See the whole Newsonic Story at: http://cosmicastronomy.com/newsonic.htm Forget the mouth organs, big orchestras with famous stars wailing sirenic laments into the third dimension don't have harmonicas. MORE EXPERIMENTS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: - February 23, 1992. And so. Another evening passes. More experiments are done. What is learned. Well, actually, not much that is really new. The famous 'Airframe' effect (the long distance carrying kind) boasted about in previous topics, has vanished for the better part of three weeks. Nothing famous is heard upstairs. Why it went away is not certain. Two of the variables which are now completely different from those very famous days when the sound system could be heard just as clearly upstairs in the back rooms of the low rental condo, are possible causes for the disappearance, but then again maybe not. One of the variables is that a total of five giant snowflakes fragments which were sitting around the experiment upright at odd angles for a brief period have been removed for more than two weeks. The thing that was so different about these giant snowflakes, besides their size (being constructed of from five to eleven snowflakes glued together) was that none of the snowflakes constructing them had been chisled, that is, none of them had been filed into six sided facets, so that all of the edges of the blades were still round. The other variable is that back in the famous days of a month ago, when the SOUND carried EVERYWHERE, saturating pretty well the WHOLE environment at constant equal volume, several snowflakes were twist tuned to be facing the huge sound image behind the windows face-on in a 90 degree rotation relative to most of the other snowflakes. These have all been turned back to be facing edge-on directly to an imaginary distant focal point away back deep in the huge sound image in the atomosphere balloon behind the dining room area's windows. Both of these variables were thought to have been major or minor contributers to the famous 'Airframe' effect. But this might not be the case. Today a snowflake was put back into a hot spot from where a snowflake had been removed over two weeks ago, and about 30% more 'Airframing' instantly came back into the sound stream. MORE ROOM SENSITIVITIES ----------------------------------------------------------------- But even as this (gradual improvement) is going on, the whole room environment is becoming more and more sensitive to the exact positions of random and arbitrary objects. Yes, its true, alas. I have found more than a dozen new hot spots for snowflakes, all of which have improved the overall fidelity of the system, as well as stablizing the bottom bass so that the lower bottom bass octaves can be heard most of the time. On the other hand, a coffee cup, a computer diskette sleeve, even the position of my head and chair, can make or break a really good deep resonanant authentically wall vibrating sound. I had hoped that pinning down some stability with more snowflakes would gradually soften the tendency for random and arbitrary room objects to input their stuff. But this has not been the case. The more the whole sound stream has been sensitized by positively focused snowflakes, the more the whole sound stream is influenced by negatively positioned (spoiler) room objects. And so, at this moment, truly great listening is by chance experience. Sometimes it is there to the max, and sometimes not. Time will tell if I can find a solution to this dilemma. The main problem seems to be that the generator sources (the speaker boxes) are of course not capable of generating the really big strong long bass waves, nevertheless those waves are being induced into the sound stream as invisible (perhaps cross harmonically re-enforced) waves, which are being teased into manifestation by the sonically focused snowflakes. The result of this is that the strongest deepest bass range sounds are like tenuous spider web strands which are there in the air but not glued together. You can hear them faintly, or not at all, until a snowflake focusing gells, and suddenly the stronger floor vibrating resonances spread forth through the room. THIS, is so tenuous, nevertheless, that the slightest disturbance, such as a coffee cup in the wrong place, or even its handle sticking out in the wrong direction, can cause the spider web pattern comprising the deep bass to collapse in choas, leaving a rubbery, or muffled, or thumpy bass, or nothing at all. It is very impressive, when that BASS is there hanging the air with powerful resonances. It is not impressive at all when there are no tones in the drums or the bottom-most bass vanishes. This loss of bottom-most bass can include richness in the low notes on a grand piano, as well as miked and amplified tom toms and snares of sweaty hard drummers doing solos independent of the music they are supposed to be playing. These drummer inputs become smashers or swacks, rather than tones and reverberating pounds. The bass is more responsive to the phenomena resonance rather than to selectivity in terms of wavelength frequencies, which is why the sonic snowflake experiment works for boosting the invisible bass ranges, but also why the whole environment is becoming concommittantly more sensitive to the resonance phenomena of the resonating bass patterns. THE MONO IN STEREO SITUATION ? ----------------------------------------------------------------- In terms of positive consequences, you should HEAR the TV set. At times this old thing (23 year old 24 inch Quasar with 5 inch single tweeter for a sound system) is sounding more and more like a modern stereo TV. Last night after a few minor adjustements in room tuning immediately around the area where I (the viewer) was sitting watching a movie, a point was reached where the TV's sound had become almost as good as one of my better Mono in Stereo demonstrations with the stereo sound system, albiet the TV's volume was much lower than the room filling band-almost-on-stage demos I have done with Mono in Stereo effects using the stereo sound system. Nevertheless, with the TV set, at times I can now hear marginally discernable point source instrument and voice separations in the sound tracks of movies or programs on the TV, and at times the lower bass range has actually touched on bottom bass response levels. This, as already alluded to elsewhere throughout these reports, is co-incidental to the room tuned environment brought into being by the sonically focused snowflakes. Oh, P.S., regards my stereo sound system itself (the original getto blaster) you should hear the Left hand speaker in MONO. It is a complete DUD. Has been for over a week. In more than a week absolutely nothing can be heard coming from it that is worth while listening to in Mono, even with the volume cranked way up. All of its puny little sound issues from the front of the speaker and you can hear this standing anywhere in the room. The Right hand speaker on the other hand, in Mono, has at times been both a good performer and a bad camper. At times, (even though its Airframe in terms of both space awareness and long distance carrying capacity have been up there), its fidelity has been god awful, high pitched, pissy, shrieky, and no bass let alone bottom bass. And at other times its MONO performance has been right up there in lights. This is the situation right now, UP THERE, real good fidelity, real good bottom bass, etc., etc. MONO IN STEREO UPDATE --------------------------------- Right now, I am playing my favorite FM station. Its programming at the moment features established female and male vocalists backed by large up to symphonic sized orchestras which have lots of roomy bottom end stuff resonating down there in the big depths of sound, even if a drummer is intruding wacking away with power amplified disturbing shocks on the skinheads. The only thing different when switching from full (two speaker stereo) to Right hand MONO, is that the sound wall off to the Left behind the drapes of the patio doors disappears and the sound stream becomes instantly sourced from the Right hand regions of the sound experiment. Otherwise, the volume is about the same for either full stereo or the Right hand speaker in Mono. And the fidelity is about the same as well, in terms of clarity of the whole sound range and no disturbing distortion in any particular frequency range. The Left hand speaker is now also responding to STEREO in MONO effects, though nowhere to the degree of the Right hand speaker. The Left hand speaker's volume is still greatly diminished when playing on its own. This is quite a change from, say, three hours ago, when, then, the Left hand speaker was a feeble little dud, and the Right hand speaker could be endured for perhaps three seconds. (I exaggerate, it could be endured for about two seconds), so shrill and distorted it was at that time. Room tuning - an odd object here or there at random - plus play with about six snowflakes, has changed all this around to an impressive performance in the Mono in Stereo universe, as well as, of course, gaining more fidelity and whole sound range stability in the sound stream in full stereo. AUDIOPHILE ? (not yet but... ) ----------------------------------------------------------------- In late January I had made a remark that going for better fidelity was going to be a challenge. Not quite so. Fidelity has been inexorably improved over the past month, a little bit more of this, a little bit more of that. At the moment, the fidelity overall is quite far beyond anything I ever thought I would get with this sound system. This is the same opion held by the 'Good Listener', who for the first time has started to listen to ways the sound can be marginally improved or even greatly improved at any given time by the adjustment or moving of random or arbitrary objects around the environment. It seems the system has now passed the grade into an audiophile class and it is now a guess as to just how far into audiophile such an experiment as this can penetrate. A main problem still persists, a slightly discolored tone in the whole sound range, perhaps best described as the difference in playing a tape over a good solid state Hi Fi, vrs over a good test tube amplifyer from the old days. In the system here in the dining room area of my Low Rental Condo, there is plenty of hang in the bass and hang in any other instruments played to have hang when recorded, but the solid state-like coloration is still the number one diminisher to success in terms of going for the ultimate. It is noticable. Another strangeness comes and goes, as my favorite FM station plays its things. The strangeness is a kind of warbling between certain instruments and throughout the deeper bass. I do not know if the warbling is due to Digital signals in the recording, or broadcasting, or if it is due to the room tuning and focusing of the snowflakes. I suspect the warbling's cause may be Digital, because it is very similar to the booming rubber bass which usually happens when I try certain Dital CD disks on the CD Disk player, only in the case of the FM radio, the warbling can selectively effect most areas of the sound range top to bottom, when it comes and goes. Perhaps a better way to describe the 'warbling' problem is to describe it as the kind of sound you might get from a Jug Band, with the bass fiddle a rope attached to a baseball bat stood on a washtub, and some of the lower timbered instruments done by mountaineers poofing away into the mouths of big jugs, while fiendishly grinning skinny people clap away in rhythms with pieces of leather slapping together. Forget the mouth organs, big orchestras with famous stars wailing sirenic laments into the third dimension don't have harmonicas. February 23, 1992. UPDATE: - February 29, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- It comes and goes. The huge lower bottom bass area can be gelled and suddenly a whole new glorious range of frequencies and power in the sound wells forth and the very walls seem to resonate with the propers of this glorious sound. Then it fades. It gets squeezed, as if only half the waves are responding. Its almost as if (a sneaking suspician) that the boost to big power sound can cause things to start vibrating around, vibrating out of focus. This might not be the snowflakes per se, they are all pinned down with honey. This could be everything else, including dust balls hidden between cracks, perhaps. Little red ants running around on the kitchen counter. Perhaps. Something, somehow, is doing the spoiling. This is because the glorious sound potential (I have now found that it is there in the stereo system and have already heard it) seems to last only for a few moments at a time, sometimes at most only through three or four tracks on a tape or the FM radio, even, sometimes, only three or four musical bars of goodstuff. Then problems are suddenly twisting the sound stream again. I don't know what it is that causes the big sound to squeeze out. I do know that any lisp in a female announcer's voice on the FM radio is entirely due to focusing of the snowflakes. I can hear a really lispy commercial ad underway, and quickly tune out the lisp entirely, and when music comes back on it is the huge glorious room sound I hear, then after a while it is gone again and when the same ad comes back on, she the announcer is lisping again. (The lisp is more like a 'whispy' fracturing in the 'S' sounds, for instance, repeating a hammer on your brain box to get the message of what I write). In the meantime an odd thing is happening with the snowflakes. For awhile recently, it seemed that most snowflakes could be twist tuned even moved around by rather large amounts with only small or marginal differences heard in the overall sound. But at least another dozen snowflakes are back in place in old hot spots and more new ones have been added (the total in place is now 126. Only one is a 12mm size, it sits on the window ledge in tandom about an inch apart parallel with an 18mm snowflake). And now, there is an entirely new situation. The snowflakes have never been so sensitive to any tuning. At this moment, just about every snowflake inputs an abrupt major collapse in the soundstream with the merest of touches. And twist tuning certain snowflakes can now