone could be multi talented, if they did not accept limitations. The someone had aspirations of being an artist and thought that that was something very special. The hundred odd peices of fine quality art was done simply to show that anyone who does not accept limitations can come up with quality creative output. But, I digress, somewhat. Back to the point of today ..... .... at the moment 'Let's Go To The Hop' is reverberating vigorously into the dining room where I am typing, from the living room. Just one moment.... .... The reason why I rushed off is I could not tell if the original was a Mono, or Stereo, recording. I raced to the living room and unplugged the Prosonic before the song ended, and everything slooped into the front of the tiny Radio Shack 'Realistic' model SCR-210 getto blaster lying on its side and it became an obvious Mono source (from the mono AM radio station), but I could still not tell if the original recording was a stereo or mono product. Oh well. Who cares. Earlier this afternoon, when something resembling reasonable fidelity was finally coaxed out of the Prosonic setup, the Radio Shack getto blaster (used a few days ago to play with stereo effects in mono sound sources (in conjunction with the 1940's era wooden portable Phillips mantle radio with test tubes)), was simply layed on its side to get it out of the way of the main array featuring the new Prosonic setup, and plugged in. Since it was already tuned to CIWW OTTAWA, an AM station, the Prosonic also got tuned to that station, and that is when the wish to write a REPORT came into the picture. For when the Prosonic was momentarily unplugged to see what the difference in sound would be, the WHOLE of a mighty sound image disappeared, and all of the sound slooped to the front of the tiny Realistic puke ports to become dull, pissy, no bass, all lacking, mono of an obvious kind. Plugging back in the Prosonic boomed the huge fractal sound vibrations back into the whole environment of the living room and house, including outside the house, out front on the driveway, alongside the house, and everywhere in the back yard. Yes I am crowing. Forget fidelity of the Tanoi kind. Who needs 25 thousand dollar speakers to demonstrate stereo. I am doing it with a 49 dollar Prosonic getto blaster with two detachable tiny speaker boxes, a 69 dollar Radio Shack getto blaster with two speakers built in, and a single AM mono radio station. Well, let's discuss come problems. I had bass earlier. At the moment bass is gone. Also, the pendulum clock hanging in the kitchen doorway is acting up again, for the last three days it has not kept right on ticking, it stops, and I have to keep chronically re-adjusting it and trying to get it to swing again. It keeps stopping. Other than that, the 'FRACTAL' stereo sonic sound is MIGHTY indeed! In fact, finally, at this moment, 'Sundown', by Gordon Lightfoot, is on radiating from the mono array, and I will defy anyone to come to this house, and claim that what they are hearing at this moment is NOT stereo ! - Finis - 'FRACTAL' - MIGHTY STUFF --------------------------------------------------- August 5, 1995, 12:00 PM. Saturday at noon. It is even MIGHTIER ! This morning I scrummaged another $49.99 bucks plus taxes (from this long weekend's grocery money) and raced to the Giant Tiger for the other Prosonic on sale. It is very different than the one got day before yesterday. This other one is chincy in design and manufacture, almost as if its plastic parts were hand stamped by monkey labor rather than injection moulded. Without recording ability or other niceties, it nevertheless has two tiny tower boxes, each with two speakers, one an inch and 1/2 across, the other 3 inches across, inside each box. Both Prosonic versions are going for the same price, $49.99. A simple A and B test proved the intrinsic sounds from the two Prosonic systems are substantially different. In fact the original, bought day before yesterday, has a very harsh barky high pitched sound compared to the lower registered more bassy sound of the Prosonic bought today. On the other hand the one bought today has nearly no high end presence and cannot take loud volume without turning to mush. The idea was to try one Prosonic set, then the other, to see which would work best as a demo for the experiment. The other would then be taken back and the money used for groceries. Belt tightening, instead, substituted for grub because I kept both units, for obvious reasons. That ends the short story. The long story is that I hooked up BOTH Prosonic sets into the system and it is a whole new story. There is BASS, galore, resonating and reverberating around the environment including KABOOMS, and high end including cymbols at times as clear as a bell, and echoes which continue long distance to finish at the end of their time, including the echoes that surround female announcer's voices, and singers. In other words, gloriosso ! I have another DEMO ! Today the AM station is featuring Beetles all day Saturday, so I get a chance to hear Beetles music not heard for years, not only that, I get to hear the Beetles in very good stereo, notwithstanding that the sound generating source is a 100 % Mono radio station. A fello well endowed with stereo lore, pointed out this morning that it is possible to fake a stereo simulation using something equivalent to a surround sound setup, but that stereo coming from just two speaker enclosures, plus a third source to kick ass