See the whole Newsonic Story at: http://cosmicastronomy.com/newsonic.htm DRUMBALLIA Rythms that soften the world. Clear light surrounds the sounds the sounds surround clear light in more than a universe, heard in rythms that are the fundamental fabrics of Creation. THREE WAY MONO-IN-STEREO ASSEMBLY ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update August 26, 1992, 10:30 PM. It looks like a current round of experiments may be coming to a conclusion. I have a sound that I like, and a means of getting it with no muss or puzzling or long wastes of time to set it up. At the moment the large upstairs room in the new digs on the far east side of town (Orleans) is being used as a work room, a small time sound studio. Up there at the moment is a setup using four speakers to make one demonstration, and a single speaker to make another. This computer at which I am typing is downstairs in the dining room off the kitchen, my new environment for the computer. Here is the rundown. The front plates of the Fisher 8400 Getto Blaster's speakers have been taken off the boxes, so that now the two speaker enclosures per se are two hollow empty shells sitting on the floor in the hallway with screws rolling around in each of them. It turns out that the whole of the sound part of each enclosure comes off as a self contained unit, a faceplate which includes the grills and wires, with the three speakers per enclosure all wired in by one set of leads, with the 1 inch tweeter having a resister wired in its circuit, and the leads continuing from it to the tiny 1/2 inch tweeter (a metal wafer exciter). I unsoldered the leads to the two smallest tweeters, so that now only the one 4 1/4 inch main tweeter of each faceplate is working, made by Sony, used in the Fisher 8400 Getto Blaster. What is in use now are the two faceplates, about 1 1/2 inches thick, with what was a moulded plastic built-in airflow tube now sticking out about 5 inches from one corner of each faceplate. The idea of opening the enclosures occurred because in first setting up in the upstairs room, one of the enclosures took a tumble and hit the floor bouncing on the carpet, the second time for this box, the first time was a few months earlier, the thing konking against the hardwork floor in the low rental condo when the experimental array consisting of both boxes strapped together end to end and hanging suspended in air by twine from a raised flimsy homemade mike stand took a nosedive when someone's foot caught some speaker leads in walking through the room. These things happen. As a result, when I was repositioning the tumbled speaker box in the upstairs room in the new digs, I felt a slight cool blast of air on my hand, and in double checking, saw that there was a small slit opened up in the top of the box where the two parts of the box join together. I checked this air slit out by covering it with tape, and deemed that the sound was better with the air slit exposed. So an idea immediately in mind was to make a slit in the other box. The problem was that these enclosures were screwed together from the back with bore holes about six inches deep to get to the screws, needing a trip to the Canadian Tire Store to get a long shafted philips head screw driver to get the enclosures apart. Once the backs were off and the faceplates carted upstairs to be hooked up, the sound test took only about 1/10th of a second. There was no question that the speakers sounded better with the small cavernous shell backs off, when used in the sonic resonating environment of my tests. In describing the situation in more detail, the whole front end of each enclosure came off as a self contained piece with three tweeters screwed and wired in place with the grills in front. There was nothing in the back, the rest of the enclosure was simply a big empty shell. And so what I now have are two front pieces which I have come to call 'faceplates'. Tests in the use of these are as follows: I first tried them laying upright facing the ceiling each on a round stand which originally came into the picture eight years ago as rolls of copper wire of 18 and 16 quage. These empty coils actually work really well as temporary stands. Then after a couple of hours I tried standing each faceplate vertically upright on the table, in different rotations, i.e. three of the four edges of each faceplate could support itself standing upright. In one test the notorious turbo roar tape, (an el cheapo GOLDEN FILM THEMES 2 with famous movie themes including James Bond theme songs and Jesus Christ Superstar), came back into life for the first time in several months, with enouph raw distortion to cause the Right hand faceplate standing upright on edge to rotate slowly and eerily by nearly a complete circle. Not very good for sure. The only thing slowing down the speed of the rotation were the speaker leads, these were getting dragged up onto the table as the faceplate slowly rotated. I should mention that at this point, everything being done is in 100% Mono. Eventually after several hours I learned that the faceplates performed better with their faces to the wall, with the backs facing out so you can see the tweeters and wires etc. At the same time I made suspenders from pieces of a long thin round stake (the kind used for plant stakes in the garden), each piece about 15 inches long and pencil thick, stuck vertically into holes in the empty copper coil stands (these look like the large round solid wood cable coils used by telephone companies and rustic or new ager types sometimes use for coffee tables, except the one's I'm using from copper wire are miniature, about 6 inches across and standing 4 inches high and can be got at any company that re-winds electric motors). With the thin sticks jambed vertically in place I have simply hung each speaker faceplate from a corner of its shell, so that it hangs dangling loosely in the air. In this latest round of tests one of the variables I finally came to believe is that the best all around fidelity comes from having things loose, rather that pinned down or weighted or gripped solidly. Solid gripping can impart a more solid sound to things, but the loose airy spacy more authentic echoing quality in the reproduction is dampened if there is any grip or solidness so that things sound compressed in comparision, even though you might not know the compression is there until you can actually hear the difference, and it is a substantial quality to pay attention too. All enclosed speakers no matter the make or price, have that compression, for example. So, to continue the description. THE NEW EQUALATERAL TRIANGLE ----------------------------------------------------------------- The two suspended faceplates are on a long table, sitting about 6 feet 4 inches apart, and about 27 inches out from the wall. Both are turned (their backside face showing) to focus toward the APEX point of an EQUALATERAL triangle. The triangle aspect is a major ingredient which came into the picture most suddenly via a late night encounter with an image of an equalateral triangular configuration projected into my consciousness, just before I fell asleep. The next day the equalateral configuration was tried with instant obvious improved results, a big kick in sonics coming into the picture in a groundswell the instant I was finally able to ease an open air speaker into the exact position comprising the true apex of the equalateral triangle. At this moment there is a modified configuration, as follows: A large 12 inch woofer is sitting on the floor on front of the apex, in the open air, tilted at roughly a 30 degree angle facing straight ahead to the wall, and about two feet behind it is another speaker, also tilted by 30 degrees and facing frontward to the wall, sitting on the floor. This other is a very cheap car stereo speaker, oval shaped, about 5 inches by 8 inches, with paper cone so fragile it can be damaged by a fingernail. Both are sitting there as temporary non-passive radiators kicking the sound stream, and both have a major influence on bass notes. That is, both are wired in hooked up to the Left hand channel, as is the Right hand faceplate speaker, in other words the entire system at this moment is running in 100% Mono off the Left hand channel. The oval speaker in particular can be a good indicator of how much bass is being incurred into the resonating structures of the sound stream due to the fact that the whole of this oval speaker vibrates mightily as if a mechanically driven machine, when held in the hand, and so can be used to tell you that 50 to 100 cycle bass sonics are there with great force even with the 12 inch woofer shut off so that the entire sound stream is being generated by just two 4 1/2 inch tweeters of the faceplates plus the oval car stereo speaker, all resonating in the open air without enclosures. A second oval car stereo speaker, very expensive this one which someone gave me nearly a year ago, with chrome faceplate guards and three very high tech looking tweeters inside, performs when hooked up as an open air resonator, exactly as you would expect, worthlessly, an almost mind numbing highly amplified shrieking, with utterly no bass, no sonics whatever, just high pitched raw horking noise dominating the whole sound stream. This is a speaker which looks good but sounds awful. But I can image it going by in cars with tatooed cocain dealers the car itself a mobile rock concert which can be heard pumping with ground shaking bass thuds for up to half a mile away, the driver's silly grin due to the fact that the brains are fried beyond bliss and are functioning on naked ego. The oval car stereo speaker which works so well on the other hand, looks awful, really awful, like I say, the paper cone material is almost as flimsy as toilet paper, but it sure works in a very satisfying way in open air resonances through the full sound range down to the bottom-most bass notes. It resonates so powerfully in bass vibrations you can't quell its mechanical motion by holding it as tight as possible in your hand, your hand vibratates with great vigor, ergo. But only when it is focused precisely in the right direction, and at the right 30 degree angle in the sound stream, otherwise it does not work very well (the bass vibes are very weak for instance when pointed straight ahead or straight up). I have made a point of discussing this at length because so much is being told simply by the fact that it resonates so strongly in the open air, when focused correctly into the sound stream, even when sitting on the floor. There are many principles at work in this. So now the sound stream itself in the upstairs room is verrrry interesting. How it came about is worth telling a story. Three days before, a provincial goverment mininstry computer supervisor came by to see our new anti-virus software with its creative user interface called 'Virus Alert', etc. And while here at the house I hurried him upstairs for a MONO in STEREO demonstration, featuring the Glen Millar pirate factory tape. In case I never mentioned it, this tape is so bad that some of its 8 cuts were actually lifted from scratchy old 78's and you can hear the pops and crackles worn by needle as plain as day, got it for a couple of bucks duly packaged as an offical typical cassette tape from the discount bin of a record store chain. Anyway, I had fussed and fumed with a quick series of tests that very day when first setting up upstairs in the big room. There was only one getto blaster box working, this was the full enclosure box at this time, the Left hand channel. The Right hand box was sitting idle. I had not yet removed the shells to create faceplates. The 12 inch woofer and oval car stereo speaker had not yet been tried. This so far was strictly the Fisher 8400 getto blaster by itself, and room sonics. Also, the idea of the equalateral triangle in the matrix had not yet made its way foward into light in my mind. I had tuned the room with several single snowflakes and a few sonic manners in the devices called flow channels and a couple of super giant snowflakes also. Only the Left hand speaker box was hooked up to be working. At this point this was the best yet demo of Mono in Stereo featuring the Glen Miller tape, with the computer supervisor from the Provincial Ministry listening. Then I switched to a movie theme tape, and to hammer the point home, (proclaiming 'to make it clear that this demo is in 100% mono'), as I put on the legit stereo tape, then reached down and clipped together the speaker leads for the other box, proclaiming 'THIS! is what the system sounds like in FULL STEREO!'