cause changes in the harmonic nature of the sound stream so extreme that it can sound like several different orchestras are playing in turn as the bars of music beat on, as far as sound coloration is concerned. This is the converse of what I was hoping. What has actually happened is that the overall sensitivity level of the system is without question increasing, to the point that to be able to tune in glory takes very great care, and even then, the glory lasts for only a short while, maybe perhaps 15 minutes at most, then it is tune-up time all over again. Tuning is also now very much a question of waiting until all of the response levels in the moire patterns of sound through the various medias including solids and liquids has stablized per any touch of a snowflake or room object, before knowing if the touch has been a good one or not. The wait can take several seconds, depending on where the snowflake or object, is in the room. Time delay tuning has taken on GREAT meaning. I shouldn't be so critical. For the most part, the system is quite adequate for pleasant back ground listening. It is the gloriouso that would impress anybody who heard regardless of the kind of system producing the glory, that is so fragile, keen in the mind because it is there, long on insult because it lacks staying power. Thus it is with curiousity. I have to try and figure out some means of controlling the glory, if possible, which is a task because as of this moment everything I have thought of to try hasn't worked, so its an open ended ball game once more with who knows what the final outcome is going to be. .... I've just discovered that the speaker boxes themselves, though sitting raised in the air slightly on wads of folded masking tape, can vibrate enough in very strong deep bass punches to move an iota out of focus. Just a fingertip's pressure against the side of a speaker box can 'iota' it back into sonic focus. UPDATE: - March 3, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! How fast things change in an instant. Here is a very quick update, because there is more to do and will be more to come. The problem of transient persistent instability was partially solved in a major way almost in an instant. Here is how. SNOWFLAKE TOWERS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Some six sided hexagonal shaped metal hydro extenders had been sitting around in a bowl of odds and sorts since last fall when they were tried unsuccessfully in some sonic tests. (These extenders are about 2 3/4 cms in cross sectional diameter and about 5 1/2 cms long and are expensive, usually about 2 to 3 dollars each as small parts; I got them from a junk dealer for 20 cents each). On a whim, one of these was stood on end on the table in front of the Left speaker box, and on top of it was layed a giant snowflake made of seven of the 18mm cartwheels glued together to form a hexagram. The change in the sound stream was instant. More bass, more fidelity, more gain in volume without changing the volume knob, and so on. And literally a leap in the degree of more East/West wide width separation in the imaging itself. To make a long story short, it was learned that two of these ornamental controllers (snowflake towers) placed roughly five inches apart (the distance between a pair of human ears) was well worth the effort of discovering all of a sudden. The thought that a superior sonic controlling factor could be achieved by placing two large sonic controllers apart by the same distance as the ears (which are the most intrinsic factor of all in terms of the human physics of stereo sound), worked. (A one eared person cannot, by fundamental phsyics, hear stereo). To make a long story shorter, a bit of fiddling brought about a new level of enhancement in the Mono in Stereo effects. Not withstanding that better bass etc., etc., was quickly tested at much higher sound levels (volume) than ever before, for the Right hand speaker, it was also possible to set up the tower snowflakes in such a way that stereophonic separation in the Mono sound source was achieved by snowflake controller tuning only, having little (or nothing) to do with baffling as was used earlier using kitchen cupboard doors partly opened as the means of achieving apparent point source separations in the Mono generated sound steam. I know, I never specified these resulting effects, but using open kitchen cupboards as baffles has always been a factor, once mono in stereo tests were initiated, the doors, open or closed, always had input, one way or another, open, then, later, closed. Or some open, some closed. (This is where the researcher takes for granted something that is inuitively obvious, then only later, discovers that the intuitively obvious is not obvious at all until specified and spelled out in detail). WHAT YOU CAN HEAR ----------------------------------------------------------------- There are a couple of differences in this new form of Mono in Stereo effects. The sound quality, though big and powerful, sounds more as if a lot more of the sonic responding is coming from the vibrations of solids, in that much of the upper mid range and higher end in particular can have a compressed texture, (rather than a pristine purity when instruments are being played alive out in the open air of the room and you can hear echos in the space behind them). What is so very different, however, is that there is a HUGE giant sound wall now up and behind the windows, spreading well both to the Left and Right of the Right speaker box itself. Mono. What's more, this spread is more or less constant, it lacks the instant jittery peak and valley effects of former Mono in Stereo tests. This new effect is solidly there in a huge atomosphere of sound which is almost as wide across as that being tested for the previous two weeks in full two speaker stereo. You can walk from the kitchen, in and around through the dining room area past the Right speaker box and the huge atmosphere balloon of sound stays up in the air, (it does not drop down like it did before to localize into a deep narrow channel originating from the Right speaker box and receeding into the depths of the wall behind the speaker, and even further deteriorate, snuffing up (localizing) right into the oriface of the speaker box itself as you approach the table). Now things are very different. As of this moment, the sound stays right UP in the AIR as you walk right past the speaker box. Now this is VERY different, because it is a full Stereophonic effect, being generated by one small mono speaker box containing one five inch paper cone speaker as the driver, and two one inch metal coned tweeters as exciters. At one point, after playing around with focusing for a few minutes, I even sailed right through the final frenzied passage of the Pier Gynt Suites - In The Hall Of The Mountain King; big bass batteries grunting away, tympanies banging on the down-beats, trumpets doing licks, the whole kaboodle, at high volume, with Fidelity, and it didn't break up, or fade in volume, all in Mono through the Right hand speaker. Except this was different, anyone listening would have sworn they were listening to a genuine Stereo system. Mind you, such a success was fleeting. Within moments after sailing through the big one (Hall Of The Mountain King), I had lost control of the system again, and was floundering around trying to get things back into sonic focus. At one point during the flounder, I had two separate sounds, all of the instruments seemed to be playing twice as if about two feet apart in a phase shift from a science fiction movie. Don't ask me how I did this, I couldn't tell you. But it was weird. The problem was that this was not a sound you wanted to listen to for very long so I soon enough had passed over it heading back toward something with reasonable fidelitic accoustics. FINISHING OFF THE DESCRIPTION (still in Mono) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Interestingly, there was as much high end (cymbols and so on) as there had been in the previous two weeks using full stereo, bearing in mind that with the new setup as of today (using at this moment six snowflake towers made of fragments of giant snowflakes), there is far more high end (cymbols and so on) than ever before in Mono. There are problems, however. Two to be specific. A better Mono in Stereo seems to be from my favorite FM station, rather than tapes. With casette tapes the sound tends to be more focallized around the vacinity of the Right speaker box itself. But with the FM, the sound at times can spread out into a full significent atmosphere of huge sound behind the dining room windows. I say 'at times', because the best of this huge theater in the atmosphere seems to be conditional to the kind of recording being played over the FM radio. In one piece of music, the huge atmosphere is there. And when the next piece of music comes on, the sound can be heard to localize around the vacinity of the Right speaker box as you walk past it. CHECKING SOME VARIABLES ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. I am well aware of the problem of engineering, where soloists or vocalists have been mixed in the studio to appear in an artificial hole created as an imposter cavity right in the middle of the sound stream. But I have heard, (when things are especially well focused) that it is easy to tell when imposter point sources are present and it is easy to live with them, in other words the imposterism does not seem to cause problems in fidelity. In fact, I think there is an obvious way around the problem. This is to assume that the sound image thinks an imposter instrument is a new live instrument playing in the midst of the image, and let the cross harmonic influences link in and become a part of the rejuvinated sound stream, so that it is no longer an imposter, so far as the sound stream in concerned. 2. One experimental variable has to be checked out before further decisions can be made regards new challenging developements. None of the cartwheels being used thus far in the giant flakes have been filed. As already said, the giant flakes are made of 7 of the 18mm cartwheels glued together into a hexagon shape. Only one these has survived intact in a full hexagon shape, the others have all been knocked over or fallen and shattered into fragments. Three other giant snowflakes are fragments shattered from larger giant snowflakes, one of which fell to the floor, and two others from giant snowflakes which flew off a motor shaft on which they were at one time spinning during earlier unavailing experiments of last October and November. The most important variable is that none of the cartwheels in these giant flakes have been filed. So the next thing is to file anew a bunch of 18mm cartwheels and glue them into giant snowflakes. Two varieties I can try right away: 1. A single hexagram rosette with 7 snowflakes glued together. 2. An enlarged hexagram (more fractal-like) using 13 snowflakes glued together in an expanded hexagonal array. As you can see, the short story isn't finished. The moral of the story is that yahoo! something has been found which can dramatically stablize the sound stream in a single stroke - the use of giant snowflakes sitting flat on hexagonal extenders to comprise sonic towers. Oh, forgot to mention, the only way I could hold a tower together was to cover its top with honey so the giant snowflake fragments would stay in place, and to honey stick the bottom of the tower to the table. As for the glory mentioned in the previous Update (of February 29), it is there, more so since it is more stable, but still not locked well in place regards staying power. The slightest movement of a snowflake tower can cause immediate compression in any area of the sound range, top, mid, bottom, or combinations thereof. What is a relief is that random and arbitrary room objects have lost much of their major degree of sensitivity. Any object in the room is still a spoiler, but can be moved around in a wider area and not so instantly cuts in or out some aspect of better sound. In other words, many of the sonic hot spots have become greatly enlarged in cross sectional area due to the input of the greater cross sectional areas effecting from the giant snowflake, and fragments, lying flat on top of the hexagonal extender posts. HUMAN EAR INPUT AS A MECHANICAL PROPERTY IN SOUND ---------------------------------------------------------------- Regards where to put a pair of towers to tickle the physics of the human ears in terms of mechanisms respondent to the maximum degree to percieve Stereo, it does not seem that there is any one place that works best, two towers can be set at an angle seperated roughly five inches apart along an East/West axis, or a North/South axis, or at oddball angles, and only slight dramatic difference may be heard between the orientations. Also, a pair can be situated at the front end of the table, or on the bookshelves on the opposite wall in the dining room area. One factor that is definitive is that there is more lower bottom bass augmentation with the snowflake towers sitting further back from the speakers, and more higher end augmentation with the towers sitting up closer near the front of the speakers, although the higher end version tends to be sharp pitched. R.S.L. March 3, 1992 Peace Joy and Happiness IT WORKS Morning ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: March 4, 1992. It works! At the close of the report on yesterday's session (Update, March 3,), I indicated some new ideas had come to mind to try next. They worked. To make a long story short, I have one new giant snowflake so far ready and erected in place. This time, instead of being layed on top of the hexogonal shaped extender post, it is standing upright, with one of its snowflakes gripped in the opening of the post with a piece of wet sponge. (The new giant snowflake is the first made of officially filed cartwheels to be the same as the other snowflakes being used throughout the environment). The idea is that the giant snowflake gripped by a small wet piece of spong can be manipulated and adjusted sticking up in the air, and when the sponge dries it will be a more or less permanent grip. So far so good. The giant snowflake consists of 13 filed 18mm snowflakes and is standing upright exactly where I focus