the sound, was impossible to produce from Mono. So at this moment, one speaker is detached (not working) from each of the Prosonic sets, and the Radio Shack piece of junk is lying on its side on the glass topped square end table against the wall. It turned out that the way each of the two speakers was detached (not working) has a great deal to do with the resulting sound, since each kind of small box from the two different Prosonic sets produces a dramatically different native sound. Now I am defying lore, for only two speakers are at work, set wide apart, and a third source lays on its side kick assing the sound from its place of grace on the end table, this third source being the $69 Radio Shack getto blaster. To give you an idea of how small the Prosonic speaker boxes are, neither kind of box is as big as a typical small 2 Klg bag of sugar or flour bought at the local supermarket. Here is another compare: expand an ordinary loaf of bread by about 1 1/2 times, cut the loaf in half lengthwise top to bottom, and that would roughly give you the pair of tower speakers. Then stand two Nabob 'South Pacific Blend' coffee packages together, and this will roughly give you one of the other boxes, in rough approximate size. Like I say, these speaker boxes are TINY, and v e r r y cheap, made in China. These little things, are producing all of the BIG MIGHTIES I'm raving about today. What I have at the moment is a stereophonic and fidelic display going on at HIGH VOLUME in the living room. Plugging in the other two detached speakers gives me more of the same, more volume, but does not change the characteristics of sound in terms of fidelity, bass, or stereo point source imaging. However, pulling the plug of either Prosonic set immediately results in a mighty big HOLE appearing in the middle of the sonic presence, and pulling both plugs results in the famous 'SWOOP', the whole of the sound vanishing like a genie going back into a bottle, the whole of it zipping across the room to the Radio Shack small getto blaster on the table, with no bass, high end, fidelity, sonics, or stereo, just weak rattly mush, in other words, 100 percent mono sound from a junky sound source. That tiny dull mortified sound is pure MONO, yes, it is a genuine demo. You cannot believe the difference when the stereo genie SWOOPS across the room and down into the bottle to become old fashion MONO. Playing either Prosonic by itself, does not produce much in the way of impressive demonstration, even though the sound is lifted in the air due to the various sonic tuning and exciter devices in the living room, but there is no bass, no clear high end, and no reverbs. Until the other Prosonic is plugged in, but even then the sound is kind of noisy, until the third radio, the Radio Shack small getto blaster on the table is plugged in, then watch out ... HERE COMES AUDITORIUM AND THE VIBRATING FLOORS ! Incidentally if you have never heard the Beetle's 'Magical Mystery Tour' on a good hi fi system, it is something you might want to get by doing at least once in your life. I am hearing things right now I never knew was in that music, huge, orchestral and symphonic bodies, and I am listening to it in MONO, theoretically. But what's the point, how good is theory if it is only 100 percent WRONG ! Oh, by the way, if anyone is wondering, yes, several times while setting up the experiment today I had to deal with speaker boxes jet propelling themselves off the orange painted bar by the power of the pure sonic energies they are now generating. Something else: In case anyone is interested in affirming historical accuracy, the AM radio station hails itself as " CIWW Ottawa, 'Oldies 1310' ". Something else I should mention in terms of historical accuracy, is that this DEMO is very much baffled. In other words, all of the kitchen cupboards (as described before, several weeks ago) are wide open to 30 degrees off from sticking straight out. And the door to the basement at the front of the hall is also wide open, as is the door to the utility room and also the door to the small downstairs washroom inside the utility room. The baffling adds both fidelity, and live presence, to the sound stream. The kitchen doors have to be constantly re-positioned since they get moved all the time due to normal household living. However, the good news is that re-positioning takes only a few seconds of momentary interest, since it is very easy to tell when a cupboard door is tuned. Here is some technical data. The two tiny tower boxes are balanced on the orange bar, sitting roughly 4 feet apart. Under each, and slightly behind, on the floor, are the two other boxes from the other Prosonic set, these two on the floor are sitting on large hexagon nuts (of kind used by industrial plummers) to give a bit more sonic echoes to their sound. The two on the floor are turned upside down so their bass enhancer ports are at work at the top of the box, instead of the bottom as per original intended design. All four boxes are turned outward by about 30 degrees, instead of being aligned parallel straight to the back, or turned inward toward a point of center behind them. When turned outward, the whole of the sound image opens up, and more bass comes into the reverbs and long distance echoes. Touch tapping each of the boxes with a fingertip has been able to produce substantial gain in fidelity and power by this simple ultra fine micro measure tuning, to wit, a wee tap by a fingertip. Here is some more