. The fello yelped at the sudden jump in sound volume and the way it most instantly filled the greater room, etc., etc., etc. To make a long story short, away the fello went uttering things like 'amazing', etc. And for 55 minutes (it was pushing 10 PM.) I did things like walk around, and make coffee, and plunk in front of the TV, mulling, wondering what it was that was bothering me so persistently about that 100% stereo comparision. And then suddenly I had it, I saw as if in a motion picture replay my hands reaching down, and clipping into the ciruit (using alligator clips) the Right hand speaker into the circuit, and realized that at that moment I had actually clipped the RIGHT hand speaker LEADS to the leads of the LEFT hand speaker box, instead of the Right hand speaker leads. Why the mistake occurred is because I had started to play with the Sony 1 inch wafer-thin tweeter, plus other little hand held tweeters, none of which led to anything at all, but which had resulted in a collection of wires clumped together on the floor hooked together with alligator clips, instead of simple single leads coming from the getto blaster. And there I saw my mistake in hookup in minds eye while plunked in front of the TV, mulling the situation. I saw the Right hand speaker leads get clipped to the leads of the Left hand speaker, and an enormous jump in the sonic sounds in the room instantly resulting. Oh ho. Oh ho. Yes. Mmmhmm. Oh ho. Oh yes for sure. Immediately I went upstairs and tried it out. Sure enough the big kick (bigger than anything I had ever heard before in the Mono experiments) had come from the two speaker boxes (Left and Right) working off the same set of leads (Left hand only), from the getto blaster. It was a 100% mono sound source. An odd thing was learned right away. When coupled together the two speakers could start to roar in a steady noise rasping away at the 60 cycle rate of the wall socket but the roar would fade and by co-incidence at the moment I had made the mistaken hookup the two speakers were working together at such an absolutely critical point of mutual focus that there was no roar, but the moment I touched one of the enclosure boxes, in came the 60 cycle roar and an hour long saga trying to deal with it. Eventually I got it so that the roar was gone when the speakers were working playing music and would come back in during a few seconds of pause between passages in the music. But with very deft room tuning I got things stablized so that the roar didn't occur, or rather hardly did. But I got used to it realizing it was not going to blow the speakers apart even though the loud roar when it came in was at a constant volume despite any volume at which the speakers themselves were playing. And then two more steps occured. The roar completely vanished when I shut OFF the Dynamic Bass Expander. And the Surround Sound turned really shitty when turned ON when two speakers where playing together over one channel in MONO to produce a MONO in STEREO effect according to the way I had things set up in the room. Later that evening I patched in a third speaker (the 12 inch woofer) for the first time to see what might happen and heard some improvement in the whole sonic range of the sound stream, expecially the bass, not so much a big boost in volume but rather a jump in quality, by placing it some distance away from the table, sitting on the floor facing straight up, because there it definately kick assed the bass range. And then in fooling around, coupled in the cheap oval car speaker with it sitting further back on the floor leaning against the leg of a long table which runs along the other wall. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. August 26, 1992, 10:30 PM. At this point it was the best yet MONO in STEREO, even had back after only a bit of fiddling the famous pulsing breathing HANG of the Glen Miller orchestra, which I had last heard in late March and early April after hours of fiddling to get the HANG into the sound stream, only back then, the fidelity of the music was a howling mess, so to speak, and much of the alluded stereophonics was gained by baffling all of the cupboard doors in the kitchen sometimes, whereas now, there was much better fidelity, and not a single baffle anywhere in the setup. Furthermore, this time the HANG couldn't be more %100 pure Mono because all of the sound was being generated from the Left channel only, whereas months before it was coming from both channels, although that shouldn't really make a difference. What was so different now is that the HANG was being rejuvinated into the sound stream by hyping up the strong bass resonances stereophonically WITHOUT the use of the Dynamic Bass Expander of the getto blaster. See. Progress. But this turned out to be only the start of things. It was that night, in going to sleep, that I saw the image of an equalateral triangle array project into my consciousness, so of course tried it the very first thing the next day, and it worked. With a long tape measure I measured the distance between the two speaker enclosures, (the two getto blaster boxes at this point sitting on two of the copper wire coil cores for stands), and carefully measured the distance out to the apex of an equalateral triangle and lacking anything else I could use for a stand sat the 12 inch woofer on the top of a simple household step ladder, the kind you use in the kitchen and which as three steps. Instantly there was much more music in the room, heard swelling into sonic view at the precise moment the 12 inch woofer was finally placed into the correct triangular apex, after much adjusting and re-measuring with the tape measure to find the exact apex, with, now, for the very first time, obvious wide spread East/West separation in the music which I could now suddenly easily get into the Mono sourced sound stream simply by standing between the two speakers on the table and playing around with a snowflake flow tube behind each speaker until I could hear separate sounds coming independantly from each speaker to my left and right, this EASE coming into effect AFTER getting the third sound source resonator (the 12 inch open air woofer) into the apex position of the equalateral triangle. And then finding that the aforementioned 8 by 5 inch oval car stereo speaker also added ingredients worth paying attention to into the sound stream, when hooked in as an open air resonator, even when lying on the floor. I was able to proceed very quickly through a number of quick tests to find more optimal locations for sonic tuning devices in the room, in fact sweeping away and putting into a box the half dozen or so single sonic snowflakes, and retiring three of the snowflake flow channel devices, leaving a rather simplified but geometrically articulate array doing a much bigger job with far more easily controllable results. The main thing is that for the first time I can get wide spread East/West separation into a Mono sound stream with hardly any fuss, whereas before, it took very tedious listening and up to three hours or more of fussing and fuming to get more than a modicum of East/West separation, which was always unstable, could disappear within moments. But not now. When East/West separation is there it stays put in the sound image, and is ovbiously there. As you can now tell, quite a few experiments were tried in the long stretch of days between the last update of July 30, 1992, and this one. FULL RIGHT ANGLE PROJECTIONS OF A SONIC IMAGE ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. August 26, 1992, 10:30 PM. Which brings us to today. And to where I first mentioned at the start of this Update that two demonstrations are now in place in the upstairs room. They are as follows: We come back to the little 1 1/2 inch Sony square wafer-thin tweeter made of thin transparent plastic mylar which I have discussed at length in many previous experiments through last winter up to the end of April, and further above in these updates. As of yesterday afternoon it was officially retired, but not for long. Whereas in previous experiments, with very tedious fiddling and nicky dork dexterities it was possible to use the wafer to induce more sonic presence into Mono in Stereo tests, now it was clear that the little thing was a distinct spoiler no matter how I used it, in light of the new setup with the equalateral triangle configuration, and four speakers all hooked up in series to the Left hand channel of the getto blaster. And then yesterday and last night I had 24 hours to myself, with twin brother gone out of town on our software business, so took the opportunity to go on a round-the-clock marathon starting from twelve noon till 6:30 AM the next day (this morning), non-stop, the first time in over four months that I had opportunity for a marathon with everything I needed to work with right at hand and not in storage. Out of this marathon session came the two hanging open air getto blaster speakers, the boxes discarded, the faceplates dangling from pieces of thin and springy wooden garden stakes bent slightly under the weight of the faceplates dangled from them, the faceplates focused to the apex of the equalateral triangle. An ornimental mobile about 6 inches across consisting of three hexagram rings which open up into a mobile with a snowflake-like fourth piece in the middle, stamped from a sheet of holographic shimmering cardboard and sold for $7.00 in the local supermall as a supposed christmas orniment, is more than enough to demonstrate my earlier remarks from a month or so ago that a simple hexagram based mobile should be more than enough to sonically boost any room or sound source. Sure enough, this crude mobile very handily boosts the overall pure high fidelity of the sound stream when placed in a suitable hot spot. The mobile is currently mounted on a home made extendable microphone stand, with stiff copper wire wrapped around the top of the stand's shaft and an alligator clip shafted onto the top of the wire so that it is holding the mobile in an upright position and the whole thing is raised so that the mobile is up in the air to about shoulder height at 4 1/2 feet and at the moment is sitting back about 4 feet behind the apex of the equalateral triangle which itself is a configuration about 6 feet to a side. The reason why the mobile is sitting back there is because in this position it is also interacting with three sonic devices at the back of the room on a temporary small table consisting of a fragment piece of mahogany panelling supported by two tomato boxes from the local supermarket to create a small table, with the three devices set in a straight line along an axis pointing straight through the apex of the triangle to the center between the two dangling faceplates up front on the big table. The three devices in a straight line at the back of the room are a flow tube, two paper Stars of David held upright by alligator clips in an electronnic stand (the kind you get at Radio Shack which has two adjustable alligator clips on a bar), and behind that the 'ferris wheel', (which consists of six giant snowflakes arrayed around a hexagonal wire frame with thin jewellry grade brass wire wrapped around the outer circumpherence through the centers of the snowflakes so that there are six wires strung around in hexagonal loops, creating a device which in fact looks a lot like a ferris wheel. At this point the 'ferris wheel' has been found to work better when focused face-on rather than edge-on, toward the direction of the sound source. It turns out, as mentioned in prior Updates, that this device (called 'the ferris wheel') when properly placed in a hot spot (node) in a room, enhances the air frame, or open air quality of the sound stream. To finish off the current array upstairs in the room, two of the flow tubes are positioned behind each of the dangling faceplates, positioned more to run in a straight line targeting the flow tube, the faceplate, and the raised mobile on a stand, but also twist tuned to end up turned to focus more directly to the apex of the equalateral triangle (closest point), in experimental variations. A remark my brother made the day before yesterday, to the effect that getting ANY bass response from an essentially open air configuration with (at that time) only the oval cheap car radio speaker patched in as a bass booster for the two getto blaster speaker boxes with all three sound sources coupled in series off the Left hand speaker lead from the getto blaster, was an interesting effect due to the fact of the industry's tendency to think in terms of bigger, or more powerful, drivers in much more high tech modern enclosure devices with electronnic engineering to get more bass, whereas I was getting much more bass simply by hooking up this simple oval car radio speaker into a MONO setup and placing it at the apex of an equalateral triangle. With this in mind I started thinking of the 1 1/2 inch wafer-thin tweeter now lying discarded in a tray of clutter somewhere in the upstairs room. At this point it was about 2 AM last night. I found the wafer and started to play around with it. By six AM I was starting to think I may as well go the distance and stay up till seven AM to catch the morning news at 7 AM on hurricane Andrew bearing in on the Louisianna coast. But by 6:30 AM I was done in and had finished setting up a demo which has so far had the following effect: but first, a last minute update on the array as it currently exists in the room. The 1 1/2 inch wafer tweeter is being held vertically upright in the air by an alligator clip shafted on the end of a piece of stiff copper wire which is being held by a small vice sitting on top of the 3-step kitchen utility ladder and centered right at the apex of the equalateral triangle relative to the two faceplates which are now dangling in free spring-like suspension from the 15 inch thin round garden stakes, the backsides of the faceplates facing out and focused to the apex of the equalateral triangle. The 12 inch woofer is sitting on the floor in front of the ladder, tilted forward at rouphly 30 degrees and set to face straight ahead to focus midway between the two dangling faceplates. At about the same distance behind the stepladder and also on the floor is the cheap oval car stereo speaker, also tilted up at a 30 degree angle and also facing forward. The consul for the getto blaster itself is between the dangling faceplates, in the middle of the