it. It has not fallen and shattered, it has not leaned to become a spoiler. One other modification is that I dug out of a storage tray a 3mm bead which had earlier been filed into a six sided shape and used last fall to construct Star of David rosettes on the table in tests described in files SOUND.1 through SOUND.2. Two of these 3mm filed beads have been bonded with honey into the centers of the center snowflake in the 13 point giant snowflake, and rotated carefully back and forth to greatest hightened sonic influence, gripped in place as centerbeads by the honey. It turns out that these tiny beads when focused properly, can import great positive influence in the Hi Fi quality and depth of the lower bass range, amongst other things. It later turns out that only one centerbead produces a better fidelity, two can sharpen some parts of the sound but subtle aspects of fidelity are sacrificed. UPDATE REPORT CONTINUED March 4, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Currently being played on the cassette deck is: GOLDEN LATIN FAVORITES, MCR, 171, Manufactured in Canada by: Distribution Madacy Inc. Here is what is happening with the new giant snowflake. I just happened to stick it on a tower post that was sitting at the front of the table offset a little to the Left of the Right speaker. With no more work than tuning it at that spot the improvement in the stereo system was immediate, to say the least. Here is how advanced the improvements are for this experiment via this one technical innovation. In switching to Mono sound, both Left and Right speakers are reponding better than ever in Mono in Stereo effects. Both are also doing something which I had only glimpsed for the first time in yesterday's test through the Right hand speaker after fussing and fiddling for most of the afternoon to hear the following effect in a transitory way that came and went ad hoc for music being played on my favorite FM station and not heard at all when playing cassette tapes. I am now playing the GOLDEN LATIN FAVORITES cassette tape. When switching to either speaker in Mono, the sound STAYS up in the air, spread wide open in a huge sound environment behind the windows of the dining room area. When walking past the table, the stereo sound stays up there constantly spread out and receeding back into the sonic atmosphere behind the window for the whole walk. This is true when walking past either Left or Right speaker playing in Mono. The sound itself is reverberting loud and strongly everywhere in the main floor area of this low rental condo (the whole environment), with no dominant peaks and valleys in the sound stream at all. When walking directly past either speaker playing in Mono, there is no momentary collapse of the sound image into an issue coming locally from the oriface or immediate vacinity of either speaker. Just as you would do when listening to the system playing in full stereo (both speakers working) you could not tell that the sound was being source generated from a speaker until actually leaning completely close to that speaker. The same is now true no matter which speaker is playing in Mono. You cannot tell it is the actual sound generator source until leaning close toward that speaker box. There is no 'head in the vice' effect, period! .... I have just walked around past the sound table, through the living room area, through the kitchen area, and back here through the second doorway into the dining room area to where I started the walk. The only place where there was any diminishment at all in the sound was a slight valley in the middle of the kitchen. Othewise the sound was as strong and clear as ever thoughout the whole of the walk. The so-called 'airframe' presence was much more active than during the past few weeks, hence the dissolving of the peaks and valleys and the 'head in the vice' lessers, both are gone. When walking into the main floor washroom (up the corridor on the far side of the kitchen wall), the sound gain dropped by about (I would guess) 35%. It means some of the 'airframe's' long distance carrying presence is back. For instance I have just walked up the stairs and into the back room uptairs and there heard the volume gain finally drop to about 25% when standing in the middle of this back corner upstairs room. This is quite an improvement from before, when it was reported a month ago that most of the long distance 'airframe' carrying power was gone by the time I got to the top of the stairs when listening, at which point I couldn't tell if it was the sound system downstairs playing at loud volume, or the TV set. Now there is no mistaking that the sound system is playing at loud volume when I am upstairs, until reaching the point of actually crossing the threshold into the back room when the greater presence of the sound stream falls off noticably. DON'T FORGET, ALL OF THIS IS HAPPENING WITH THE LEFT HAND SPEAKER ONLY, PLAYING IN MONO. Actually, I have to reveal a hint of emotion in this. I have just stood in the kitchen peeling a banana and randomly walked around in a sort of daydream listening to the violins playing out 'here' to the Right, and the big electric bass playing out 'there' to the Left, and heard the same imaging presence as I walked around through the whole of the main floor area's enviroment. There is no question that this is full fledged stereo, and borderline audiophile Hi Fi to boot. Please don't ignore that it is coming from a single Mono track on a cassette tape being played through the Left hand little speaker box. Okay, I'm feeling satisfied, right now. WHAT ABOUT BAFFLES ----------------------------------------------------------------- Here is something to report however. I have finished eating the banana, and typed the above remarks regards feeling a little emotion, and then did a double check. I went through the kitchen and closed all of the cupboard doors. None of them had been baffle tuned. (In the earliest of the Mono in Stereo tests reported for later January and in February, the only way to get a semblence of East/West image separation was via careful tendious testing and placing of the kitchen cupboard doors to act as signal delaying echo baffles, in which tests the audiophile quality of the sound itself could be quite awful, a trade off in order to tune in any East/West image seperation. What happened when I closed all of the kitchen doors, is that the glorious magnificent full stereo effect in Mono just reported in the above paragraphs vanished! The borderline audiophile Hi Fi quality is still here in the sound stream, as is the airframe sonic image, sustaining itself in a large atomosphere up there in the area behind the dining room windows. But now it is a tube balloon, localized directly in the region behind the Left hand speaker box sitting on the table. The 'airframe' live sound presence is still there, as is the long distance 'airframe' carrying effect, and the sound is still semi-stereo in terms of receeding echo-wise by depth into the sound image behind the window. But the magnificent wide East/West image separation heard only a moment ago has vanished. There is no Left/Right point source instrument locations in the orchestra. The sound stream's band width currently is very localized. And when walking past the Left speaker box the sound falls down and becomes obviously sourced from the speaker box itself. So. There is no question, sonic baffles it is. I am going to go back into the kitchen and hopefully get back that magnificent orchestra playing latin american favorites on stage in a concert hall, the live presence I was listening to only a moment ago. Here goes. WHAT HAPPENED ----------------------------------------------------------------- It took less than two minutes to get back some Left/Right image. I can't really say its better or worse than before. I would say the audiophonic Hi Fi quality is better than before particularily in the strength of the lower bottom bass echo reverberating regions. But it seems that the wide window is not as wide as it was. The important thing is, however, that some width separation re-appeared in the sound stream the instant I started throwing open some kitchen cupboard doors. So baffles it is. It means, alas, I am going to have to play a bit with the doors to try and release the hunger for the really obvious wide spread orchestra I was listening to before I closed the kitchen cupboard doors. So here goes. I shall try again SOMETHING IS LEARNED ----------------------------------------------------------------- I have just learned something new. Two more minutes have passed and I am back at the computer. The wide East/West sound image is wider than it has ever been. The fidelity is better than it has ever been. All it took was to treat the kitchen cupboard doors as room tunable random objects. Moving a door back and forth through a narrow arc of a few inches revealed immediately detectable hot and cold sonic resonance positions. So each door was quickly tuned for its sonic 'hotspotness'. The improvement was obvious after only the first five doors had been tested. The improvement was so obvious after tuning just nine doors that I broke off and come back to the computer to get this report out of the way. There is no point in describing the details of each door's position, most are open by about an inch or so, a couple of doors are wide open, sort of. There are still eleven more doors to tune, but what's the point of reporting on it after, or even taking the time to do the tuning now anyway. Well not quite. I have just done the walk around through the listening area and back to the computer and there are subtle peaks and valleys in the sound stream as I did the circle, plus a slight momentarily brief localizing around the vacinity of the Left speaker box as you walk past, both of these effects not being evident at all before I originally closed all of the kitchen doors. So obviously something was being captured in the chance bafflings of the doors earlier which has not yet been restored in full with the latest door tunings. Nevertheless. The sound system in Mono in the Left hand speaker is producing very listenable not just background music, but enjoyable clear and open-ear loud volume easily accepted sound. Loud means not brain trashing, this is loud enough that you can't hear a voice on the phone, but you can certainly think straight as you concentrate on other things. There is still only one new giant snowflake in place as of today. I haven't touched a thing (other than the kitchen doors) for over three hours. Five more giant snowflakes still have to be put together - the 13 flakes for each to be bonded together with Gell Crazy Glue, and then mounted on the hexagonal extrender posts using pieces of wet sponge as mobile grips to create snowflake towers. The flakes were filed last night while watching a turkey science fiction flick on TV. This will have to wait for a few hours or perhaps a day. The reason why is today is one of those rare days occuring about twice a month when my hands are a little jittery. Its a question of age as much as anything. No pressures, no stress is hampering my peace of mind. However, in the usual ebb and flows of what I suppose are normal bio-rhythms every so often a day formulates into a physical down dip that can include some slight jittery in the hands. This is not really bad at all, don't feel sorry for the poor experimenter, it is not this kind of situation at all. It is just that ANY jittery in the hands is TOO much for quality control in this kind of experiment, although I notice that most of the jitter has dissolved in the last half hour. I'll let you know when next there is something to let you know. One of the things I hope will CLEAR up when more full sized 13 nodal giant snowflakes are standing up in place, is better total high end resolution. Despite my claim that here we have borderline audiophile Hi Fi at this moment, it is unstable. It is sensitive to such things as the movement of my head (hence pair of ears) and to the locomotion of the little dog, for example. This is a real problem, because the higher end is going in and out in a rather screetchy rather compressed distortion rather freely, and obviously I do not like this. I would like to predict that more giant snowflakes will stablize this fault. I'll let you know. Incidentally, I can double the volume gain of the TV set by a very simple means; move a kitchen cupboard door by about an inch, and move a small Bic cigarette lighter sitting on the counter by about 1/4 of an inch. I think this was a chance random tuning opportunity but it sure did happen. R.S.L. March 4, 1992 Peace Joy and Happiness ITS LIKE GROWING A FLOWER GARDEN 6:15 AM ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: March 6, 1992. What a difference a few giant snowflakes make. Last night and today was a busy day, what with the Michelangelo computer virus scare and whatnot. The whole of the time until last evening was spent producing and delivering disks with anti virus software using our designed Menu driving system. For the whole of the night, all of the spare space on the stereo system table was being used to produce disks and packages, you know, making the disks using the two computers going none stop, labels, write protect tabs, sleeves, stuffing the envelope packages. And then at 5 AM., we (my brother and I) ran out of package envelopes. And now there is some spare time again after a few hours sleep. Five giant snowflakes are now glued together and standing up in bright colored hexagonal arrays in the environment. The kitchen cupboard doors are all closed. And the stereo is in full effect, even at very low volume. Oh, forgot to mention, only the Right hand speaker box is working. It is in 100% Mono. I am listening to a cassette tape of Xaviar Cugat favorites and can hear the orchestra playing in a Latin night club in the huge sound image up there behind the dining room windows. Nice. Lots of airframe live presence, lots of long distance carrying power, lots of stable fidelity as I do the circle walking through the main floor area. Etc. Etc. Nice. (The cassette tape is: Xaviar Cugat And His Orchestra, 'The Beat Of The Big Bands', CBS Select, BUT-50193). It turns out that the giant snowflakes need to be put in certain positions to work properly in regenerating full stereo in Mono source sound. As far away as possible from the sound table (the generator source) seems to be the best place to locate these upright giant snowflakes in the listening environment, with each giant snowflake focused to an imaginary point of center deep in the sound image back there behind the dining room windows. This also works for best all around Hi Fidelity, the same as is the case with each individual snowflake sonic controller, all uniformly focused drive-in-theatre-style to an imaginary point of focus back in the huge sound image. As for the exact locations; one giant snowflake is sitting on top in the middle of the bookshelf against the opposite wall in the dining area. Two giant snowflakes are at either end of the bookshelf. A fourth is against the far back corner to the South in the kitchen, and the fifth is on top of the TV set against the far North wall, back in the corner of the living room area. As I said, farther away from the immediate vacinity of the speakers the better for these giant snowflakes to regenerate full stereophonic reproduction from a Mono sound source. The point of this momentary Update report is.... ....no more kitchen door BAFFLES. The kitchen cupboard doors are all closed! CATCHING THE WAVE 10:30 AM. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: March 6, 1992. The 'Good Listener' was by for a moment, in a hurry, had no idea the system was working in Mono. Thought the fidelity was a bit rougher than a couple of days ago, but realized it was a different tape playing heavy duty Golden Piano stuff and not frequency drift on the FM radio, but thought the stereo imaging was fine, but had no idea that it was entirely Mono through the Left hand speaker. "Oh, in that case, hmm... " said the good listener heading out of the room still in a hurry. Catching the Wave means that, in tuning the giant snowflakes, (I think I am going to call them sonic soul patterns), there is a reflection through which the flake passes that is probably about 1 or 2 degrees at most (out of 360 degrees) in which a whole bunch of frequencies consolidate into real good stuff. But like I said, it is really fleeting, you have to be on your toes to catch the wave, particularly since these giant snowflakes can take many seconds for their resulting final responses to kick in in full, when tuning them. It means that tuning has to be done VERRRY slowly to be really effective. It is during the long moment of HANG, when the old sound has been dissolved and the new one is still unconsolidated, that you can MISS the wave if hurrying too fast in twist tuning or torgue turning a giant snowflake. One of the more noticable effects (already seen earlier last month but more so today) is that I can project the image over the speakers, bringing it foward, into the room, out from the sound image area behind the windows per se. Some audiophile specialists might tend to think that recurrancing the imaging right over the speakers is preferred. I can't get into real forward imaging tests due to the fact that there is no room for it in the dining area of my low rental condo. On the other hand it is really easy to more deeply move the sound out and farther back into the big area behind the windows. This is possible entirely by snowflake tuning. In a major example, tests using the Dick Tracy movie sound track cassette (conducted at the end of January, 1992), led to imaging so well developed (albiet weird) that at times you could picture yourself standing on a busy corner in a downtown intersection of a major city and hear police sirens echoing sonically from up the street and way around the distant corner, for instance. It wasn't just a simulation, you could hear the sirens echoing from afar. THE PROJECT IS COMPLETE 3:00 PM ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update: March 6, 1992. One more giant snowflake is in place. This makes a total of six. (The only reason for six is I have no more hexagonal extender posts to stand the flakes up in). Everything is better. You may have wanted to know, so I have just told you. It still takes GREAT care to tune things. But you should hear what MAJOR tuning is possible, especially in the now filled in lower regions of the bottom bass. The sweet pure frequencies now happening in point source instruments of the high end are finally sounding like authentically fidelic in a stable way. One of the things to watch for when experimenting with Mono in Stereo effects is that it is really easy to get a parallax into the sound image. This means that as you walk past the table and the working single Mono speaker, the sound image itself will be heard to shift in total, being on the Left side of the speaker when you are standing to the Right, and rotating around a pivot, to end up recurred in the air behind the Right of the speaker when you are standing to the Left. This parallax effect is as if the recurred sound image is pivoting by a lever with the generating source itself the fulcrum of the lever arm. It takes some acute listening to tune the system so that the sound image stays in the same place located in the huge environment behind the windows, no matter where you are when walking around. THE FRAGILITY OF SUCCESS ----------------------------------------------------------------- When first setting up the 6th giant snowflake I re-adjusted the position of three of the other giant snowflakes and ran immediately into a problem. I had the system on MONO playing through the Right hand speaker. All of a sudden there was irrational noise, lots of it. A quick check of the piston in the five inch tweeter showed the cause without question. The piston was visibly throwing in long strong vibrations, causing the bass range to fracture, break up, blat. You could see the piston throwing in and out as plain as day, just like the cone of any ordinary playing loudspeaker. And in and around the throws, the piston was clearly vibrating at smaller rapid and variable rates. Oops, Oops, and Oh No!. The system was once again 'dynamically unstable', to state the problem in a simple two words. It was not dissolving into full fledged Turbo Roar, thankfully. But bass caused roars occurred a couple of times already, for perhaps a few seconds each time as heavy duty music played on the FM radio. First thing to do was turn down the volume a little to the point where the speaker crapping did not seem life threatening. And then start re-tuning snowflakes willy nilly here and there to see if I could re-stablize the system. It worked. Shortly along the way I became aware that the lower bass range was starting to respond anew with power filled resonances rather than meaningless noisy shatters and could see that the tweeter's piston had again become centered in impact vibrations so that to all extents and purposes the voice coil piston was once again absolutely immobile to the naked eye. Now that the impact vibrations were coherently synchronizing with the sound stream generator, I quickly re-adjusted the giant snowflakes and thus the crisis was over. The good sound was back. It had only been a few minutes, say perhaps five minutes at most had passed. Fortunately it had been just a momentary upset. Real good recurrancing and resonation was back in the Mono playing speaker. Not only was this single Mono speaker source sounding once more like a large stereo system at work, the sound stream image itself was back up in the stage behind the windows spread out Left and Right and into depth like an opera and not in anyway localized around the source of the sound stream itself, ie., the single little Mono Right hand speaker. It meant that not just the speaker cone itself, but also all of the moires in the room, were also once again acting as if they too were power generators, and their vibrations (if somehow visible) would appear motionless to the naked eye even though extremely powerful vibrating was going on inside all of the sonic moire patterns of the environment. I say with emphasis; this demonstrates just how much beyond the normal performance capabilities of getto blaster class speakers and normal stereo sound systems and theories that this experimental sound system is, in how it utilized many fundamental sonic enhancements as are already embodied in the spiritual realms of Reality to achieve such engineered results. THE PROJECT IS COMPLETE March 7, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- There is no need for any further updates. The 6 month sound experiment in my low rental condo has led to a clearly seen need to push and shove beyond the barriers of present day bogged down technologies and the inhibitive pre-conceived beliefs of those in control of the technologies and their theories about it and life. Anyone who may want to follow the route may in fact find that I have hardly touched the hem of the garment in terms of what can be learned about higher qualities of sound and what can be deduced easily regards certain principles in Reality, learned from understanding principles as they also occur in the third dimensional realm of this universe. FINAL UPDATE March 10, 1992. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I figure that at this moment I am at about 30% of potential. The 1st super giant snowflake (31 snowflakes glued together), needs some means to be able to support it so I can stand it upright tilted at about 60 degrees from the horizontal and rotated by about 60 degrees to the sound image area behind the windows to be more effective as a sonic conducer. This setting I know works in hand held tests. There may be other angles which are better. Time will tell. I figure two of the giant snowflakes will be able to give a real boost to the whole performance level of the stereo in terms of both major gains in overall fidelity and more powerful reverberations that are stable in the bottom bass and lower bottom bass regions of the sound stream. I have to wait until filing more snowflakes for the second giant item, and figure out how to support them in some way that I can focus precisely. But, why bore you with details. Otherwise, I have already seen and heard enough to know that I am at about 30% potential. In tests this afternoon (March 10, 1992) I simply rested the super giant snowflake held upright in place by a random clutter of cassette tapes on the book shelf against the wall opposite the sound table and left in that angled upright position the giant snowflake was still workable enough to give the best performance ever achieved to date for my sound system. What is particularly interesting is that this best ever performance is in 100% MONO through the Right hand speaker. I heard electronic gongs pass in a run from the far Right to the far Left of the sound image for instance, so there is no question about a wide stereo spread recurring in a room from a Mono generating source. Once again however random room objects have come back to being major spoilers. On the other hand only a few objects have to be discretely adjusted to overcome the spoil. The major gains cancelling the spoiling come in after the snowflakes have been well tuned. What I have learned is that sonic tuning is very hard to do at first, I have to proceed through some very strange distortions until a new effect starts to gell, wherein tuning becomes much easier. The fact of the super giant snowflake as a conducer has stablized a number of transient effects to where they can be tested and controlled. I suspect the strangeness has to due with distortions of the cross harmonic kind - reflections moving laterally back and forth between the instruments and sideways between the walls, because the tiniest of iotas and touches to the snowflakes can make or break 'tone' in the music. This is by far the tightest sonic tuning I have ever had to do, to where I can start to hear space behind the different point sources instruments and vocals, plus richer harmonic overtones in the rings of the ride cymbals. When this gets focused I am able to handle the more important qualities of tone and authenticity leading to reproduction of live sound presence without compression distortions, in the Mono playing system. At times, I have had the Right hand Mono speaker's sound spread out to the LEFT to such an extent that it fills the same sound image area as is filled when running the system in full stereo. In fact at times I have been able to lean right up to the Right speaker box with my head about a foot away and tune a snowflake, listening to changes in the image still UP in the AIR spread out behind the speaker. In other words, the Mono sourced sound is no longer being collapsing to the front of the speaker by local big interferences such as my head and body. The recurrancing at long distance from the generating source is very stable. Please note that most all of the tuning is at long distances away from the speaker. I had three single snowflakes near the front of the Right hand speaker and discovered they had become spoilers. It was in testing them before removing them from the system that, out, I found I could lean my face right close to the speaker (maybe a foot and a half away) and looking up into the huge sound area hear the sound and percieve the image effects still up there in the air when testing the snowflakes. This is why I say that at the moment the system is working at about 30% of potential. During today's tunings I could hear a lot more come and go in transient ways. Just hearing the glimpes of, means I know that inevitably a whole lot more can still be coaxed out of the system. One thing learned today more than ever is there can be great audiophile differences between one cassette tape and another, and between individual tracks on a tape, particularly if the tape is a collection such as movie sound tracks. The feel of fidelity between one recording and another can be surprising. As for the 'airframe' long distance carrying potential, this seems to be a factor of tuning. At one point this afternoon I had chance tuned things in such a way that in the main floor washroom with the door closed it was back to being almost as loud and clear as being out in the living room area, with the solid washroom walls having become more or less transparent for the sound stream. But this was short lived. In further tuning for more high end fidelity and more powerful lower bass