technical data. I almost forgot to mention it. The two tiny boxes from the first purchased Prosonic set are entirely enclosed, that is, their entire accoustic cavities are sealed, there is not a port or hole anywhere in either box, except for a tiny hole mostly filled by the speaker lead going in. The two tiny tower boxes from the second purchased Prosonic set are not sealed. At the back, near the bottom, in an indent, is a grid that opens into the area that is the so-called 'bass enhancer' port at the front of the box. This area inside is wide open, that is, there is no cap so you can see the speakers above. Near the top at the back is another grid, this one with indented horizontal slits pressed in so that tiny thin lines run the length of each bar, the slits themselves so thin only a piece of paper can be slid into the box through these slits, the point being that extra resonance of some kind that is not all solid but active with open air is to be expected in the engineering design of the tightly adjoined bars and slits. To investigate a tower box, I held it in the palm of one hand and shone a two battery flashlight into it, held in the other hand. The flashlight weighed more than the speaker box. By the way, today turns out to be the highest rainfall for the date ever recorded for the region. We did not get the worst of it here, in Orleans, just an all day steady moderate fall, but to the west it flooded intersections and basements in small locals up to 35 klicks west and south-west of Ottawa main. This summer is turning out to be a summer of new breaking records recording the extremes of ever more obvious atmospheric instabilities, as well as other developements of technological and spiritual kind. - Finis - 'FRACTAL' - MIGHTY STUFF --------------------------------------------------- August 7, 1995, 1:40 PM. Monday afternoon. Something more or less unusual happened last evening. I was playing with the two different Prosonic sets, trying the speakers of one plugged into the other, etc, and it came back to a similar setup of the day before, except instead of both power units working, one of the tiny tower boxes of one Prosonic, and the tiny square box of the other, this time were both plugged into the source unit for the tiny boxes, produced the best all around sound for a single set at work. It happened that I tried a cassette tape not played for over three years. It is a collection of golden oldie Rock and Rolls from the 50's. When turning it on, there was something unusual about the sound, which took a bit of investigation to figure out what was going on. The best description I can give is what happened when a credible witness came by later in the evening and I turned it on to show the person. I asked: "What do you make of this sound"? The person was standing listening, head slightly turned away, nose and lips screwed a bit because it was not fidelic. It was loud and so on, and very raunchy. The person was standing inside the doorway from the kitchen. The person replied: "Pretty much exactly what you would expect from stuff like this - ", said the person, indicating the two tiny power unit cabinates sitting stacked one on top of the other on the floor, four speaker leads coming out, to the two tiny boxes sitting four feet apart on the floor and the two tiny tower boxes sitting four feet apart on the raised orange bar, an embodiment of two small shelf-style stereo sets, with four tiny speaker boxes spread wide apart, That is what the person indicated when pointing to the source of all sounds. As if the two sets were working in tandem to make a kind of surround sound arrangement. It was my turn. "This is what we've got", said I, showing that the left hand speaker boxes were not working, and that the second set was not plugged in, and that the whole of the stereophonic image filling the main area of the living room was coming from only one single tiny tower box, sitting raised in the air at the right end of the orange bar. "That explains why most of the sound is centered on this side of the room", observed the witness, thinking it through, slowly, indicating the right side of the living room, where the witness was standing and where sat the tiny tower speaker box raised in the air, plugging away on its own, the six sided star array of hexagon slinkies all suspended above the floor behind the setup spread forth toward the near distant wall behind. "Is it stereo"? I asked. "Oh, well, yeah. But ... it's very noisy", was the person's reply. At that moment the sound source was triply Mono, in that the original music had been recorded in Mono, plus the pirate factory tape, (bought for $1.99 from a discount bin 3 1/2 years ago), had been recorded only on one channel, so that it had a 100 percent single speaker playback, and the single speaker itself (the tiny tower box), meant that the reproduction in the living room HAD to be a Mono source. This was the cassette tape of rock and roll golden oldies. The mystery that I had to mull through was that on one side of the tape the whole of the tape had been recorded on only one channel, the other channel was completely blank. By single channel playback I mean that when the cassette is playing, sound is only coming from one speaker. Turn the tape over, and sound starts playing from both speakers. This tape is quite unusual, I have never come across a cassette tape like it, bought from the rummage bin of a music store. This is one of the points of this short