table and sitting back against the wall on a small shelf. And on top of it, sitting on top of the cover for the CD player, is a flow tube placed lengthwise running parallel in a line between the two dangling faceplates. Centered on the table in front of the consul is a hexagram and Star Of David figure which was the original paper template used to form the hexagonal frame for the 'ferris wheel', and which was then cut out with an Exacto knife to yield a hexagram prototype for a mobile. An intrinsic Star of David was cut from the center portion and is one of the paper Stars being used (as already described) on the makeshift table at the back of the room. And so, I crashed, at 6:30 AM, couldn't hang tough for another half hour to hear the morning news about the hurricane. I woke at eleven-thirty AM with the phone ringing. It was a telephone lineman cluing up to come in in a half hour to hook up a business phone, now that we have progressed past the cornflake sandwiches no-budget stage in our antivirus software business. In came the lineman at noon, did the thing, drilling the appropriate hole in the baseboard for a telephone extension line, etc., then mentioned that he had done three years in electronics and sound featuring quite a bit of research in using devices to locate 'nodes' ie. hot spots in a room, and trying to single down sound to one point in a room, and trying to single down sound to a single frequency, just about the entire opposite directions of my entire sound tests. But that is beside the point. The point is that up the stairs went we me saying that despite the weak weedy sound he would hear he would have to appreciate the kind of experiment he would be hearing, and that the sound source was a pirate factory version of Glen Miller circa 1938-42 with some of the cuts literally lifted from scratchy old 78's. With these restrictions in mind, the intent of the test was for him to tell where the sound source in the room was coming from. First stage of the demo was for him to stand at the doorway listening. After about half a minute he said it seems to be coming from over there, pointing to the 'left' to a faceplate dangling from its stake on the table. I said okay, go further into the room. Again he stopped and listened for about a minute and then said something to the effect that obviously it was coming from over 'there' pointing in the oposite direction to the rear wall at the back of the room, and over to the far corner. Ahah thought I, the demo is working, right on schedule. What in fact could be heard was explicit pure and perfect LATERAL sound projection, in the first instance (at the door) the sound seeming to come from roughly the dangling speaker to the left against the North wall, and then a few steps further into the room sound could also be heard coming from entirely the opposite direction also, from the area back against the wall to the South, with also sound seeming to come from the far rear corner. This explicitely demonstrates long distance sonic projections, in this case to more than one giant sound image area at the same time, the two main images separated wide apart by nearly 20 feet, with nothing in between. Then he walked into the room first over to the dangling faceplates then over toward the south end of the room and finally sniffed his way gradually back to end up standing right over the little 1 1/2 inch wafer sitting upright in an alligator clip on top of the ladder. And looking right down at it finally he said, well, this must be it. So then I let on the secret that yes that tiny little thing was producing everything he could hear, and to make the point, went over and clipped in the Left hand dangling faceplate. There was an enormous jump in the sound volume and a big range appeared, including strong base and stereo presence. Then I clipped in the Right hand dangling faceplate, and the sound volume more than doubled, and then the 12 inch woofer on the floor, and finally the oval car speaker also on the floor. Whereupon the room was of course now filled with a very loud body of sound comprising the Glen Miller orchestra resonating away, all 100% mono in sound source since the tape was mono as was the single channel input via wires hooked in series for all of the speakers from only the left channel of the getto blaster. Whereupon the fello commented to the effect that it was a very impressive stereo demonstration, to which I asked was he satisfied that it was in fact stereo and yes, there was no question about the fact that it was stereo. The fact that it was not a modern stereo band playing Glen Miller music was not in his mind. He was firmly assertive that it was stereo. So I filled him in on the secret of the second part of the demo, that it was in fact 100% MONO, making the point by going over and holding up the right hand speaker leads from the consul and then dropping them again to let them hang over the edge of the table, the useless exposed ends of the leads with bare wires trailing onto the carpet floor. In the meantime my twin brother had just arrived home from the overnight business trip, so after an hour had passed, with he and the telelphone lineman first discussing the last of the telephone business who then departed, and my brother completing his collection of phone messages and calls, I coaxed him upstairs to run the same demo as which had just been done an hour earlier with the telephone lineman. My twin brother handled it a slightly different way. Pausing at the door, he first muttered that it was actually not a very impressive sound demonstration per se in that the sound was very thin and weedy. But said I, wait till you find out what is actually going on. He then sniffed his way slowly into the room, looking to the left, to the right, back to the front of the room, to the rear of the room, came to a stop in the vacinity of the apex of the equalateral triangle, and after about 30 seconds of careful listening announced in a loud voice that obviously 'THIS' is one of them (pointing to the oval car radio speaker on the floor, and then pointing to the 12 inch woofer said 'this too I guess', still sniffing around carefully. I said no the entirety is coming from the little 1 1/2 inch wafer. It was sticking up in the air in the little vice on top of the ladder, right under his nose and he couldn't tell. The first pursuent remark of my brother was that the thing was producing at least three times its range and volume. Actually it was a lot more than three times, because held in the air entirely on its own in a normal room the thing produces only a pissing weak hiss, with the mechanics of any music's structure just barely discernable as tiny ticks, at a barely discernable volume even with the gain cranked up high. In the demo up in the room at this moment you can hear everything in the music, including the words of a vocalist, and drum set cymbols, and in certain places in the room you can hear the bass patterns at work even though they are so weak as to be at times sublimal and of course at this point there is no possibility of bottom bass with the thin little wafer working just by itself. The thing is it took nearly three hours (from the moment I got the idea for a demo) to overcome a problem that almost crippled the whole idea. And that was that sitting upright working on its own the little wafer cracked and popped in total fracturing instead of responding to strong sound strikes in any music when playing at any volume loud enough to cause sonic projection to take place in the room. It was finally found that not on the floor was a partial answer, the thing mounted upright in the vice was origanlly set on the floor behind the kitchen ladder. The next solution in getting stability into its sound stream was to set the thing on top of the ladder, and then fuss and fume with the thin speaker lead wires from it attached to alligator clips from the main speaker leads until they ended up spread as wide apart as possible coming off the 1 inch wafer and dangling over the sides of the vice and the ladder, and that all wires lying around the room (or dangling) needed very discrete adjustments (in fact just a nudge with the big toe usually sufficed) to get rid of more of the pops and fracturing, and at times constant rattling, sounding like it had been blown. And finally some very discrete adjustments of the various sonic devices in the room eventually stablized the wafer's open air resonances to such an extent that it fooled the telephone lineman at first, who finally closed in on the sound source, (a fellow who had never played with open air resonating speakers before), and my brother (who has played with open air resonances before), such that (if not concidering the sonic projection aspects) the kind of sound my twin brother was hearing was just about exactly like what a 12 inch woofer would sound like attached to a stereo set and held up in the hand in the open air in a room, weak, weak, but definately discernable, which is why he assumed in thinking that I had at least two speakers going (the 12 inch woofer, and the oval car stereo speaker). The point being that the actual source of the sonics in the room was like silly putty. Even standing close to the wafer you could not tell if it was the source, because sonically the sound could shift position, for instance to the front, or back, or both sides of the room or into a corner, or all three at once, just by moving the body a bit. Which indicated to my twin brother the greater possibility of several sound stream generator sources, an easier to handle idea than the single little wafer doing ALL of the work, aided by my sonic devices acting as sonic projectors causing long distance resurrancings of the sound image. Like I said, at times two main similar sound images could be heard simultaneously but separated at both ends of the long part of the L-shaped room, a distance of almost 20 feet. After remarks quickly passed back and forth in typical twin brother language, I hooked up the four speakers as before when the lineman was listening, and let my brother hear the full stereophonic demo with the system as before playing in 100% Mono. This time there was no trouble in my twin brother's mind as to the fuller integrety of the sound quality, especially since he was well aware of the fierce fidelity problems with the Glen Miller Mono tape otherwise, which were now not apparent, a whole range of inferior qualities in the music having been filtered out or cancelled by the sonically inducing environment of the room, etc., etc., with a wide spread East/West sound image obviously present, enough that for the first time my twin brother never remarked on any missing wide spread image in the stereo sound picture being created up there from 100% mono sources. Like I have been saying, given time, I think it is possible to reproduce the Glen Miller orchestra and other major earlier bands in full stereo presence as if performing live in a concert hall, the rejuvination of such orchestras originally recorded only in Mono, replayed anew taking place in a concert hall, using (fractal) sonic hexagonal geometric matrix techniques. In the last day, last night, at times, in hooking in the Right hand faceplate in full stereo to hear the difference, the ahem stereo would actually COLLAPSE into a more traditional sounding stereo sound system. In plain fact the MONO in STEREO sounded better. This was true in any of my tapes plus the AM or FM radio, at times any such source sounding better stereophonically via a 100% Mono sound source. Now this is getting interesting. One of the things is that I can now freely play with the transient cross harmonic reflections for sound sources originally recorded in full stereo, at times separating this part of the music into a separate background sound playing by itself completely out of synch with the main foreground sound authentically comprising for instance the Left hand channel. I can tell the difference, because the weaker sound cross-over from the authentic Right hand channel as picked up by the mikes of the other channel has a weak almost warbling tin-flute-like reedy sonics to it, until I play a bit with focusing and tuning a bit more and suddenly get the two sound streams to gell again and get better stereo from the 100% mono source, for instance entirely from the Left hand channel. In a last comment, is some philosophy to consider. For instance, what could I expect if I set up such a demo (as the one in the upstairs room), in, for instance, a court room, to claim principle. Well, perhaps, not very much, as pointed out by my twin brother, concidering the types who could be in a courtroom, judging. To their eyes and ears nothing special might be in fact ocurring. They could in fact easily think that the tiny 1 1/2 inch wafer tweeter resonating in such a sonically incredible way is not a miracle, to them it might just be another new high tech device designed to power a getto blaster at a rock concert, they would have no way of knowing. The only way they could know anything definative is by extensive forensic laboratory testing reports with this specialist and that famous authority saying yes and no, to my benefit, or detriment, depending entirely on their preconcieved beliefs, levels of inherent intelligence, and favor or disfavor toward bribes paid by the greatest convincing liers, which leaves me out of the arguement since I cannot, by fundamental most heart felt conscience, lie. You can see the picture of the courtroom circus, me giving the best demo