reverberations, the brief taste of super quality long distance 'airframe' had vanished again. There was still long distance 'airframe', but nothing like what I had briefly heard. It does however tell me that in days to come and with further developements, such can be tuned fully into the system in a stable way. I know this, because everything I have so far ever heard in a transient way during the duration of this experiment has come to pass in an out front stable way, inexorably. The future is forever hopeful. SEE POSTSCRIPTS IN APPENDIX.3 ------------------------------------------------------------- APPENDIX.3 has support information, for anyone curious enough to read it, beginning under the heading: POSTSCRIPTS. ALLSONIC is a FANTASY a short story written in 2 days at the last minute to indicate what I expect could actually happen, given the sonic techniques already demonstrated and in place today (at this moment) in my low rental condo. THIS PHASE FINISHED . . . March 10, 1992. ------------------------------------------------------------- GIANT SNOWFLAKE CONSTRUCTION ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 12, 1992, 4:45 AM. I have just constructed a giant stonehenge-like image consisting of the six sided large nowflakes arrayed in a large rosette in front of the Right hand speaker, with all angles focused toward the center of the hexagram. Six single snowflakes form another rosette within the main Stonehenge construction. The seven snowflakes in the two other rosettes on the outside of each speaker box have also been twist tuned to be uniformly focused toward the rosette's center. The result of THIS has been to almost completely stablize the sound, furthermore the random room objects have lost just about all of their sensitivity. At this moment the Left hand speaker is producing in 100% MONO a giant sound wall reaching all the way across and beyond the stretch between the two speakers, in a manner which noticable also comes and goes (in terms of maximum wide width) between certain tracks on certain tapes being playing as I sit here writing on the computer. TWO SPEAKER STEREO VRS MONO FOCUSING ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 14, 1992, 11:30 PM. It looks like two different ways of focusing the snowflakes are in order. 1. For full two speaker stereo, splay tuning (drive-in-theatre style) seems to be best, with all snowflakes small and giant, including those in rosettes, focused toward an imaginary point of center deep far back in the giant stereo sound image. 2. For MONO IN STEREO tuning (one speaker only) the best sound comes from having snowflakes in rosette focused cartwheel fashion, that is, each flake small or giant is focused toward the center of the rosette. TWO SNOWFLAKE SONIC ENHANCERS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 15, 1992, 10:50 AM. The nice thing about using liquid honey for research is that you can glue things together, and when finished, simply rinse off the liquid honey to unglue them again. For instance two giant snowflakes have been pressed together like an Oreo cookie with liquid honey, just little dabs on the sharp corners of the flakes of the snowflake forming each little hexagram did the job, one giant snowflake was laid atop the other, and rotated 30 degrees to create a 12 sided figure. Now THIS has sonic power. You wouldn't believe what it does to the sound stream, particularly the bass end. Two of these new 'atomic' snowflakes have been made (bonded together with liquid honey). They seem to work best titled at about a 60 degree angle and turned more or less face-on to the main sound generating source, rather than focused to somewhere within the recurring sound image behind the windows. In terms of Mono in Stereo, here is what is happening right now. A cassette tape of 20 favorite latin melodies produced in Holland was originally so bad it was thought to be a 4 or 5 piece cabaret orchestra playing tinny ricky tick latin stuff. It turns out to be a major orchestra with big arrangements and an extremely wide setup on stage when recorded. (20 Sweet Latins, MCR, STEMPRA, 2687154, Made In Holland). For instance on one of the cuts a miramba (latin vibraphone) is playing far off to the Left in the giant wide sound image. Through the Right hand speaker playing in Mono only, the mirimba can't be heard until after some very fine tuning, using the Stonehenge array as described previously above in the Update of March 12, 1992. After the ultra fine tuning, the mirimba can be heard as a very faint very high pitched almost metallic instrument way off to the back, barely discernable. With two of the 'atomic' snowflakes in place, the miramba through the Right hand speaker in Mono comes to life. It is still way to the back offset to the Left (rather than away off to the Left by itself and loud and clear) but there is no mistaking that it is a mirimda, and that it is being picked up by cross echoes and is coming back, amplified sonically by the 'atomic' snowflakes, through the Right hand Mono channel. A simple means was found to mount the 'atomic' snowflakes at the proper angle. This was to make a stand out of a strand of 16 guage copper wire, bent to shape to have an equalateral triangle base, and the other end sticking straight up then bent out, the shaft wrapped with a bit of masking tape to help hold the 'atomic' snowflake in place. It is easy to bend the upright support wire to any angle to focus the 'atomic' snowflake. The name 'atomic' comes on the spur of the moment because the resulting image from the two giant snowflakes (each having 13 single snowflakes glued together in a six sided hexagonal array) looks in fact something like an atomic lattice when seen as a reasonable copy of some atomic images shown in such magazines as 'Discover' and 'Scientific American'. I think I have tapped a mother lode. The sonic enhancing effect of the 'atomic' model snowflake is stupendous, compared to any other sonic controlling arrays and devices tried so far. This one single advance, (the 'atomic' snowflake) had solved more problems than I can count. The only problem(s) remaining are .... ?? FOOL A GURU ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 16, 1992, 5:53 AM. Well, I've got stereo enough to fool a guru. Audiophile specials and speaker freaks talk about a certain kind of background effect called 'cross talk'. They don't like this, and try to get the 'cross talk' out of their speaker designs. Or sometimes try to modify it with passive exciter speakers sitting on the bottom of a speaker enclosure facing straight up, for instance, to give more 'presence' to the enclosure's sound. What the cross talk is is transient echoes working back and forth way in the background between the speakers. What it actually is is cross harmonic room echoes being picked up cross channel from one side of a room or orchestra into the other side's stereo microphones. What this means in terms of Stereo in Mono is glory. The cross talk can be teased forth using the snowflake controller techniques into enough presence to operate as the missing channel, albiet fainter, or in the background, rather than a foreground. Nevertheless there is enough cross talk information which can be teased forth to make the orchestra seem in full size, in that the cross talk reflections contain the pulsations (BREATHING), and HANG, that go to generate a full stereophonic recurrance of a sound stream. THUS.... When the 'cross talk' is teased forth from a Mono playing speaker, you have rebuilt (or rejuvinated) the hang and pulsations that comprise a full sized orchestra, or sound source. Now how I did this is sort of a story in itself. For one thing, there are now two artifacts made of two giant snowflakes stuck together in a 12 sided double hexagram, each hanging facing sort of down on temporary but adequate support stands made of 12 guage copper wire bent the right way. I was calling these things 'atomic snowflakes' but now call these artifacts 'sunflowers' since that is what they look like, the way they hang suspended on their copper wire supports. A narrow piece of masking tape wrapped around the end of the wire keeps the sunflower from falling off. Each sunflower has 31 snowflakes glued together in a flat pancake with six star arms or radians sticking out. Two suitable sonic hot spots have been found in the room for them, one about two feet to the right of and and foot forward of the Right hand speaker, the other in a more kinky nook on the left end of the secondmost top row of the bookshelf against the wall opposite the table, and tucked in behind a support for the top row of the bookshelf. (This bookshelf is made of narrow strips of wood, sitting on stiff cardboard cartons used as supports and cubbyholes for the bookshelf). In this location, the second sunflower is about six feet out in front of the Left hand speaker, and offset to the right by about a foot. The first mentioned sunflower is facing down toward the wall which runs behind the table, hanging at about a 60 degree angle, and turned about 30 degrees away from the Right hand speaker. The second sunflower (the one on the bookshelf) is actually facing about exactly the same direction as the first, and at about exactly the same angle too, (as it happens) except it is hanging down by only about 30 degrees. I say 'as it happens' because I did not notice the similarity in the alignment until checking right now, and was surprised because the second sunflower was set up and aligned totally on the basis of where it sounded best, having nothing to do with alignments to any other object in the room. By the way, it doesn't seem to much matter where the sunflowers are hanging around. The two locations described immediately above just happened to have been two good locations first found. A couple of other locations have just been tried and it sounds a little better - more bottom bass. These two new locations have nothing whatever to do with the old, and there is no parallel alignment. So, it is up to you to try any locations, given that you get to the point of trying your own hand made sonic sunflowers. There is a problem though. Fidelity can come and go, between tracks, between tapes, and between periods during the day. In other words, as good as the system sounds after two hours of pounding around the circuit tuning everything in sight, two hours later there is no fidelity and tuning has to be done all over again. BIRTHDAY AND THE AIRFRAME EFFECT ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 16, 1992, 5:53 AM. Today is my birthday. With that great news out of the way, here is an update. Tonight I have learned something about the 'Airframe' effect. This is the long distance carrying feature of the 'Airframe' in the sound stream. I have been able to get more, then less, then more Airframe again, by predictable snowflake tuning, for the first time. There is a certain sound which comes into the sound stream when tuning snowflakes and the sunflowers, and within the sound is the long distance carrying effect of the 'Airframe' principle. It was difficult up till now to be able to identify just what it was that was constituting 'Airframe' quality, because as it turns out it is not tied in directly to fidelity, nor to more echoing effects which can be tuned into the music. It seems to do more directly with jumps in volume, the kind gained from a snowflake's tuning rather than from turning up the volume knob. In other words, the long distance carrying component in the 'Airframe' is not a question of improved fidelity so much as more active efficiency. Which raises a question about so-called 'speaker efficiency'. I first heard the word 'efficient' in a hard sell speaker mart store run by Hong Kongese ten years ago. I was in to look for a cheap pair of stereo mikes for a cassette recorder and in came a rather run down looking thin middle aged fellow to look around. Immediately a sales staff (one of the owners) was on the case, throwing buttons to turn on this big pair, then a button to throw on that bigger pair, and the dollars kept going up as more and more tweeters, woofers, and 8 inchers were getting activated in the different giant boxes all standing in a row in the maximum 'head in the vice' position in the store, to where the middle aged fellow had long since being steered as the sales staff talked at ninety miles an hour. Then I heard words to the effect: 'These are our best pair'; a button was pushed and a new pair came on stream. They sounded louder and harsher. Nevertheless, the sales staff was saying shouting: 'These are VERY efficient'. There was a long silence. Then the middle aged fellow said: 'What the fuck does efficient mean'. Boy did I ever enjoy that, because I was wondering exactly the same thing myself but was keeping my lips zipped. Now, circ. Mid-March 1992, I am beginning to think 'effeciency' means long distance carrying power. It can be said to be obvious that when sonic snowflake controller focusing is done correctly, the sound can carry farther, and axiomatically echo reflections and reverbertions from long distances return, rejuvinating the sound stream at the source and in the recurrant image of the sound itself, leading to an obvious gain or jump in volume. In this context, 'efficiency' simply means more activity in the moire patterns pumping away more solid-seeming in impact vibrations resulting from the sound stream in the environment. In this context, 'effeciency' really has nothing to do with the loudspeaker's electronics, nor its voice coil, etc. Efficiency is strictly a question of most positive re-enforcing harmonics at long distances throughout the environment itself and perhaps independent of the generating source(s) or what kind of sound they produce per se. The reason why I say this is my two generating sources (the Fisher Getto Blaster 8400 speaker boxes) are producing practically nothing per se, on their own, and the sound itself, in sonic recurrances well away from the mouths of the generators, only comes to life after the environment has been tuned with sonic snowflakes. YEP YEP YEP ON THE WAY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 18, 1992, 8:20 PM. Benny Goodman's was quite a band. Unfortunately all we have to listen to from that era are Mono recordings made with wire recorders. Stereo wasn't invented until