story, that somehow, the one side of the tape of golden oldie Rock had been recorded only on one channel, the other channel was deader'n a doornail. (The other side of the tape is recorded normally, from mono originals, but on both channels). But more importantly, the unique peculiar co-incidental setup that I had in the living room and whole house environment as of this time (last evening), was producing credible stereo including deep reverberating bass and loud old style rock and roll drums, from a single tiny tower speaker about the size of a half a loaf of bread, so effectively that it fooled a guru into believing, on first impression, that it was a stereophonic recording, coming via two Prosonic sets playing together through four stereo speaker boxes in a kind of 'surround sound' demonstration. But only one tiny tower shaped speaker box was producing the entirety of it. All that is needed is to cook up devices that can better stand to produce clarity and stability in the fidelities of such an experiment, and there will be a new kind of physics easily demonstrated in the sonic properties and principles of sound. The problem is that an experiment like the one just described - the single-speaker single-channel reproduction of a mono recording - will not instantly excite audiophile purists, or physicists engineered in mind set to the best reproductions of original sound using the most modern and high tech embodiments they design in theory or hardware. They will hear the first thing they don't like, harsh fidelities that come and go amidst fracturing that comes and goes as they move or breath, and also clearly being inputted from the pulses of three different moving distrupters set up in the midst of the array now in the living room. (The experiment last evening was audibly responsive to the movements of the distrupters, a somewhat unusual occurrence). The sound per se was like any rock and roll recording turned up in volume past the fidelitic tolerance levels of any stereo system, except the volume here was limited, not that which could come from a home entertainment system, if you get my drift, but certainly far, FAR, more volume than you could ever reasonably expect from the cheapest kind of set money can buy. The volume last evening could be heard out in the street out in front of the house, from the one tiny speaker box in the house, at the rear. So what is the problem. It's like selling a house. A house may be the bargain of the century but in comes a buyer and first thing they see is a shabby kitchen, the only weak point in the house and property, and everything else they see in the house will also be wrong! Which is why so many house sellers renovate the kitchen and bathroom before putting their house up for sale. Well, I can't do that. What you get is what you get, with these kinds of experiments I have underway. My saving grace is anyone who can listen past any shabbies (such as from last evening) to hear the unusual and unique and so called 'impossible' will be amply rewarded by surprise against the disbelief that stereophonic sound is only possible from two separate speakers and channels, originally recorded by at least TWO separate microphones. This is not true. Stereophonics from just one microphone or speaker or channel is completely valid, and depends entirely on the reproductive means, per the environment in which the original sound is being reproduced. Original recording, per se, has nothing to do with the re-creation of stereophonic sound. As witnessed by the unexpected unusual demonstration of last evening. - Finis - MORE..... To prove the point of the last paragraph at the end of yesterday's update, I dug out a cassette tape recorded for the heck of it by me back in 1984 at a downtown Ottawa bar in which a local group of musicians was holding forth nightly for a week with music a' la' Spiro Gyro, who was very popular at that time. I used a small hand held Aiwa walkman with braised aluminum case which cost $250 and was concidered a better quality stereo recorder at that time. To do the recording I used a pair of microphones that cost about $14 the pair, taped to a table in the bar. The recording was quite barky, and bass was not gained hardly at all to the same extent as was in the bar, a big disappointment. Otherwise it was a good tape, in that all of the ambiant background and surrounding sounds in the bar were clearly audible, including chatter, coughs, chairs scraping, customers calling to waiters, and me chatting while the band played live, briefly, about why I was doing the recording, just a simple test to see how a live recording would sound on a home stereo system with new kind of experimental speakers that had 'Airframe' properties their chief feature. Today I rummaged around until finding that old cassette tape from 1984, and tried it out in the living room, and here is the result .... Yes and no. Yes, that .... No, but .... As a matter of fact, I got sidetracked, I haven't yet tried the cassette. BAFFLES ---------------------------------------------------------------------- August 12, 1995, 12:30 PM. Saturday afternoon. Seems I have dropped the ball momentarily, no updates for 5 days. I've discovered baffles. Not the kitchen cupboard doors. Material baffles, arbitrarily placed. It started yesterday afternoon, when doing the dishes, I finally noticed that a large piece of green plastic scouring pad was standing up against the wall behind the right sink, and had been standing