ever yet achieved, and the authorities in the court not having the slightest idea of what has happened, and liers and specialists getting into the fray taking over the whole consiouness of the picture from that point onward and me being on the dangerous borderline of being branded a hysteric or paranoic or worse needing immediate pychiatric attention, until I can do what it takes to prove myself innocent, with my own battery of specialists and authorities producing the other side to the picture, yes, new theories in accoustics in this stuff for sure, certainly new concepts in stereophonic sound no one has ever thought of before. But what's the point of me going through all of that - a kind of meat grinder just to think about it. I have no intention of having to beat the drum vigorously in a court room to prove my right to creative intelligence. And figure that by the time it might ever come to a court case by rascally claim jumpers I will likely be well involved in some other new and different project. Such is life. Peace, Joy, and Happiness. In Divine Order. Greydon Moore Orleans, Ottawa, Ont. August 27, 1992. TWO QUICK EXPERIMENTS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update August 31, 1992 4:45 P.M. In the past three days a couple of things have happened worth nothing, oops, worth noting. The first is a temporary experiment lasting a couple of days that started off interesting but petered out because it would not proceed past a certain point, as follows: One of the odd ball objects lying around in one of the boxes of clutter from the old days (say 8 years ago) is an electrostatic tweeter. This is a small silverized plastic device weighing only a few ounces, with a horn shaped front. This so-called tweeter is about 3 inches across. I spotted it suddenly as if sitting out in the open, even though nested in a box of clutter on the floor of the upstairs room, It was suddenly noticed that this thing was SIX sided. Ohhh, interesting, thought I, picking it up for the first time, thinking. Its importance as a device is that the front though square has six sides going into the oriface of a horn, plus three support rods on the outside in the form of an equalateral array. Ergo, a six sided sonic device to play with. Substituting the electrostatic speaker for the 1 inch thin Sony wafer led to nothing, really. You couldn't hear anything from it until putting the ear real close then you could hear a faint hiss, is all. I tried it for a few hours on the floor behind the step ladder, including tilted upward to point to the underside of the 12 inch woofer sitting facing the ceiling, on top of the ladder. This electrostatic tweeter seemed to offer some juvination into the sound stream, even though its output per se was nothing but faint hiss, I assumed it must be re-enforcing some higher harmonics which were cascading downward to juvinate some lower bass harmonics as well. But could not get beyond a lot of extra high frequency stridency in the sound stream, too bad. I tried mounting it on a shaft, (a rod supported upright in a bigger vice sat on the floor), with stiff copper wire and an alligator clamp holding it so it could be tilted upward by about 30 degrees and be thrust up in the air underneath at the back of and just below the 12 inch woofer (which at this moment was sitting facing upright on the kitchen ladder), focused in a hot spot there, where its electrostatic performance seemed to improve marginally, seemingly by kicking subliminal high and low ranges in the resonances of the woofer, but once again, the improvements did not go beyond a certain point. And then finally, I simply dropped the electrostatic tweeter onto the cone of the 12 inch woofer and walked away and left it to do its thing there, facing forward, bouncing around on the woofer's cone, but not hard, since it was almost weightless. Now... the thing is that the big woofer is sturdy enough that you can put something on its cone and the something will merely bounce around in little hops without fracturing the sound. How about that! When first I dropped it onto the cone and walked away, after a moment it had bounced into a sort of oddball position on the cone giving forth with a sudden major fidelic kick to the sound steam, which immediately caught my attention, but the moment I started to fiddle with it, (trying different positions for the alligator clips for the speaker wires, then the polarity phasing of the wires, and different positions for it on the woofer's cone), nothing of any further importance happened except the big kick vanished and I never did get back that sudden momentary big kick. That was lost the moment I touched the alligator clips attatching the speaker leads to the electrostatic tweeter. Yet once again, something had occurred to draw my attention to a new insight, to wit, that an electrostatic tweeter bouncing around on the cone of a woofer could hit a hot spot in resonances such as to settle in and cause a big kick of major improvement in the sound stream, ergo, such science fiction mechanisms can work as a sonic device entirely as from another planet compared to traditional loud speaker theories of planet Earth. But yet the whole of the device's more interesting output could vanish by something as fragile as changing the way its speaker leads were clipped to the tweeter. In fact it soon came to pass that I could now officially hear rumble from time to time as the thing grumbled bouncing around on the woofer's cone. So finally, I gave up, put the thing back in the box it came from. End of experiment for the time being. But soon got into something else. Playing around with various tilts of the 12 inch woofer on top of the 3-step kitchen ladder, plus tiltings of the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter on the floor in front of, then behind the ladder, led to something new, albeit temporary, involving the Peer Gynt Suit, as follows: I had abandoned the Peer Gynt Suite after the winter, after all those months of trying to coax more fidelity out of it so that it could sail through the closing passage: 'In The Hall Of The Mountain King', without breaking up completely, and when once achieved, I shut the thing off so to speak, tossed the cassette tape back into the box of tapes and never tried it again. This, let me mention, was back in the days of full authentic stereo, and a challenge at that time was simply to make the getto blaster perform more fidelically, top to bottom so it could handle 'In The Hall Of The Mountain King'. Believe me to be sincere when I tell you that the tape is playing now and is far more fidelitic than it has ever been, and is just at this very moment sailing through the final passage: In The Hall Of The Mountain King, with such success that I can hear the floor over my head vibrating from the sonic booms. I happen to be downstairs in the dining room which has been consigned as my computer area and am sitting at the computer keyboard typing in these very comments. The point about the previous paragraph is that the system is running in 100% Mono, at this moment. AN HOUR LATER ----------------------------------------------------------------- But, this is not the end. As soon as another cassette tape was put on, the sound quality vanished. So, I still need to do work to try and figure out a way (or ways) to improve the sound stream, and to stablize the improvements. Because, nothing but noise when playing 'In The Hall Of The Mountain King' ensues now, a few minutes after typing the comments about the sonic booms overhead. Whatever I had done to momentarily stablize the sound stream enough to play that very rough touph symnphonic recording, has been dissolved. THE ELEPHANT AND THE BUTTERFLY WING ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 2, 1992 12:15 A.M. The September issue of Discover Magazine has a brief article on Page 13 entitled 'Of Elephants and Butterflies', concerning an aspect of the modern theory of Chaos, in which a small event can cause a big reaction, for instance (in theory), a beat of a butterfly's wing can have an effect on the weather, in theories of chaos. A beat of a butterfly's wing in Wisconsin can cause a storm in Florida, according to the theory. An example given in the article is of a metallic strand waving in the air under the impulse of a randomly changing magnetic field. A computer was engaged to study the blow by blow instants of the random magnetic field, and its effect on the chaotically flapping magnetic strand, such that eventually extremely small pulses imparted at certain instances in the random magnetic field by the computer could cause the magnetic strand to start oscillating in a stable predictable manner. How does such news effect 'newsound' sonic experiments? It seems that controlling chaos by very small pulses at the right moment, the 'Elephant and Butterfly' aspects of chaos, is very much in demonstration in the experiments as they now exist upstairs in the large room. It is becoming increasingly clear that although the big room upstairs is a good accoustic environment for sound experiments, and the new setup features an equalateral triangle as a fundamental array for the sound stream generators, the sound stream itself (the elephant, no matter how it is generated) is extremely fragile and inherently unstable to outside influences (the single beat of a butterfly's wing). Tuning now is in two steps. The first is as always like before, where a tuning device is carefully moved and positioned and twist tuned by smaller and smaller iotas until better sonic qualities come into the sound stream, with a final element in tuning gained simply by tapping the device ever so lightly, about the same amount of tap you would give with a single wet finger to snuff out a candle flame. This light touch can make or break a greater quality in the resulting sound stream in terms of stereophonic power, volume, and overall high fidelity. You can hear the quality result from the tap, after two or three seconds of wait, until the sonic patterns gell. Significantly here, is that the greatest value in the bass tones and lower bass range can stablize into the sound stream after the merest minor of light touches. Light touches are true for any of the sonic devices, including the flow tubes, the ferris wheel, and the resonating open air tweeter speaker drivers themselves, and the 12 inch woofer. For instance, this afternoon a new milestone was hit. This was in being able to sensitize the sonic room environment to such a height that it (for the first time) was able to handle what is one of the heaviest hard hitting strikes of sound from any of the cassettes tapes I happen to have on hand for research. This is the famous 'turbo roar' tape mentioned many times before, with the James Bond theme 'Diamonds Are Forever' on this cassette tape of dubious quality called 'GOLDEN FILM THEMES 2'. The song starts up fairly low keyed with a female vocalist, and then the whole orchestra hits a powerful chord just before sailing into the main current of the music. This chord is so strong that the getto blaster system has never before been able to handle it, no matter how I have had the system set up or the room tuned by sonic devices. This chord has always generated a collapsed moment in sonic time. Today I got the chord, for the first time, in 100% Mono to boot. The room was tuned and all sonic devices sensitized by light tap touching as described above, and when the chord struck it spread out and resonated soaring forth through the room, hanging in the air, with echoes going outward in all directions. It was quite an effect, to say the least. Then the main part of the music came in with the dubious turbo roar bass, and the sound stream disintigrated into mostly static at loud volume. The importance however was that a new aspect of principle had just been demonstrated, that open air resonating sound sources in the manner of two tweeters on the getto blaster faceplates; (each officially just a little more than 4 inches in diameter) and an oval tweeter 8 by 5 inches in diameter, were capable (as butterfly wings) of effecting a giant chaotic system (the whole room and the house) so that harmony resulted rather than chaos, to wit that the loud sonorous boom of the CHORD was loud enough and pure enough to transport throughout the whole house. This chord included a bang ~HARD~ on a giant tympani miked real close to the tree, er, drum. I mean, this is James Bond stuff and that was a mighty chord, which the system handled, for the first time, confirming principle in a striking way, no pun intended. I was, ahem, pleased enough to shout out loud. "'Yeah!" A real loud unabashed shout, ahem. Mind you, it was that chord the system handled right at that moment, for immediately after came the 'famous' turbo roar on the bass and the system failed to handle it, when the turbo roar bass settled in the system unsettled out, the sound stream broke up into a fracturing rattling attempt at reproduction, the kind of rattling fracturing you get when pressing your finger on the domed small center voice coil cover of a big normal hi fi stereo speaker of an enclosure with the cover off. P.S. The chord was handled with just the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter wired in but without the woofer. More power in the chord was added into the chord with the added input of the woofer wired in, is all, in running through the CHORD again. ROOM RESONANCES CONTAIN THE ENTIRE KEY TO STEREO - THROUGH THE ECHOES ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 4, 1992 3:30 P.M. Okay. Today I am going to report one more Update, then post this description on the BBS computer Bulletin Boards as NEWSONIC.ZIP. Unless something else happens first worth making a report. But, onto the main business. Today I learned something new. Actually, it is something I have suspected before, but was never able to confirm in a definative way until this afternoon. The current setup in the upstairs room consists (as before) of the two 4 inch diameter tweeters still in the faceplates of the original getto blaster speaker boxes, suspended on short garden stakes hence resonating more freely in the open air. In the equalateral triangle apex position is the 12 inch woofer, sitting resonating in the open air, facing up toward the ceiling on top of the 3-step kitchen utility ladder. Directly underneath it so as to be also in the apex position, on the carpeted floor and tilted forward at roughly a 30 degree angle, is the 8 by 5 inch diameter oval tweeter, also resonating in the open air. 