the 50's. So old Benny Goodman recordings are Mono, and rather high pitched, screetchy. Not any more. I am listening to the full orchestra spread out on a sound stage. This Benny Goodman cassette tape was unplayable until tonight. You could play it, in order to hear originally recorded Benny Goodman music, but you had to accept the conditions under which the stuff was original recorded, 55 years ago. Not any more. In fact, as I type this information on the computer, with Benny Goodman playing behind me, I can hear tell-tale ticks and crackles telling me this tape was picked up off an old recording and mass produced for cheap consumer sales at a bucket shop cassette making factory. Fact is I got it for $1.98 at a Pascals Hardware store in Ottawa in 1991. The Benny Goodman orchestra I am listening to right now is as good and fidelic and STEREO as, for instance, the Spitfire Swing Band, or the Glen Gray Orchestra, recorded last year circ. 1991. I don't want to lie. The fidelity is spotty, better on some tracks and worse on others. However, over the last, say, two months, the fidelity problems are less severe right now than they have been over the past two month with tapes of modern swing bands, such as the Spitfire Band. The thing is that the fidelity at this moment is better than reasonable. And there plays the original Benny Goodman orchestra, spread out in stereo on stage behind the dining room windows in my low rental condo. What's most important of all is you can hear SPACE between the instruments. And it is all coming from the Left Hand Speaker. The Right hand speaker is shut down totally all the way to zero. True enough, a 100% Mono playback is reproducing a 100% recording, in stereo. Tuning in this original Benny Goodman stuff started with Sing Sing Sing, the first version, recorded in 1937 prior to the better known version recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1938. HOW SO ----------------------------------------------------------------- I reasoned that even though recorded in Mono, there had to be significant amounts of background reverberation echoes, or cross talk, going on between the recording mikes due to the conciderable resonance frequencies of the huge calf and pigskin tom toms being played by Gene Krupa. Sure enough. After playing with the sound in tuning around for a few minutes, another, fainter, more far away distant sound could be detected echoing in and around slightly off the beat in the drums in Sing Sing Sing, barely hanging in there on the perifery of perception. It was not hard to tune in more of that distance factor. In fact it was relatively easy to get it brought forth into a major sonic ambiance, once its presence had been detected. And lo and behold here is where both the fidelity and the stereophonics were found, on this cassette tape of old original Benny Goodman recordings. Like I said, the original Benny Goodman orchestra was quite a band. AUDIOPHILE FIDELITY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 22, 1992, 12:30 PM. I guess in all fairness there is something else to report. Yesterday afternoon I came home with two new tapes, purchased at bargain prices from one of the area record stores. The first was a cassette for $3.95 with original Glen Millar classics recorded circ. 1938-1940. (Produced by the General Electric Corp., 1990 BMG Music, with RCA logo, 2168-4-R). The second tape (purchased for $3.00) was the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, playing Rimsky-Korsakov SCHEHERAZADE, produced by Allegro, ACS 8003. When I got home I put on the Glen Miller tape, after having (as reported in the previous Update immediately above) played around with a cassett tape of original Benny Goodman stuff. When I turned on the Glen Miller tape in Mono, ooh, wow, yeah, did it stink. High, screetchy, scrunched up deader'n a doornail, and the bass, what there was, was that strange open Poing Poing Poing I was always getting on the CD player playing a laser disk of old classics on the Fisher model 8400 Getto Blaster. Yeoh what a dismal racket. It was even worse with the getto blast playing in stereo. So I got to work. I played with room tuning and snowflakes for quite awhile until it was clear that the Glen Miller tape was sounding somewhat better, (yet nowhere fidelic or stereophonic) then put on the Scheherazade tape. Oooh boy it was even worse, as if the sound had been squeezed up like an old fashion squeeze box accordian and turned sideways or something. Geez this racket was just about the worst I had ever heard. The Scheherazade tape was utterly non fidelic even in full stereo. For a moment I thought I must have screwed up the sound system. But in putting on the cassette tape of Golden Latin Favorites, my favorite all purpose referencing tape, and finding it about the same as usual, I could immediately assume the Scheherazade problem was not in my system, it was the tape, and thought - 'no wonder it was on sale for such a low price'. Needless to say I started back tinkering around with the Glen Miller cassette, trying to see what I might be able to do trying to get a Stereo effect playing it through one speaker, since this would be Mono sound, played through a Mono speaker. Several things ensued very quickly, none of them yielding any worthwhile rewards. Nevertheless several things did ensue. The following report is with Glen Miller being played in Mono through the Left hand speaker. One thing worth noting is that a couple of days earlier I had stood the speaker boxes up on end, pointing toward the ceiling, each sitting on a hexagonal shaped giant washer used by plumbers (about 2 inches across in diameter). This is because this seemed to give the sound stream a spacier presence even though some solid thumping power in the lower bass end was lost and it was harder to control the power overall because you could see the speaker cone's pistons throwing in and out in the bass punches. And they could rattle on certain tapes that formerly didn't rattle. But I stayed with it. Another new variable is something else I had also devised. This is two birdcages, made the day before. These each consist of two hexagons made of bent 12 guage copper wire. One hexagram is 20 cms across, and the other is 11 1/2 cms across. The smaller is set inside the larger, and rotated by 30 degrees. Inside each are 6 single snowflakes, pinned with honey in the middle of each of the six radii side section around the circumpherence in each hexagram. (The hexagons are geometrically proportional, in that I constructed the 20 cms hexagon on a sheet of grid paper, then geometrically constructed a Star of David inside the hexagram, then a sphere through the nodal points where the arms of the Star of David criss cross, then drew in the second 11 1/2 cm hexagram through these inner points, then used these two hexagrams as templates for forming the birdcages). Originally I tried the birdcages mounted on mike stands at distant corners of the room, but later moved them close to the Left hand speaker, one on each side, mounted on hexagon hydro extenders with pieces of dried sponge inside to hold upright the birdcage's support wires. These techniques all had ability to improve the quality of the awful Glen Miller original recordings, but only so far. The fidelity was fierce, piercing shrieks and shrilly on all of the sax and claranet type intruments, and the huge vague whumpy or rasping boomy bass had utterly no distinction. One thing I did detect momentarily, along the way, was that one of the skilled features in Glen Miller's orchestra was to pulsate sound rhythmically between different sections of the orchestra, contributing to the orchestra's overall major rhythm and swing impact. It almost sounded like the band was BREATHING. As I said, I detected this pulsation between sound sources momentarily on one of the tracks on the tape, then the effect was gone again. But I had heard it, and knew it was there, despite the awful fidelity. Today, after a long sleep, I resumed around 10:30 AM. I started playing with the Right hand speaker in Mono. To make a long story short I found that if instead of trying to avoid distortion by tuning for fidelity, if I tuned further into a certain kind of distortion I could come out the other end with a new kind of HANG in the music. It turns out that the humongous distorted bass was actually front to back room echo reflections that needed only to be focused, to include very harmoniously the sonically rhythmic puslating effects working back and forth between different sections of the Glen Miller Orchestra. Furthermore, I went around closing all the doors (downstairs and upstairs) and found an immediate improvement in overall fidelity. And lo and behold, there it was, the Glen Miller orchestra, recreated to about 50% live in the main floor of my Condo. I say about 50% because there were still pockets of distortion, obviously, particularly since some of the tracks had been picked up off 78 RPM recordings because you can hear the pops and crackles of the needle. Nevertheless, what I heard makes me believe it will someday be entirely possible to recreate the old original Glen Miller orchestra using the old recordings, like a hologram made of sound in the middle of a theatre or auditorium, as well as of course a room like mine in a low rental condo. I have to tell you that the original Glen Miller band was doing some amazing stuff, compared to what you hear today in terms of modern bands doing swing, or playing original Glen Miller orchestrations. Not only did Glen Miller use the orchestra itself - and distances between parts of the orchestra - to produce various HANGS as part of the rhythm structure, all of the musicians, particularly the solosists, had awareness of this sense of HANG and used it to great effect in their solos. This is a very different effect than standing up in front of an orchestra and blowing hard and strong straight into a mike in a separate track that is going to be overmixed on top of the orchestra later during stereo dubbing. Musicians cannot play the HANG when out of place from their usual position in an orchestra in which the HANG is an essential ingredient to the band's total impact rhythmically. Nor can they play hang when horking their brains out straight into a mike which is power amplifying their play back through into the orchestra in ways that are quite out of place in terms of relationship to other musicians in the band as the soloist horks away into the mike. On the other hand, on the Glen Miller recordings some of the playing by musicians is amazingly deft due to the way they handled HANG back and forth between each other. Its no wonder the musicians all chose to stay together after Glen Millar was accidently dispatched to an afterlife or next life during an air flight in 1942. There is one other feature to report. At the moment when I got HANG brought into the picture the sound and the fidelity clarified, the sound stream became extremely stable, in that I could walk through the entire main floor area of my condo, and right past the Right hand speaker box, and the Glen Miller orchestra remained up there in the huge sound image behind the dining room window, sonically filling the room with rhythmic pulsations of full bodied whole range sound the entire time. I call the effect BREATHING because you could almost think the orchestra was organic. The HANG works both Left to Right, and Front to Back. The bass fills a large area to the rear and to the right side in the band and I assume that it was one place where a mike was located close to the instrument (the bass fiddle). On the other hand, I assume from what I hear that no mikes were in particular used to get extra gain for the drums. The sonic echoes and reverbs I hear from the rim shots for instance sound exactly like they were hit hard and carried forward to the front of the band to where they entered the mikes or a listener's ears. However, my environment itself was EXTREMELY sensitive to room tuning. Even moving a pencil on a table could spoil the effect. It was the front to back room echo reflections which were the most vulnerable, these which were contributing in such a major way to the depth, width, and presence of the Glen Miller band, could collapse in an instant back to static harsh high pitched distortions and the boomy loose noise of the bass, just by moving a pencil, for instance. I got a witness to hear it. We had to move a sweater that had been dropped into a chair as my brother came downstairs ready to head out the door. When the sweater was removed and stuffed in the hall closet, the huge live presence of the Glen Miller band, pulsing away in strong echo creating stereophonics, came straight back into the sound stream. All of this was demonstrated with the system playing in 100% Mono through the Right hand speaker box. And so a technology has been demonstrated, there is stereo information and fidelity on old Glen Miller recordings. But here comes the rest of today's story. In getting to this high point regards getting stereophonoic and acceptably fidelity play from the Glen Miller tape, I was using the Right hand speaker in Mono, and had turned the box around to again face foward but this time rotated by 90 degrees so that the front face was vertical rather than horizontal, and instead of slightly turned in a splay position I now have it facing straight ahead (compared to the way it had been used originally), and again used the 2 inch hexagonal plumber's washer, this time to raise the box on this small pedestal about 1/2 inch above the table. In this new position, the speaker cone's piston again became locked solidly immobile by impact vibrations, getting around the problem of bass note rattles and rubbery noises. So, what else, now that the Glen Miller experiment was over, but to try the Sheherazade tape. First of all, I switched the system to full two speaker stereo, then turned on the tape. Ohh wow yeah what an effect! It was symphonic allright, and VERY fidelic. Now isn't that a surprise. Crystal clear instruments, point source located forward and back, left and right in the huge sound image, playing in totally audible presence even the highest notes of a violin. And when the whole orchestra ganged up including tympanis, the room shook a bit. There was another suprise. The Left hand