there for several days. The brain working slowly, finally got around to asking, 'what the heck is THIS doing here'. With this, came the idea to try it as a baffle in the living room. When put in place in the vacinity of the right hand tiny tower speaker, when working in the domain of the 3-way Mono experiment last described on August 7, using a pirate factory tape of Golden Oldies Rock and Roll from the 50's that had been recorded on only one track, lo and behold the piece of green plastic scouring pad cleaned up some real mess in the tiny tower speaker's sound stream. A search through the utility shelves in the kitchen turned up another piece, and a half piece, both of which, judisciously placed standing up at a 30 degree angle in the tangle of stuff comprising the experiment in the living room, served to very nicely stablize the sound, while purifying its fidelics top to bottom, in such a way that the sound stream no longer swam around and twisted in distortions. The sound image in stereo, formed in the living room, stayed stable no matter where you walked around, and the sound image swung around to always be spread out left to right sideways and into depth behind the tiny tower speaker. In other words it stayed totally projected up in the air. Even though the sound stream was coming from one tiny Mono speaker. Out the door and a search through 5 stores that sold this most common of kitchen household items in various kinds and manufactures, yeilded five different kinds, the only one which worked well still being the original two and a half pieces from the kitchen cupboard. The others bought in three dollar stores, a hardware store, and a supermarket, suppressed the sound, or snuffed the stereo sonics, when tried. The two and a half pieces that worked, amplified the sound in both volume, and range, and enhanced that all important ingredient I have all being calling all along; 'STEREO SONICS': the sense of live performance sound. Day before yesterday, in poking through the cluttered garage looking for things to throw out, I came across two furnace filters with thin red paper frames, made of loosely woven white fiberglass. This morning I decided to give one a quick try with the TV set going, and discovered right away that in one corner of the room it served more than nicely to purify and clean up the higher end of the TV's sound. The other filter was found to work just as well, when placed in the opposite corner of the living room, also tilted at a 30 degree angle, leaning into the corner. Now I have solid reverberating bass echoing through the room purely at a lower volume, plus sweet tones in the high stuff. Nowhere else did these furnace filters work as well except in those two corners. Ok, filter material WORKS. An interesting aspect of physics has come out as something NEW, learned from this. The two furnace filters are in opposed corners from the corner occupied by the TV set. The array approximates a 30, 60, 90 degree right angle triangle, with the right hand filter sitting leaned into the corner on the floor more or less straight off the right end of the orange bar. The six sided raised array made of stretched hexagram slinkies radiates back toward the center of the TV from roughly the middle of the orange bar. And the other furnace filter is further back in the opposite far left hand corner of the room. Which now instantly highlights a feature not observed as distinct about the small green filter sheets arrayed in conjuction with the single source tiny tower speaker featuring full image stereo and sound range from a single 3 way Mono sound source. It happens that the only place the green sheets worked was in a left/right hand placement on either side of the center of the orange bar, leaned at roughly a 30 degree angle, and further angled about 30 degrees to face backward into the sound image, rather than toward the sound source. The right hand sheet is leaned against a support rod of one of the laboratory stands that holds up the orange bar and so is about 5 inches to the left of the side of the right hand tiny tower speaker box that is the sound source for that experiment. The other sheet is leaned against the inner side of the left hand tiny tower box sitting on the left end of the orange bar. This original array, put in place yesterday by the simple expediency of LISTENING for the best result, has turned up to be a configuration essentially the same as an independent configuration put together for the TV set a short while ago today, using the two aforementioned furnace filters, put in place also, by the simple expediency of listening for the best result. Here is some technical information. The furnace filters are a dirt cheap brand got from the nearby Canadian Tire store about a year ago. A 3rd filter, got at that time, was stripped open, and the fiber glass filter square peeled in half, and both thinner sheets used in a large air filter rigged up to work as a negative ion generator, the device abandoned last winter when the square box fan in use for it ground to a halt and not a fan could be bought mid-winter anywhere, not even dredged from a warehouse. So a 'Holmes' Air Purifyer and Ionizer was bought to replace it. The negative ion aspect of this 'Holmes' device is very good, it is a white plastic shell that stands on the floor to a height of 20 inches so it is a big device. Having a negative ion generator makes all the difference in the world when working long hours on a computer. The