'In the open air' means that all sounds these four speakers can possibly generate are via resonances, after the fact, long distance from the generator sources themselves (the speakers), since there are no enclosures, no crossovers, no flat curves responses, no half-wave rebounds, no nothing but inter-harmonic resonances. Especially no equalizers. For twelve months now the four equalizer toggles of the getto blaster have been shoved full bore to the top so all four are operating wide open. The plain fact is that by even a slight diminishment of the highest frequencies equalizer, a drop is immediately heard in the lower frequency bass ranges along with a drop in the higher frequencies. In theory I am supposedly totally destroying the purpose of the equalizers by running all of them flat out, in theory creating a problem that is supposed to confuse the system to an impossible situation, according to audio-stereo buffs and assummed specialists who have sauntered upon my demos from time by time, and have even paused to show me how to set the equalizers properly by reaching forth to change them, only to fall silent as I reach forward shoving all of the equalizers back to the top, to get the sound back. The theory that regeneration of bass waves requires bigger woofers, bigger enclosures, cunningly designed boxes with tubes or other conductive resonators, carefully designed open ports, crafty control of the backwave responses, speaker capacitors, resisters, and/or electronic high tech inner circuits altering the output signals, is all blown to waste due to the fact that both the Surround Sound and the Dynamic Bass Expander contols of the Fisher 8400 model getto blaster are OFF, and I am getting real big bass soars from the three open air resonating tweeters and an open air woofer, an otherwise theoretically impossible setup. In keeping with the claim in the previous paragraph, the bass can be intuned or deteriorated by the merest tapping of one or another of the sonic devices in the room whose construction is of a six-sided fractal nature in the manner of a hexagram and/ or a Star of David. So stable vrs unstable fractal geometric harmonics is the key to bass range resonances, rather than long vrs short longitudinally propigating wavelengths, the bass waves being rejuvinated from hidden information in the higher sound wave harmonics of the source waves. There can be no other way but this, in the teaching setup currently in place in the upstairs room. By 'merest tapping' I mean just that!. Tapping it with my finger, you know, curved the way a human may tap a handheld pinball game trying to get a tiny metal bead into a slot, you know, you've seen humans tapping these games like they were Gods, tapping VERRRY slow, very easy. That's the way I tap, these days, I tap, and wait, and tap again, and wait a few seconds for the response to settle in. By waiting, I get a better, or worse, or REALLY good, response coming into the sound stream, after each tap. And occasionally I get a lucky strike, a huge swelling increase in the sonics, fidelity-wise and in power, of the bass range for instance, but also the high end, all from the lighest tap I can muster with a quiver-free finger on a sonic tuning device or a resonator in the room upstairs, getting it into some kind of pristine focus, a final 99.99% of focus, wherein its greater ability to function comes into the picture as active. This leads to several conjectures. But first, an update as to a major change made in the setup, with new sonic tuning devices, as of the last two days. HAND MADE PAPER MOBILES ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. September 4, 1992 3:30 P.M. For four and a half months I had been thinking of making a large six sided mobile to hang in different places around a room to hear how it might effect the sound, but kept thinking of how difficult making such a mobile would be, etc,. etc. Then day before yesterday I woke up with a new image in mind as to how easy it would be to make a six-sided mobile. I had an existing template of just under 9 inches in diameter, originally cut out last February. I used it as a template to draw six more images on sheets of stiff stamp album paper and cut each out with an Exacto knife. The first image took a little over an hour to template and cut out, the next two took about three quarters of an hour for the two, and the last three took just over a half hour. See, a learning curve at work. Then all I did was fold each cut-out image in half, then cut out a small flat hexagram from a piece of stiff restaurant menu cover material, (a thick plasticized gold sheen plastic textured paper) and cut three slots criss crossed into each hexagram, and shoved the angular corner of each folded image into an angular fold of the small hexagram, and presto, had two sturdy six sided mobiles made of paper and rouphly nine inches in diameter, ready to test, that I could immediately mount held upright on a pair of homemade microphone stands via alligator clips, the alligator clips held upright by stiff copper wire wrapped around the shaft of each mike stand. These two home-made mobiles have substantially changed the sonic characteristics of the experiment. It was certainly possible to lower the whole tonal range of the sound stream, and perceptibly improve the sound stream's overall fidelity, with these two new mobiles. But the second mobile when added in also made some major changes in how the sound stream could be understood, or interpreted. For instance, prior to the mobiles, it was often hard to tell if one or another open air tweeter was wired in synch or out of synch with the other open air tweeters. Now the change is heard in an instant. When wired in synch, the sound stream opens up into a large sonic presence with Airframe sonics, etc. And when wired out of synch, the whole sound stream squeezes up into a compressed hissy pissy sound with little or no bass. Prior to the two new mobiles, it was often hard to tell which wiring was in or out of synch, in that the quality of distortion or eerie odd sounds changed, but didn't necessarily disappear, or expand, just change. Now, there is an obvious something gained, or something lost, depending on how I hook up the mono wires to each tweeter. Such major effects the two mobiles have had allowed a significant change in the sonic experimental setup itself. Previously I had reported in 'Updates' on the use of ordinary pencils laid in the crossarms of flow tubes to help stablize the sonics rebounding in the room so that you didn't hear major changes Up and Down as you walked around. The pencils led to brass rods about a foot long each, hollow, bought for a dollar to 3 1/2 bucks in a hobby store depending on the diameter of the opening of the brass rod, it turning out that the biggest opening tried, a $3.40 version, had the best sonic results. Which led to the use of five cardboard tubes from rolls of paper towel, which seemed to work better than the brass rods, plus finally a handful of cardboard tubes from used rolls of toilet paper also sitting in various ways (some upright) in sonic hot spots in the room. When the second new six sided mobile was first set up, something suddenly seemed quite WRONG with the sound. It didn't take long to figure it out, I simply went around the room gathering up ALL of the cardboard tubes and tossed them in a box and moved the box out of the way into another room, taking them completely out of the picture. The same for any brass control rods lying around amiss, and pencils. And then I began to play with the experimental system anew, in terms of resulting sounds. First of all, gone was a tendency for the higher end to end up shrieking with spurious distortions, or to end up with strange sounding sour cross harmonic interferences. In terms of bass, any bass power over the past two weeks had been gained by a form of power amplicification, more sound, more roar, but no real genuine open air Airframe echos in and around the bass instruments or drums, but I was working on it. I in fact thought I had some Airframing in the bass from time to time, but in hindsight really didn't have anything substantial now that I can easily hear the difference. With the mobiles, bass range cross room echos leading to immediate perception of open air Stereophic sonics in the bass range came into the picture after about a day of fooling around. The reason for the delay was in having to learn how to listen for a new ingredient in the sound stream, not perceptable before. This new ingredient is really hard to get until it suddenly gells after repeated tuning and retuning, touch tapping and re-tapping, of the various sonic devices, until suddenly a suble muffle-like distortion disappears from the bass range and there it is, a loud and vibrating open air sonics strong enough to cause all objects in the room to start vibrating with real vigor. Which in its own right presents a new problem, in that the vigorous vibrating can cause responding objects to vibrate out of focus as if they had been lightly touch tapped with a bad rather than good resulting sonic response. However that is strictly technology which can be overcome by better more conducive sonic devices in the future. In the meantime there is still much to report, so I shall carry on. The aforementioned straight line array of sonic devices (reported in a previous 'Update' further above), has been expanded to include the two new six sided paper mobiles, a single giant snowflake, two different sized paper Stars of David, and the 'ferris wheel', all in a perfect straight line aligned straight to the center of the apex of the equalateral triangle, where at the moment is found the upward facing 12 inch woofer sitting on top of the kitchen utility ladder. The giant snowflake, the two upright Stars of David, and the 'Ferris wheel' are all twist turned to be facing the apex face-on. In other words their full cross sectional diameters are focused toward the apex. In brief, two points of the equalateral triangle form a side along the wall. The third point is out in the room, the 3-step kitchen utility step ladder, the apex. Mid point is in space between the ladder and the table at the wall on which sit the other two points (two hanging faceplates), the getter blaster consul, and a few sonic tuning devices. The flow tube is back toward the other side of the room, extending in a straight line out from the apex ie through point three, the end of the narrow plywood shelf on which are arrayed several sonic tuning devices including the 'ferris wheel', almost touches the rear wall. The 12 inch woofer most of the time is on the 3-step ladder as point three, and the 5 inch oval tweeter on the floor along the straight line between point three and the leading edge of the flow tube shelf. Right behind (beyond) the oval tweeter is the first standup mobile, and behind that the second, which is also sometimes behind the very far end of the flow tube shelf. The six sided mobile closest to the apex is raised higher in the air, at about face height (my face, I am about 5 feet 8 inches). The second is at roughly chest height to line up in focus roughly with the centers of the two upright Stars of David, and behind them to the center of the 'Ferris Wheel'. The six sided paper mobiles are focused so that one of the faces falls along the axis, so that when standing in front of the apex and looking along the axis I can see first the two paper-thin slices of the mobiles, (and vertically below the thin rods of the homemade mike stands), and behind them the cross sectional face of the giant snowflake, the center openings of the two paper Stars of David, and finally behind that the center opening of the 'Ferris wheel', all lined up in a precise straight line as a giant flow tube array. I hope this above description in the last two paragraphs gives you an adequate description, since it took some doing to eventually get EVERYTHING involved to line up in a perfectly straight line along a central axis, and took conciderable concideration in words chosen to descript the setup. Have you noticed the number of times I have mentioned PAPER? Paper works. It doesn't have to be wood, or plastic, or densly solid. An ordinary sheet of paper, cut to the right image, certainly works. In coming to the current setup, a number of different variables were tried in rapid succession. For instance: The two hanging faceplates were tried in different alignments, all relative to being focal points relative