speaker was still standing on end. So what else to do but get that speaker straightened around to match up with the new positioning of the Right hand speaker. The moment I lifted the Left hand speaker from its hexagon washer pedestal and turned the box around, the huge sonic symphonic presence vanished!. It was instantly back to the same old problems, unstable high ends, bass that came and went as you walked around, crushed or compressed sounds in the mid range, or high end, or low end, depending on how you tuned some giant snowflakes. So I turned the Left hand speaker box around back into its upward position, and there it came swelling back into the room, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra playing Scheherazade. It turns out that the assymetric arrangement of the two speaker boxes, along with the snowflake tuning as it is as of this moment, are what it takes to get a whole top to bottom sound stream stablized into a magnificent sonic and fidelic stereo presence. This assymetric requirement is probably due to the positions of the two different speaker boxes relative to where their major sound generation outpours into. The Right speaker's sound is reflected off a South wall about 8 feet to the right, and contends with two corners, including the kitchen wall and doorway in front of it. Whereas the Left speaker mainly radiates into the larger open area of the living room area, it is located on the table past the end of the kitchen wall. A main difference in the sonic controller snowflake tuning is that all of the giant snowflakes have been pulled from long distance or remote locations in the room and are positioned close to the speaker boxes, in a predictable pattern. Specifically, the giant snowflakes are set in a pattern which radiates out from the corners of each speaker box. The boxes are set forward on the table up to a half a foot from the rear wall leaving room for one giant snowflake to be positioned at the rear corner of the Right hand speaker box, and two of the giant snowflakes to be positioned aligned in a straight line radiating away from the two rear corners of the Left hand speaker box. Four giant snowflakes are radiating away from the front corners of the Left hand speaker box. But since there are no more to play with, only one giant snowflake is radiating away from each of the front corners of the Right hand box. There are significant differences in the way the giant snowflakes are now handled, as of the last two days. All of them are standing vertically straight upright, none are hanging downward at angles in the arrangement I was formerly calling sunflowers. The two super giant flakes (now called super giant starflakes) have been moved to new remote locations and are positioned at specific strategic angles, being the widest apart spread possible between the two giant starflakes in my environment. Both super giant starflakes are standing straight upright, and are turned to face edge-on (rather than face-on) to the sound image. One is positioned about 10 feet away from the Right hand speaker, angled at about 60 degrees to the right of the speaker box. The other is sitting on the TV set over in the back corner of the living room area, angling about 30 degrees to the outside of the Left speaker. That about sums it up. I figure that as of today, Stage THREE of the experiment is over. Stage ONE continued from late summer into the late fall and was concerned with expanding the getto blaster's sound stream enough in terms of both bass and ability for louder volume to give something to work with toward improving the system's overall fidelity and resonses. This was achieved last December using rosette shaped images laid out in thirteen different locations on the table, as sonic controllers. Stage ONE is described in files SOUND.1. Stage TWO began in earnest in January of 1992, as an attempt to get more fidelity and 'Airframe' presence out of the system. This was achieved by standing all of the snowflakes on edge and splay tuning them toward an imaginary focal point to the rear of the sound image behind the dining room windows. This led to great front to back imaging, and greater East/West point source imaging, and gave an indication that Mono in Stereo effects were possible with such a sound system. Stage TWO is described in from the top of SOUND2.TXT. Stage THREE was getting to the point of recreating genuine stereophonic effects in a Mono playing system, as totalled immediately above. This was achieved by several means, finally. The changes include the use of two birdcages (as described above in this Update), and using 19 strategically placed giant snowflakes (each containing 13 snowflakes glued in a hexagon-star array), plus two super giant starflakes (each containing 31 snowflakes - these in fact look more than ever like large snowflakes). I suspect that a few more of the giant starflakes are going to add more to the system, but more of what? Probably loud volume fidelic power, and perhaps more degrees of audiophile authenticity to the whole sound stream, and hopefully more overall room sensitive stablity, but, also, a new form of intransigent distortion. However, regards room sensitive stability, I don't know. Each time I've filed a new batch of snowflakes and glued them together into giant snowflakes and set them up, the whole room environment seems to have become a little bit more sensitive to good and bad spoiler and enhancer chance effects by random objects in the room. Otherwise, I guess this is it for the moment, now that Stage THREE is over. I am happy that more technology has been demonstrated, to wit, getting fidelity and stereophonic impact from original Glen Miller mono recordings that are over 50 years old. Plus hearing that HUGE orchestra sounding away majestically in the performance of Sheherazade in full two speaker stereo, using a cheap normally raw sounding portable getto blaster as the only sound generating source. THE CD PLAYER NOW WORKS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 22, 1992, 5:30 PM. What a surise. The CD disk player works, finally. I've just turned it on to see what playing responses it may now have, in terms of the new tunings as described in the above Update. I haven't turned on the CD player since last January. First I switched the system to full two speaker mode, then turned on the CD. What a surprise. On came Glen Miller playing Little Brown Jug, in full stereo. Gone was that strange boinging system-rattling bass I have always described for this system whenever attempting to play this CD disk entitled Best Of The Big Bands Vol(s). 1 and 2, which are digitally enhanced remakes of the big band's original recordings. Apparantly the work that was done today to get something reasonably fidelic and reasonably stereophonic out of the Right hand speaker playing in Mono has carried over into a much greater stereophonic clarity in these digitally enhanced disks. Not only are they now truly stereophonic, they are remarkably fidelic. I now take back all of my previous judgements regards this getto blaster's CD player. I really like it. Hearing the Glen Miller band explode into stereophonic life when the player was first turned on was as much a surprise as I got when first turning the system to Mono last January and heard the music being played at that moment stay up in the sound image area behind the window instead of collapsing in an instant into small dull sounds issuing directly from the front of the speaker box. This did not happen then (last January), the sound was sonically enhanced enough, that I immediately began to call this the 'Stereo in Mono' effects. And as said it was a very unexpected surprise. To repeat, the surprise in January was hearing a sonic recurrance of Mono sound in a Stereo effect in a large sound image area up in the air and BEHIND the dining room windows in a form of true stere imaging, rather than the expected weak dull totally local mono. Once again, (as already said), the performance of the CD player is in every way as much a pleasant surprise. There is one thing new already learned in the last few minutes. When I first turned on the CD player and the Glen Miller band sprang into stereophonic life, the East/West image was extremely wide spread. You could hear the drums and cymbols being played rearward and way out in space beyond the Right hand speaker, and a sax was playing equally out in space well beyond the bound of the Left hand speaker. In fact, what was in place was a hole, there was nothing of the orchestra being heard in the middle of the huge sound image behind the window. It turned out that one snowflake cured this. This is a single 18mm snowflake sitting on a wooden edge at the forward end of the left table on which sits the Left hand speaker box. This table has a two-inch wide strip of cedar wood along one edge, forming a back part, the table itself is press board with a white surface. This four foot table is turned with its end to the back wall so that it extends into the dining area, and sits flush to the end of another four foot table which sits against the wall and on which is the Right hand speaker box. When this single snowflake was carefully twist tuned by a few degrees in arc, the sound image coalesced, merging toward the center of the sound image, and clarifying somewhat in overall fidelity. Actually, I like it better more spread out. When focused into the middle the sound hardened and went up a bit in pitch. I think the original spread out sound is more authentic, the only reason it seems like there is a hole is that I am so close to the sound generating source when standing in the dining area. Further back in the living room area, there is no hole and the effect is of a large orchestra on stage behind the windows. So there you are. AMBIENT HANG (delayed echo responses) has benefit in the sound stream itself. For instance normally an audience's handclapping sounds like frying bacon. It crackles and pops weakly. With stereophonic presence in particular major front to back imaging, the clapping is that of a genuine audience out there in the depths of the environment where the band was playing when recorded in Mono long ago. Speaking of HANG, there are two kinds to concider; HANG from delayed musical responses as a musician plays, and AMBIENT HANG from delayed room echo responses. This second form of HANG rejuvinates the presence of a band in 3-D space after the fact, after the recording, in playback. FULL STEREO IN TWO-SPEAKER STEREO MODE FROM A MONO TAPE ----------------------------------------------------------------- In all fairness there was nothing else to do but try the original Benny Goodman tape, the one that had been worked over to the nth degree in Mono day before yesterday. And yes, I am pleased to report, it was remarkably improved. This time I played it in full two speaker stereo. It took some work, about 1/2 hour of fussing and fuming over little things here and there throughout the whole room environment until finally I'd gotten rid of most of the shrill, and figured the bass into a big spread out proper sound at the back of the bandstand, over to the right, and had the drum set sitting over to the left, with RING in the cymbols and powerful tone filled stage echoing rim shots. In terms of overall impact, it was not as impressive as swing recorded in Mono and played on the CD player, nonetheless in terms of two days ago this was quite a sound, to say the least. Now, once again, don't let me lead you astray. In terms of modern day fidelity truly audiophile this was not. On the other hand it was definately stereophonic, and the band was BREATHING front to back and East to West, though not to the same extent as the Glen Miller band, in that HANG in THAT band seems to have been one of Glen Miller's more capable orchestrating techniques. Then in the Benny Goodman tape on came SING SING SING. I think this is going to be worth more work, no matter how much it takes. I am reasoning that no matter how the thing was recorded, there has to be some mighty HANG in the echoes and reverbs happening between the different drums during those drum solos. I have just touched the hem of the garment so far. I have the drum set well back on stage and this time it is to the right on this particular recording, or at least, according to the way I have things tuned at this moment. But I am getting the hang of the room echoes, pun intended. This guy Gene Krupa sure knew his stuff. Blown up and stereoized like this, that guy was really wailing, something like the HANG Joe Morello playing for Dave Brubeck used to manifest comprising about at least 50 percent of the effect of Morello's solos, this 50% being the lingering HANG between the different echoing parts of his drum set as he played his solos, etc. In SING SING SING Gene Krupa used delayed echoes and HANGING back beats probably like no other drummer ever. You can NEVER hear this on mono playbacks, nor on any stereo sets playing the original recordings, what you would hear is lineal time and straight ahead rhythm structures, you would not hear the time delayed pauses and skipped beats wrapping around the reverberating echos unless your stereo set is capable of achieving deep front to back imaging as well as full orchestra East to West separation for a band (such as Benny Goodman) recorded in Mono. * I hear tell of a 1930's era drummer named Baby Dodds who was supposed to be so good he inspired Gene Krupa. Trouble is not much apparently was recorded of Baby Dodds (trivia I picked up over the years occasionally listening to the CBC radio) and what was recorded never captured Baby Dodds going at it in solos for an hour or more at a time. One final comment. There are problems with the sound, still. One thing I have learned is that shrill is unfocused stereo. When I get rid of shrill, I get better stereo definition, on the other hand, I can tune in more shrill of a certain kind, using just one single 18mm snowflake in fact, and get in far better stereo definition East to West, for instance, just in playing around exploring sound effects. I think there is something else which is an impression which may be correct or not. At the moment I think it is correct. Here is how the impression works. In normal stereo recordings a singer or instrument can be recorded in a separate booth and the