mind stays clear and does not clog, when a good negative ion source is at work immediately nearby. Getting back to business, the two furnace filters which have now (as of today) been absorbed into the experiment, are 16 x 16 x 1" model 64-3409-0, made by MasterCraft. The two green sheets of kitchen plastic green scouring pads are 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches and are characterized by being less dense rather than thick, you can see through them, and the surface of one side is covered with many tiny black globs of burnt plastic from poor manufacture. I speculate that the hard tiny globs may have some sound stream conducive contribution, but it may after all be just a question of density and thickness of weave of the material itself, in that denser sheets do not work, and today, a very loose woven white fiberglass furnace air filter has proven to also work very well, in today's case in filtering out harmful cross harmonic distortions in the sound stream of the TV. - Finis - DIFFERENT -------------------------------------------------------------------- August 22, 1995, 10:50 AM. Tuesday morning. Today is different. Nothing NEW has been learned, but more of current progresses have been determined. Plus a memory of times past, interesting enough that I feel it is worth reporting. The new progresses are that a local Home Hardware Store had six foot wooden rods, used by cabinate makers for cutting into dowels. I bought a rod for under 3 bucks to try it at home, with a hexagram plastic slinky dangling from it. For nearly two weeks it stood at a thirty degree angle leaned against the wall by the front office door up the hall, seeming to kick ass sound and add more grunt and growl in the bass end from long distance via 'Airframe' properties, when leaned at a specific, precise, perfect, angle, in one exact hot spot, against the wall opposite to the doorway to the front room. Every where else tried and this six foot wooden rod with hexagram slinky dangling was a spoiler. Yesterday afternoon while sitting watching the CNN news on TV, the idea occurred to try this six foot round rod in lieu of one of the four foot square rods comprising the six sided array of rods and stretched hexagon slinkies raised in the air spreading forth above the living room floor in front of the TV. The effect was immediate. As soon as the six foot round rod was inserted along the length of a stretched hexagon slinky, the sound got more bassy, and fidelic. So out came the four foot square wooden rod and it is now up the hall where the six foot rod used to be. The six foot rod was coaxed and nutured, its plastic hexagram slinky stretched even more so, and it was in going to a maxima, fiddling with it to extract even more new growl and grunt in the bass, suddenly pthhhh! the whole array collapsed, a triangular tripod toppled foward to land mid center and the whole array fell as a layer to the floor. There it rests right now. One end of the six foot rod has been raised again to former height to give some acceptable listenability to the sound, but for the rest I am going to wait until enough petty cash comes in from daily software sales to buy more six foot rods and do the array anew. Which brings us to the rest of today's report. Some history. Gotta get it off my chest. Jist gotta. Worth reporting historically is, the 'famed' OHM-WATT GENERATOR. Of course there is no such thing as an 'OHM-WATT GENERATOR'. But one was used once, to stage a deception. I have to freely admit that this was the only time in my life I have ever willfully staged a deception, and here is how it happened: Living in swank digs on the shore of the Rideau River, an executive style bungalow with 4200 square feet upstairs and the same downstairs, with a third of an acre of landscaped surrounds, and 120 feet of shore along the Rideau, the A-Frame house being used for 3 years for loudspeaker research featuring the intents of another person, me helping. This was circ. 1983. A long time ago, in looking back. Four doors to the right (the North) lived the Deputy Minister of Defence for Canada, a nice guy. I once threw out a long thin electric plug-in floorboard space heater that didn't work, and two days later at dinner time he was at my front door, having rescued the heater from garbage collection and repaired it, wanting to know if I wanted it back, or could he use it. Of course I gave it to him, very impressed with his honesty. Which is how we met. Which also explained a mystery. At times the front street would be filled with bright blue Fords (sedans) with government plates, and at times vans and trucks galore with men up the telephone and hydro poles just hanging around for long hours at a time up there in the air, leaning out on leather belts strapped to the tops of the poles. Mysterious indeed. Until the nature of the neighbor was learned. Every time a terrorist group acted up, or some threat was made, he came immediately under maximum government protection, due to his 'sensitive' high profile job as deputy chief of all things military for the country of Canada, at that time, circ. 1983. But a heck of a nice, interesting, friendly neighbor. Four doors to the left was a different story. The house once belonged to a cabinate minister who was famed for being totally bald, not a hair or whisker or eyelash whatsoever from a childhood ailment) from the first two Trudeau governments (Ron Basford). It was now owned by a (who knows) with an Ecuadorian young