to the apex of the equalaterial triangle in which the apex officially consists of the center of the top of the kitchen utility ladder, (used for convienience for such, since at the moment I have nothing else around the house that can work better). I tried the faceplates focused straight toward the back wall, also straight toward each other, also reverse side out, then front side out, also spread wider apart and further back, also closer together and closer to the apex, and have finally settled on a spread of roughly 4 feet 10 inches between the faceplates, and the same distance to the apex of the equaleral triangle. (I suspect this is a constraint imposed by the size of the room. To wit; a bigger room may handle a wider spread with perhaps better results. I tend to suspect this, unproven until tested). Originally up until two days ago I seemed to be getting a better Mono in Stereo with the faceplates reversed (reverse side turned outward). But with the advent of the two six sided paper mobiles it was obvious that the best sound results with the fronts of the faceplates facing out in a normal manner, but turned to be in focus with the apex of the equalateral triangle. As for the flow tubes (two giant snowflakes or a giant snowflake and supergiant snowflake each mounted through the centerhole of a centeral snowflake), with each snowflake array per se sitting about 5 inches in the air and about 5 to seven inches apart on a horizontal support stand made of stiff copper wire), now with the two six sided paper mobiles added into the sound stream as conducers it does not seem to really matter precisely WHERE these flow tubes are situated. Formerly, it seemed that certain precise locations for them were essential, in particular one directly behind each of the suspended faceplates and turned to focus along a straight line to the apex of the equalateral triangle. Now, it seems, I can put them farther back against the wall, or right close in immediately behind a suspended faceplate, to the side of a faceplate, or away at a long distance some where else in the room. Any of these variables in location seems to have a marginal difference in the resulting sound stream with no location being specifically right on, with its effect there obvious and unquestionable. What does seem constant is that things seem to work best (sound best overall) with the flow tubes all tuned to focus along their long axis to the apex of the equalateral triangle, or also to an invisible mid point in the center of the equalateral triangle itself. I tried turning the flow tubes sideways so that the thin wedge resultant in the profile of each giant snowflake in a flow tube was focused as a side-by-side pair toward the apex or whatever, including focused laterally in straight line North/South or East/ West alignments in the room, and at times seemed to get a boost in overall volume and noise and a bigger seeming orchestra or band the result, but so far have found that the best overall fidelity, and point source sonic distinctions for instruments, and sonic dispersion for the whole of the sound, etc., comes from very discrete focusing of a flow tube along its length, pointed like an arrow toward a target, for instance to the apex of the equalaterial triangle. Which brings in the finality of this report and the reason for the Update. With the setup now sitting as just described in the preceeding paragraphs, fine tuning is now sufficient to allow a new round of tests whose results I shall report in a moment. A first comment though is that I seem to have come full circle now, back to a condition that was being reported off and on in experiments of last winter. And this is that the setup has now become very selective again as to its response to one tape vrs another, or even to one track vrs another on the same cassette tape. What I mean is that I can fuss and fine tune until I can hear Gene Krupa's drum solos in Sing Sing Sing rocking the floor (so to speak) on an el cheapo pirate factory Benny Goodman tape circa 1936 - 1940. And then put on a cassette tape of (for instance) George Girshwin's American In Paris, and hear nothing but muffle and totally mono symphonics. Until I fuss and fine tune again and again, until inexorably out comes some stereophonics, coaxed by little ifs and bits out of the sound stream into something major, including resonantly grunting bass fiddles, and typanis, sonorously resounding away in the background way off to the left, or the right, depending on the orchestra, all in mono, never forget this, unless I tell you otherwise. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. September 4, 1992 3:30 P.M. Which brings us right up to the moment of my last tests before writing this Upate. That was to take all three of my touph hardship case symphany orchestra tapes and work them through back and forth one after the other, listening to the sound stream and constantly adjusting the focusing of the various sonic devices. What has been learned is this. When the focusing settles in, you have something to talk about. Needless to say, those symphany orchestras are VERY POWERFUL MACHINES. Concider that they are contained of more than 100 instruments spread out in a sitting that fills a concert stage, and that they play at soft to loud volume, and when LOUD, it can include ALL of the instruments including a battery of grunting bass fiddles, ALL pouring forth at the same moment. Now I honestly can't say that I have ever heard that POWER ever reproduced in a stereo system, no matter its sophistication or cost. But I did hear glimpses of it today. It was at lower volume than (of course) the symphony playing in the flesh. But you have to understand that when resonances got so powerful that EVERY object in the room began to vibrate at rates that tingled the fingers, you know you are dealing with a potentially MIGHTY POWER of which just a glimpse of it was being heard, but it was already sounding MIGHTY, not ear deafening loud, but MIGHTY no less. What I mean by not 'ear deafening loud' is that when the fine tuning became just RIGHT, off and on, you could hear the presence of the mighty orchestra gell and take shape in the room. The tympanis, for instance, would immediately attract your attention way off to the back and off to the side, since you could FEEL vibrations coming directly from them. A battery of violas had the same effect, grabbing your attention because you could FEEL their sonic vibrations coming toward you, moved well over from the tympanis. And so on. Like I say, this is interesting, because the only source of the sound stream doing all of this mighty resulting work is the two four inch tweeters from the getto blaster hanging in faceplates, the 8 by 5 inch oval car speaker, and the 12 inch woofer, all resonating openingly and unabashedly in the open air, a supposed theoretically impossible situation. I can disconnect the woofer and still get the sonics of the orchestra, but not the MIGHT in the strength of the deepest vibrating bass notes, this seems to be directly the input of the woofer kick assing the sound stream by pure open air resonances. The point is that in careful listening, there turns out to be another ingredient in the sound when reproduced entirely from a 100% monoral source (all of the above in this Update has been described according to all four speakers being wired in series to the Left hand channel, the Right hand channel for full official stereo has not been hooked up in any test, even for a few seconds, for two days. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update cont. September 4, 1992 3:30 P.M. I can at this point reproduce the symphonies in stereo using a monoral only setup. However the effect of percieving the MIGHT of the symphony orchestra, as well as its size, at this moment is gained via hooking up the woofer in open air resonances into the sound stream. This does not mean to say that the MIGHT cannot be gained without a sonically responsive woofer added in. All it means to say is that at this moment, with what I have at hand in order to work with in terms of sonic enhancing and rejuvinating resonating devices, I can't seem to get the MIGHT without the 12 inch woofer. The next experiment is to try two (or more) larger six sided mobiles and see what these might do. I suspect they will do quite well. But won't know until I actually get around to making them and to try them out. To do this I will have to take the template for the existing mobiles to a Xerox to get it blown up to about twice the size, and to find some stiffer form of paper, or paper cardboard, or paper thin but stiff plastic which will be strong enough to be able to hold the larger mobile in an upright position gripped on a mike stand with an alligator clip. I think this (the grip) is the way to go since I have more exact control as to exactly where the mobile is located, as opposed to merely hanging it from a string somewhere where it is sonically hot in a room. Hanging a mobile from a string in a sonic hot spot in a room is the final target for design of sonically enhancing six sided (or twelve sided) mobiles, but this will come after the fact of using such mobiles locked in rigorous locations to test their sonic activities. The mobiles I've been discussing are rather simple; a Star of David surrounded by a hexagram frame. The two I have at the moment were hand made (as decribed prior above) by cutting three faces using a template, folding each face in half, and assembling it into a six sided figure. These have a paper band about 1/2 inch across forming the hexagram outer ring, and the arms of the Stars of David are all paper bands about 1/4 of an inch across. An earlier much smaller hexagonal mobile described in one of the recent previous Updates (got from a local shopping center with hologram carboard its design and intended to be sold as a quote 'christmas tree orniment' by the salesgirl), seems to work in a unlikely new place. I have simply dropped it onto the woofer and let it bounce around in the bass strike resonances of the woofer. At times you can hear it rattle a bit, bouncing around on the cone, and it does definately bounce into and out of hot spot resonance positions, but in the overall, for the moment, it is adding an improved albiet subtle sonic 'airframe' ingredient into the sound stream, something that is immediately missed if you take it away (lift the mobile away from the woofer cone). And so, that is it. The gist of the short story being that the MIGHT described above as being inherent in the reproduction of a symphony orchestra is coming only from and entirely from harmonically focused room resonances and echoes, (re-enforcing 'sense' within the chaos), not a twit or tat of it coming from anything remotely resembling a speaker box or enclosure. In fact, I am inclined to think it would be impossible to get the MIGHT into a sound stream from any enclosure, or speaker box devices, and in fact it might not be possible to get the MIGHT from any reproduction system other that one performing in 100% Mono. Wait, let me go upstairs and check that last remark. I'll simply hook the thing up in stereo, and try it with, then without, the two external resonating speakers (the woofer and 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter) hooked in, and see if I can or cannot get the sense of MIGHT using full official stereo. Here goes. Be back in a few minutes. I am back from upstairs. Well, it is pointless discussing the symphany in pure official stereo mode, with both Left and Right hand channels hooked up, only the the two faceplate speakers working. It was distorted and high pitched, and no bass. End of a 10 second experiment. With the two external resonators (12 inch woofer and 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter) also hooked up to the Left hand channel while playing the system in full stereo, there was more sonics in the stereophonics, and bass, but it was mainly all assuming from a sound image area re: the wall behind the hanging faceplates. Plus a crisp compression or squeezed ingredient most noticable in the sound. But in disconnecting the Right hand channel and hooking the Right faceplate speaker to the Left hand leads, a change immediately takes place. Sonic presense spreads out and takes hold of the room. I can feel a glimpse of the MIGHT of the orchestra again, for it turns out that my perception of such SOUND is coming from all around me including behind me, as well as dominantly in front of me from the direction of the main giant sound image area. In some regard, I am standing inside the symphany orchestra - not far away in front of it in the listening audience seated and silent except for stiffled coughs from unhealthy audience members. So, it seems I was right, at least in the ambiguities of the experimental setup that I have on hand to play with in the upstairs room, that the MIGHT is a feature being generated only from a 100% Mono source at the moment, using generators that function entirely in the mode of open air resonanators which rather than pouring forth the sound, kick ass the sound stream echoing around in the room itself, to regenerate and rejuvinate original cross echo and cross harmonic reflections that comprised the original MIGHT of the orchestra before it was recorded to a media for later reproduction. Most importantly is the ambiant 'presence' of sound you can hear around you, beside you, and behind you, and mainly from up front, ambiant presences you simply cannot get with speaker boxes no matter how