result superimposed (dubbed) over the main tracks with the result that an arbitrary sound signal has been intruded into an original play, and this should perhaps cause certain forms of distortion, but I believe that snowflake tuning can treat the intruder as just another instrument, or voice, inserted into the band or orchestra and snowflake tuning can suitably then accomodate this. However, in the case of old style swing, recorded for the original bands in Mono, something else takes place. For instance on the Benny Goodman cassette tape are a couple of numbers sung by a female singer. It would seem that the the band was recorded first, then the singer later recorded separately and superimposed (dubbed) over the band. The result of this is a truly artificial intrusion. The effect in snowflake tuning is heard as a two way yin/yang form of big distortion. For instance the singer can be sonically tuned to sound loud and clear and alive as if standing right out in the open singing away in the huge sound image area, but then the rest of the band, the background, is shrilly as hell and very weak and muffled. On the other hand the band can be sonically tuned to have clear fidelity and live presence filling the huge sound image area including East/West separation, and the singer sounds shrilly as hell, in fact unlistenable. This duo yin/yang problem seemingly can be overcome by very deft, very careful, snowflake tuning, but I don't know yet if the problem can be entirely overcome not having had the time to play with this problem for a long spell, say two or three hours, and not knowing if the snowflake embodiments I currently have are suitably good enough. I know I am risking loosing credibility in reporting the above intruder alert. But for a fact I have heard differences. Even on old swing music originally recorded in Mono, on some tracks and in parts of certain recordings, both vocals and instruments can be tuned in or out simultaneously to better fidelity and sonic stereophonic presence, but also at times a vocalist behaves as a separate sonic entity, being clear and distinctly sonic and stereophonic as the surrounding orchestra snuffs up like an earthworm trying to bite dust. Then coversly, the orchestra is horking away loud and clear in sonic stereophonics and the singer's screetch and distortion per se is intollerable. I do not know if this is strictly a question of inept tuning on my part or the limitations of my current devices and sonic tuning objects, or if this is a quality on the monoral tape. Time will tell, perhaps. USING RADIO ADS FOR TUNING IN MONO IN STEREO ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 25, 1992, 2:00 PM. Oddly enough, using the commerical breaks, the FM radio's blurbs and retails advertisments, can be a boon when you want to fine tune Mono in Stereo effects, when the system is playing in 100% mono through one speaker. The reason why is the number of ambiant background sounds which can be heard on such ads. For instance on one of Ottawa's power pumping FM stations featuring new and old hits (supposedly the best) I happened to be in the kitchen and on came an ad for a spectular featuring a department store. The male voice was up front, yakking away about something amazing about this department store, and in the background was a noise, merely discernable, vaguely crowd-like, which sounded both like a splattering rainfall and frying bacon. During the ad, (a very long one), I managed to tune a couple of fractal sonic objects, and in came the department store. It turns out that the ambiant background for this ad had been recorded in stereo in a crowded deparment store, and there was I, standing in the presence of long isles receeding into the far distance as you would normally hear in a crowded department store, with customers talking as single point sources of sound everywhere you looked into the sonic picture, and a crowd of people clapping hysterically in a state of crazed glee after the announcer had finished the blurb. The most interesting thing about this was in hearing the rainsplatter and spitting frying bacon sounds suddenly shift around and spread out wideways and backward, to become the floor area of the huge department stores, as I carefully tuned. The echoes transformed and become correct. All of the echoes were correct. There was no question that I was standing in a department store, facing foward to a male person yakking about prices in my direction, and all around, especially behind, the appreciative throng rounded up by the ad's producers clapping on cue when the yakker's persuading blurb was finished. The point is that this was an excellent opportunity to fine tune Mono in Stereo effects, playing in 100% Mono through the Right hand speaker box of my stereo system. I have to qualify the fidelity. All of the sound range is there, including big bottom bass resonances, but it is slightly colored, as if I have something metallic in my ears. USING TAPES WITH SPECIAL EFFECTS FOR TUNING IN MONO IN STEREO ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 26, 1992, 2:00 PM. An even better opportunity for tuning in genuine stereo effects in a Mono in Stereo sound stream occurred this afternoon, playing an 11 year old cassette tape of the Pink Floyd. (This is the recording with 'Run Rabbit Run' and the cassette tape I have was taken off an LP in 1980). At one point it simulates the waiting area of an airline terminal, with a women's voice calling flight arrival and departure information over the public address, as the Pink Floyd plays around with their experimental music. I first heard this voice as an indistinct distorted noise and couldn't hear her words, but after a bit of fiddling, tuning a couple of sonic pieces, suddenly the women's voice clarified and moved far back into the deep recesses of the sound image, exactly like a voice echoing from the Public Address system from a long way off in an airline terminal. I would say a couple of hundred feet was perhaps the real sounding depth of this sonic picture. But boy you should have seen how carefully I had to tune two sonic controller objects to get that voice in the distance clarified as a precise sound picture in the holograms of the moire pattern resonating as a Mono generated source. This was a very impressive effect, both for the Pink Floyd band itself, and due to the fact that it was a tape that had aged 11 years stored in a box of odds and ends, and on my getto blaster performing in 100% Mono through the Right hand speaker. This was this afternoon. SPINNER ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 26, 1992, 12:00 AM. This evening, something else was tried for the first time. It has long occurred to me that spinning a super giant starflake at a slow speed should somehow boost the stereophonics, boost the intrinisic volume level, and improve the fidelity of the system playing in 100% Mono. I was expecting marginal improvement, but got instead so much sudden powerful bass boost through the Left hand speaker playing in 100% Mono that when the speed of the spinning super giant snowflake was set to just the right velocity it power boosted the bass so much it pushed the speaker back starting to teeter off its pedestal within a few seconds. This backward thrusting speaker was caught just in the nick of time. Now, several comments are in order. Firstly, all I could do tonight was one quick 10 minute test then had to shut down due to sleepers getting ready for a busy day tomorrow. Secondly, the jerry rigged device used to spin the snowflake took three days to get together, and as it was it was just barely useable. The problems actually had begun the day before, with no success whatever on the first attempt at spinning a super giant snowflake. The problems yesterday were as follows: The problem was to be able to reostat the snowflake's speed from zero to fairly fast with precise control. So, I got a tranformer from an HO guage railway on sale at a fantastic low price and hooked it to a little motor I had, and the thing spun so fast the snowflake was a blurr. WAY TOO FAST. I tried wiring in a reostat switch as a second control but still had virtually no control over the velocity. But also, with or without the second reostat, the HO train transformer kept clicking off about very 15 seconds and I had to wait about a minute for it to click on again. So today was phone calls, and a 10 mile trip to a hobby store, where was offering exactly the same little motor I had already tried at home. This motor came in via the X factor three years ago, at a Humanitarian Society's annual meeting, where a Holistic Physician who had bought several dozen for an experiment and found they were the wrong kind was walking around handing them out from a grocery plastic bag. The Humanitarian Society was named 'PACE'. This evening I scouted other hobby centers, and the hobby departments of Eaton's and The Hudson's Bay, looking for either a cheap HO old style steam engine where I could attach the spinning snowflake to the train's wheels, but no luck. Battery operated turbo cars wouldn't work because their hand held reostats wouldn't allow fixed settings, the velocity would only be as steady as my finger on the reostat's trigger, and assuming I taped the thing, the reostats were not of good enough quality to vary the speed through a wide steady range. So said the manager of The Hudson's Bay's toy department. Heading out the Mall door I passed a Radio Shack store. Moments later I was heading out the Mall door again with a 12 volt motor, a 100 ohm reostat, and 50 feet of thick speaker wire. To make a long story short, this worked, sort of. With the HO guage transformer turned on to its lowest possible setting, (next slightest twist and it is turned OFF) I can turn up the 100 ohm reostat a smideon and get a slow velocity, then hardly touching it, it jumps to rather fast, then really whizzes up to speed with just a slight more of a turn, so fast the super giant snowflake could literally fly apart if I left it spinning. The point is that as difficult as it was to control the slow speed, I was able to bounce back and forth over an obvious optimal velocity for spinning the snowflake. In my best careful control of the device, I was able to set speeds stablized just a bit too slow, or just a bit too fast, for the optimal speed. It was when spinning at the slightly too fast frequency (velocity) that, nonetheless, the sound stream responded to its sonic amplifying sound wave disturbances to such successful levels that it literally drove the Left hand 100% Mono playing speaker backwards in an audio thrust of extremely loud sudden turbo roar that was this time fidelic, not just a raw appalling racket previously called 'Turbo Roar' in these experiments. Tomorrow, March 28, 1992, the plan is to get a better remote variably controllable reostat to be able to slide with easy control back and forth through the optimal velocity for spinning a super giant snowflake, and also try a second spinning snowflake on the other side of the room to see what the two might do together to a sound system playing stereophonically in 100% Mono. For a fact I have already seen an improvement beyond my expections. While the 10 minute spin test was underway with the spinning snowflake, I walked around randomly disturbing objects and even giant snowflakes in major ways, and heard hardly a distruption in the sound stream. What a difference from the norm. Previously, any object if it was being tuned in the environment could take long seconds even longer to suitably tune, and snowflakes and giant snowflakes were particularly critical. With these, once in place during a tuning run, even the slightest touch could make or break the sonic stereophonic presence of the system playing in 100% Mono. So perhaps that fracturing instability problem has been solved. Time will tell. Tomorrow, with two spinning super giant snowflakes, and (hopefully) means to control their spinning velocity more accurately, I should have more to report in the way of interesting news, rather than half way there ramblings. Incidentally, for any would be or budding technicians or scientists who are at the moment amateur (said in a kind way) here is what can happen. To start with, the 100 ohm reostat was not sensitive enough to allow for variable speeds, It had been wired to the HO guage railway transformer and to the motor by my brother in a first attempt to try it. Three problems: as said it was not velocity sensitive. Also you could feel juice when touching its metal parts. And also after a moment of trying to set the HO transformer some smoke and crackling pops suddenly issued from the 100 ohm reostat. So another reostat was dug from a box of odd parts in the basement and wired up in a different way. This is the version that was used for the above mentioned 10 minute power pump resonance test using a spinning super giant snowflake whose slow velocity was only partially controllable but enough to hear good sonic results in the sound stream. Later I decided to try the original 100 ohm reostat wired up in the new way. But it was zip zero nothing, fried inside and defunct. So the other reostat (whose ohms aren't known only the words JAPAN DGATA appear on it) was hooked up again, and nothing happened, no snowflake spin, and suddenly smoke, lots of it. So it doesn't work anymore either. What's worse, something about the way it was originally wired up worked, but in seeming to wire it up the same way a second time it didn't work, so obviously something about the second wiring was wrong. But what the heck was wrong.... I don't know.... I'm inventing these hard tech skills as I go along and it seems there are definately some things that take practice when blind luck perfect intuition fails to work a second time in a row. Gotta buy more stuff, tomorrow. Fortunely, this kind of stuff (reostats plus a second 12 volt motor) don't cost very much. INTERLUDE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update March, 28, 1992, 2:50 AM. What a day THIS has been. I am now assuming that the difficulty in proceeding to the very next step is in direct proportion to the importance of that very next step. The above remark only has one interpretation: Nothing happened today. Well, it did, sort of. More stalemate, more false news, more trips to make around town