wife, full blooded jungle indian gal who thought nothing of straying in to your house (mine) at sunrise looking for her missing cat. I found her in my house three times going blink blink blink, "ah, looking for my cat, its gone missing". And then one day I heard an odd strange 'mewoow' and seeking the source further and further, tracked the weak mewoows downstairs and into a small room that was not being used for anything, and when opening the door, there was a great big shabby tabby cat, trapped inside for who knows how long. Of course I let it go and away it went on the instant, up the stairs and out the door to the Ecuadorian estate, its slow tail winding the air in stiff jerks and gyrations from very intent muscles as it flew across the lawns to home. It seems a gust of wind had slammed shut the door downstairs one day when the cat was investigating new turf. At least, that is the most probable friendly interpretation. The other is the Equadorian was prowling the house in complete stealth one day before sunrise and accidentally left the cat locked in the prowled empty room. At that time, her 'husband' had been "gone for a couple of weeks" and she "didn't know where he was". If I had had money I would have offered something, thinking meybe the poor gal was starving, but, no, she kept saying, everything was ok. The landscape along this 1 1/2 long block of shoreline was like a park, a continuous garden, no fences, all open, and very beautiful. The house I had, was owned by a fellow and wife who was head of an Iron Ore of Canada mine in Quebec, whose chief CEO was Brain Malroony before he was appointed head of the Conservative Party, then elected as Prime Minister of Canada. The son of the house owner was in Toronto, and he (the son) was head of the Young Conservatives of Canada. I was surrounded by political expertise, even though, remained throughout, non partisan, politically, completely. I was renting the house for a song, less than half the going rate for such a property, in exchange for being custodian caretaker, looking after all problems including a toilet shattered (exploded to shards) by freezing in the back extra quarters (self contained originally for staff) during a particulary cold winter week. And landscape grooming. My house had formerly been the official Embassy digs for the San Salvadorian Embassy, until the embassy was thrown out of the country. San Salvadorians used to hang their plentiful laundry out the windows summer and winter, I was told by neighbors. There were chickens, too, I was told, inside. The house had been empty for four years before I moved in. Had the house for three years. When I moved in, the yard had been neglected for over four years and the front was a mass of weeds and wildlife nearing thigh high. I bought the toughest most grunty power mover money could buy and cut the mess twice, then swithed it for a top of the line Lawnboy mower/mulcher, which (combination) brought the wild growth under control, and started pulling weeds with a kitchen knife, every few days I would go out and pull more weeds, such that by the second year my large front lawn was the most weed free, glorious looking rich green front lawn on the street. Got a lot of praise from the neighbors. Of course the richest greenest part, was where the septic tank leached. Getting back to the Ecuadorian household four doors up the street to the south, the former (Ron Basford cabinate minister estate): one afternoon the police arrived and collected over $250,000 in Canadian money stacked in piles on the living room floor, and much more than that in cocain sitting around in kilo bags. It was a major international bust. Just goes to show what a neighborhood can be like in this day and age. For the remaining year that house was locked up and vacant. The irony being that all this MONEY was happening just four doors up the street when I barely had enough money for the barest of day to day groceries, every cent earned by flower selling going for parts and materials for the loudspeaker and 'Airframe' sound experiments, back in 1981 to 1984 in that house on the shore of the Rideau River 4 kilometers south of Ottawa. And now to the main gist of the short story. The next door neighbor immediately south was the head of the business adminstration for the Atomic Energy of Canada, yes, the outfit that sells nuclear reactors. He was an engineer from England, but not involved in nuclear engineering he was the head of the business adminstration. He was the big cheese for all things financial for the Atomic Energy Commission of Canada. And not that old, I would say, in his late 40's. In the A-Frame house on the Ridea River, which I rented, was an ongoing research project into the developement of loudspeaders that had open ports and resonated, totally different approach to the current theories in which such things as cross over relays, and other equations, were used to produce sound. In the 'Airframe' research, no such techonology as was being pioneered by the world famous accoustic labs of the National Research Council sound labs under the dictatorship of Dr. Tool was being used at all, in the research underway in this executive bungalow on the shore of the Rideau River 4 klicks south of Ottawa, circ. 1983, whose neighbor four doors up the street got busted with over half a million in concain proceeds one surprising day when everything seemed quiet in this swanky shoreline one and a half blocks long, 4 kilometers south