expensive the stereo set, presences you get in a concert hall or modern motion picture theatre showing a big budget thriller, but not there in the flat wall wide spread images produced by a big boxed pair of stereo speakers, including expensive studio monitors. At this moment, when hearing or sensing the MIGHT, I am in the position of the conductor (or more specifically the recording mike(s)), rather than in the position of a listener sitting a long distance back in a concert hall. The sonic rejuvination taking place upstairs in the room is hearing what the mike hears, rather than hearing what the stereo system is reproducing, or hearing what the sound engineers wanted you to hear when they mixed the tape. Now of course there are artificials in the sound stream, due to the mixing, and quality of recording devices including mikes and their placement and the media itself including the pirate factory quality of cassette tape mylar. But notwithstanding, there has been a major circumvention taking it well away from an inevitable final finished product, back toward a reproduction of the original product, in the form of the sonic experiments taking shape in the room upstairs. For instance, now I can hear MIGHT in a symphony orchestra, for the first time in my life outside of a concert hall. What I have in fact is unusually ambiant dispersion, something extremely hard to get in the design of ordinary stereo speakers for instance for the audiophile listener. This 'dispersion' fills out the whole of the environment with sound ambiance, but at the moment in its embodiement upstairs is still lacking the other main ingredient of a true stereo setup, and that is the distinct point source of all given instruments imaged most clearly within the background Left to Right spread of the dispersion. True enough I do have instruments sounding from the Left, with others sounding from the Right, but for the most part you have to kind of have to listen to determine exactly where precisely in the sound image that instrument is working. Certain instruments at this moment can be heard to be precisely located, but what you want ideally is to hear ALL instruments clearly and precisely located without effort. And this I do not yet have. In fact I might not be able to get it all the way correct, due to the fact of a mike placed too close to one or another instrument, that instrument hence dominating all nearby other sounds, and so on, in full stereo the problem of over anxious miking being solved by the mixing, etc., after the fact of the recording. These factors I do not know enough about yet, to comment on with definative confidence. In further keeping with thoughts for the future, the best thing to come up with next is an embodiment in genuine official stereo, where sonic tuning devices can be plopped in one or two hot spots in a room and result in immediate improvement in stereo imaging, dispersion, and/or fidelity of the existing sound system working in full stereo with for instance a pair of speaker enclosures comprising the sound generators as the source for the stereo sound stream. Not forgetting to mention the same (or similar such) devices plopped down in the room to get an immediate kick into the sound of a TV, or clock radio, or anything the purchaser wants to hear sound better, including of course the dynamite of eardrums and sanity, the getto blasters. Doing the things as described above in 100% Mono is interesting because it speaks upon principles of sonic propigation, projection, resonances, and reccurances, which are obviously at this moment not concidered as valid or possible in the theoretical scopes of existing teachings of sonics in the labs or universities or for the home stereo buff. I can see much more. HOW CAN AN ARCHANGEL APPEAR IN FRONT OF YOU TO GIVE YOU A MESSAGE ----------------------------------------------------------------------- For instance how can an archangle, ahem, I mean archangel, appear in front of you to give you a message? It has to be by a form of projection from a higher plane of vibratory existence to a lower plane (the third dimension), and as far as I can tell, the mechanisms for such projection occur in similar mechanisms as are found for sound. There is a proviso to this; a projection of an archangel would also embody resonance and recurrant higher absolute properties of light, some of whose mechanisms are similar to those of sound but in which, when motion is involved in the source of the projection, also involves attributes of relativity theory at the third dimensional level. But not for archangels ... no special relativity theory in the principles of this higher dimensional energies in light. Never the less... Oh, one little sidebar I can tell you, a mini short story revealing how much effect the two new hand-made paper mobiles have on the sound stream. When first setting them up, and removing all of the paper cardboard tubes, in playing around with the two open air resonators in the vacinity of the apex of the equalateral triangle, I thought I had finally blown the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter. I started with it sitting on top of the kitchen utility ladder, and the woofer on the floor behind the ladder. Then the positions of the two were reversed. Then finally the oval tweeter was on the floor directly under the ladder. Yet for over an hour, no matter what I did, the oval tweeter wouldn't perform. It would sit dormant, until I tapped its cone, then it would start to rattle and crackle producing no other sound, then quit again after a few seconds, whereupon I would tap its cone again and get some more feeble crackle and rattle for a few seconds. I thought for sure I had finally blown it. And was starting to think greviously of what I might do to get another one somewhere that might work as well, but for the heck of it left it hooked up as I continued to play around with other sonic devices working to get things tuned in a better way in the room now that I could hear more due to the input of the two new hexagram shaped paper mobiles. Then all of a sudden the oval speaker kicked in, entirely on its own, working as handily as ever to kick the sound stream with strong resonances, and there was no trace of rattle or crackle whatever. Apparently I had done something to dissolve a hidden form of chaos that was interfering with both the woofer's resonances, and the oval tweeter in particular. This time there was a new difference, however. In days past you could see their cones move when sonically responding. But as of now the oval tweeter's cone is so locked solidly in impact vibrations, to all extents and purposes it is immobile, not moving at all, until you touch the cone and can feel how powerfully it is vibrating. You can't even feel it operating when held in the hand, unlike two weeks or so ago when it vibrated so strongly when held in the hand that it could almost seem to torque, when brought into focus in a way that amplified the bass sonics. The same is now true for the woofer. You cannot see in anyway that its cone is active. Not even by putting your ear right to it can you hear anything significant coming from it. Even dust and lint settled to its cone is not bouncing around anymore. Only by touching the cone can you tell if it is working or not. Or by disconnecting it, then the ingredient it is imputting vanishes at once and you know for a fact that it was working with great input, even though you cannot hear anything whatever with your ear cocked right to the face of the woofer. At this point, with the current setup in the room upstairs, the setup is so fragile that occasionally I can hear the oval tweeter rattle for a few seconds as some hidden chaos temporarily enters or leaves the sound stream as I tap and adjust different tuning devices. But it doesn't worry me. It only serves to confirm the notion of the Elephant And Butterfly's Wings in modern day theories of chaos, where theoretically a commotion as small as the beat of a butterfly's wings can have a rippling effect, spreading out to effect something as major as the weather system itself. I can see this concept at work as plain as day in the sonic environment of the room upstairs. Particularly when it come to making the merest of slightest taps on an object, and hear a huge ingredient in the bass ranges of sound suddenly start to demuffle and come swelling out into the room, causing objects to start vibrating with a power of their own. Then with another mere tap to the aforesaid sonic device, that bass power abrupty diminishes or fades again, at times into only a weak almost unhearable muffle denoting where there are supposed to be bass notes. End of mini story. The three symphany tapes in question used for the above described experiments revealing the existence of MIGHT, are: Grieg - PEER GYNT SUITES, Opus 46, Opus 55, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Jonel Perlea conductor. Cassette tape by Allegrettto ACS 8030. George Gershwin - AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, American Radio Symphony Orchestra, M. Brown, conductor. Cassette tape by Allegretto ACS 8034. Rimskey-Korsakov - SCHEHERAZADE, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Jonel Perlea conductor. Cassette tape by Allegretto ACS 8003. POWER IS MIGHTY WHEN IT CAN MOVE MOUNTAINS ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 7, 1992, 1:30 A.M. Only a few moments were spent in tests today. Specifically, a quick demo was made to a visitor demonstrating MIGHT in a symphony orchestra, with the 100% four speaker Mono setup, vrs ordinary normal two-speaker two-channel stereo, then the 100% four speaker Mono setup again. When hooking back up to 100% Mono to conclude the demo, some time was spent trying to discourage a rather unsettling high pitched distortion from the sound stream, which had actually been in there when the system was first turned on to start the demo, until after a few feeble moments had passed and the visitor decided it was time to leave. I kept muttering about how something must have gotten into the system overnight because I couldn't seem to get rid of the high pitched strange stuff, and had no really good bass to boast about. To no avail I fussed and fumed with sonic tuning devices, knowing this demo had not been a good one. Out by the car as the visitor was leaving, he mentioned something about perhaps the speakers not being wired up the right way. A light dawned, because in fact the wiring was not one of the things I had thought to check when trying to diddle and dork my way through attempts to get rid of the strange noise, even though the MIGHT was there to hear in the symphony and the presence of the orchestra nonetheless, not great might mind you, but enough MIGHT in the Mono sound stream to reveal such might's existence to the visitor. So upstairs raced I to double check the wires. Sure enough. The two remote speakers (12 inch woofer and 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter), were wired in reverse, the reverse seeming to have been the way things ended up hooked together sometime late yesterday evening just about the time I shut everything off to call it a day. With proper phase back in the hookup, plenty more in the way of MIGHT was soon back into the soundstream, new levels of the stuff in fact, more than enough to turn me on into trying a number of variables in the placings of some of the sonic devices. Two changes resulted right away; one of the paper mobiles on the home-made mike stand was moved into position to the exact center point of the equalateral triangle; and all of the flow tubes were twist tuned to be focused directly toward the triangle's center. Some more MIGHT began to be glimpsed in the background of the music. There, a larger and larger image of the orchestra was beginning to make sense (take shape), in fleeting glimpses and facets, stablizing then dissolving in the sound stream. There and then not there, like I was getting about half of it at any one time, for a few seconds getting THIS, a few seconds later getting THAT, in the orchestra, the rest of it not got producing distortions and muffles throughout the sound range and image picture. Nevertheless these partial glimpses got to be surprisingly revealing, it was more than I had ever been expecting in recreating a sound image with what I had to play with upstairs. In fact it almost got to be awesome. First of all the volume suddenly began to swell by noticable degrees even though the volume knob was never touched, until I eventually had to turn the gain down in two stages by 15%, and it was still louder than when I'd started. But there was more happening. I began to hear some awesome potentials in POWER in the mighty scene starting to take place in the backgrounds of the sound image, bearing in mind that we are talking symphony orchestra with over 100 instruments all horking away in loud play in crescendos in for instance SCHEHERAZADE by Rimskey-Korsakov. What I had was POWER that was about half there. The music was fracturing and flipping in and out, first you could hear a mighty tympany, then just muffled distortion, then a few bangs of tympany again. It came and went. The same for all parts of the orchestra throughout the sound range, including batteries of bass fiddles, and violas all working together in glimpses, then gone, as they kept flipping in and out of the sound image in fragments. Yet in these glimpses you could easily begin to sense the 'real time' existence of the MIGHTY MACHINE called the symphony orchestra. The point is in being able to hear glimpses of this mighty device in the first place. That alone demonstrated that the information is in the sound stream, even though ALL of the bass, and ALL of the stereoscopic imaging, is being generated by positive cross harmonic re-enforcements cascading downward from the higher frequencies being produced into the open air by the resonators (tweeters and open air woofer) to generate the sound stream. And then on went George Girshwin's 'American In Paris'. This took more work, because the dynamics of this recording seem to be poor to begin with, the tape always comes on weak sounding when first I play it in sound tests. But notwithstanding, this time when I put it on it was pretty good, quite strong, right from the start. There was lots of touching and tapping, and very light tapping, of the flow tubes and resonator speakers and every so often a lucky strike brought in MORE and gradually the POWER increased. Let me tell you about this. The POWER got so great, in fits and starts and few second glimpses in and around the loud racket, that nonetheless a crescendo passage was hit by the orchestra so mighty that the Right hand faceplate suddenly took off abruptly and sailed right through the air, off the TABLE, landing on the floor with a CRASH and a tangle of speaker wires pulled from the tabletop, followed by utter complete silence. (Fortunately the floor is covered with beige carpet). Thus ended today's experiments, with a totally unexpected demonstration of potential POWER. The Right hand faceplate is still lying on the floor in the upstairs room. I feel simply just like leaving it there till tomorrow when the buzz hits again and I will head up the stairs and see if I can tease or coax more stability out of that POWER. I'm not sure. I may need to start thinking of some better technology to do this. The point is, I now know, that POWER IS THERE!. Well there are other reasons besides temporary laziness. A French translation version of our Virus Alert anti-virus package is now underway and in fact the 'visitor' mentioned immediately above actually came over with French Translated versions of some of the program's drivers for me to look over. And in the meantime it turns out something I did with a bit of help from friends last winter to be able to simultaneously Scan and Clean virus using McAfee's SCAN anti-virus software may have some small time market potential sold as a support utility for users of SCAN, since no one in the world apparently has been able to work around the problem of how to SCAN and CLEAN virus simultaneously using the McAfee stuff, except I did it in an attempt to improve our store sales of a menu driven adapt of McAfee's SCAN (called SCAN/START) sold at shareware prices before the advent of our VIRUS ALERT package. The visitor is encouraging me to get the thing out (the automatic scanner and cleaner for SCAN) since no one else has one, so this is taking some work by me to redo the thing to run as a stand alone utility. In today's hack session I got it swung around so that pressing one key engages a sequence of events where (for instance) a virus infected disk is scanned, any virus encountered is cleaned, the disk scanned again, and when no virus is found, it ends at a prompt flashing away saying 'NO VIRUS FOUND', all engaged with the press of one key. It takes the right frame of mind, and the right rational circuits at work in the brain pan, to plow around in fishy codes to get such things to work right, particularly since I am using syntax techniques developed from ordinary batch files and a special compiler to create this stuff and batch files can be notoriously kinky, as everyone in DOS knows. Today I was lucky, several hours were spent and I must say the time passed without making a single mistake in altering numerous code structures. Such luck is not always to be expected, in the computer universe. And then I went upstairs and discovered POWER. And started tooling around with it to such an extent that suddenly one of the open air resonating tweeter speakers (consider the physics for heaven's sake) suddenly took off and sailed throuhg the air off the table, bringing the play to a halt with abruptly nothing but echos of CRASH fading along with the echos of the music. So, let's see what happens tomorrow. I already have a few ideas playing around in the subliminals in the background of the mind which might work to help stablize the POWER in a sympony orchestra when played through a mono stereoscopic system, such as is seemingly being evolved in inexorable steps in the room upstairs. P.S. Today, before the system blew apart, before I started tapping into some of the heavy duty POWER that sonic projection techniques now suddenly are offering, I double checked the 8 by 5 inch oval speaker to see if it was still functioning under the agility of 'impact vibrations' or was that a fool's notion that I had come to accept the day before, since the last time I saw any impact vibrations at work (no visible motion whatsoever in the cone of a speaker) was last spring. But yes, most certainly, there could not even be seen so much as a glimmer of a vibration effecting the cone of the 8 by 5 inch oval speaker, and yet as I slowly turned it this way and that faced into the sound stream I could feel strong vibrations come and go, but the strongest sounding bass sonics came into the sound picture when the hand-held oval speaker felt functionally vibrationless. Plus, touching the cone produced an immediate Whappppp ! This was interesting, because a couple of weeks earlier when first I set up the upstairs room and began experimenting, at the time I first tried the 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter as an open air resonator, it could vibrate so strongly in any bass notes that it could literally torgue your hand, resist change of direction like a gyroscope. Not only that, the thing could end up pumping away so vigorously that you could think it had suddenly become a loudspeaker because for sure you could hear strong bass coming directly from it with the ear. Now, with impact vibrations in effect due to better overall control of random sonics in the room, you can hardly hear the thing play at all, even though qualities in the sound stream sharply drop the momemt you disconnect this 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter, coupled long distance to the sound stream's main image by sonically resonating impact vibrations. As for the 12 inch woofer, sitting on its magnet, facing the ceiling in the open air on top of the kitchen utility ladder, at this moment you can scarcely feel anything at all, barely more than a slight tingle under your probing fingertip when touching the cone, when it is seemingly working at its best to kick ass the bottom bass of the sound stream. So impact virbations are definately involving the 12 inch woofer too. This woofer does not really give you more bass, or deeper bass. What it does at this moment is give you more TONE in the bass, more presence, in particular more open air sonics surrounding the bass tone sources in the sound stream, with more stereoscopic depth back toward the rear of the orchestra in the sound image, the depth leading to more MIGHT, and the MIGHT, inevitably, when stablized, to this new thing, called POWER. I haven't yet had a chance to check things over to see if I can get any of the POWER without the 12 inch woofer. I expect I can get some, but will find for the moment that the woofer is needed to make the POWER more obvious and easy to generate. An impression to correct. Actually the woofer at the moment is sitting propped by a brass hexagon nut about two inches across and a half inch thick from a pipe fitter's junk bin, so as to be titled forward by about 30 degrees. The 8 by 5 inch oval tweeter is below on the floor under the woofer, tilted forward by about 60 degrees, supported in place with its magnet propped by a roll of masking tape. It was within moments of setting up these two resonators in this fashion that the hanging Right hand speaker (faceplate) took off from the table and hit the ground when some REAL POWER suddenly loomed out into the open in super resonances during a crescendo in AMERICAN IN PARIS by George-Girshwin. SPECULATIONS INDULGED --------------------------------------------------------------------- I probably couldn't duplicate the exact circumstances no matter how hard I tried, in getting a hanging faceplate to soar off the table again. However that wouldn't be a goal anyway. I remember reading once how dismayed Telsa was when a resonating experiment he was performing triggered a minor earthquake in downtown New York, and when the authorities finally homed in on the source of the local six block disturbance that was starting to shatter windows, they found Telsa in a panic desparately whacking away with a sledgehammer on a vibrating device that was attached to a ceiling support post in the middle of his laboratory. I don't think I will ever want to trigger that kind of earthquake, but did trigger enough to move heavy weight by the sonic resonances of a symphony orchestra. In reconcidering the pipe fitter's hexagon nut, I should mention that the woofer works quit well sitting on its own facing straight up, except the magnet climps to the metal top of the kitchen utility ladder and a lot of extra vibration passes through the coupling to the ladder and it seems these vibrations are distructive rather than constructive. I have used a roll of masking tape as a miniature support stand for the woofer, simply sitting it face up on top of the roll, and also using the roll to tilt the woofer forward. I only had a momentary time to play with the woofer propped at a 30 degree angle by the hexagon nut before the physical system got trashed by POWER. but with an apex point of the hexagon nut faced straight forward, there seemed to be a substantial gain in certain desirable ingredients in the music. For sure I had just made substantial gains in cleaning up the mess in the music (the fracturing, the only half there) leading to a really worthwhile sudden gain in pure fidelity when the POWER crash occurred. How much the hexagon nut as a geometrically sympathetic support prop for the woofer contributed to the fidelity, and the sudden looming increase in POWER, are questions I don't yet have answers for, without sounding fantastic the wrong way. The next round of tests could tell more. It may just be that the hexagon nut helps, just as you might expect, since it is six sided, but intrinsically otherwise is not a 'device' needed in the technology. Now, I am starting to sound psuedo scientific silly and don't want to do that so will quit, because normally I am not moved to run at the mouth or dribble from the brain. Except that this POWER thrust that moved the hanging faceplate off the table has got me very curious. It was also because, right at that moment, I was beginning to hear a very MIGHTY engine starting to take hold in the pictures of sound far back beyond the wall in the room, constituting the symphony orchestra. There was bottom bass starting to well up that was totally beyond anything I was suspecting was inherent in the music. And yet can forsee (having as a newspaper editor once upon a time stood right behind the three bass fiddle players of a major symphony orchestra playing 'New World Symphony' by Dvorjak, and know what the power of such an orchestra can be like when playing in a school gymnasium in a small town, where I was a reporter/editor, once upon a time. The reason why I was able to stand behind the bass fiddle players listening, is that one of them was a friend of mine. We had played numerous jazz and dance gigs together a couple of years before, and I had no idea he was also a professional symphonic musician until suddenly there he was setting up his music stand with the symphony orchestra during a federally financed provincial tour. Apparently he had been playing with them all along but didn't like to boast. Now, get the picture, this fello was 5 feet 4 inches tall, and was playing the largest sized bass fiddle you can get. I asked him what happens when he has to hit the high notes at the top of the fiddle. 'Just forget them', he said. There were three high notes he'd just tried and muffed at the height of some frenzied passage in New World Symphony, for instance, he said. The thing about symphony orchestras is that they can produce very awesome statistics in terms of decibles when playing, but these kind of decibles do not seem to do physical damage due to the generally harmonic nature of the music, witness performers who are still playing or conducting with accute hearing at age 90. On the other hand I remember a girl in 1967 who distained rock or psychedelic music until some people she knew formed a band and opened at a former motion picture theater stripped bare of seats with the audience on the hardwood floors and band up on stage where the movie screen used to be. So around the corner she came to hear the band. When I tuned into the situation a couple of hours later, she was standing immobile, transfixed, her face thrust straight forward into (almost into) the oriface of a gigantic speaker, two styrofoam coffee cups their bottoms punched out cupped over her ears and pointed foward into the mighty speaker like megaphones, and I shouted 'WHAT ARE YOU DOING!, and she shouted back, over the din, 'LISTENING, ITS FANTASTIC!. And I shouted back in alarm, 'BUT WHAT ABOUT YOUR HEARING!. And she shouted back, 'THAT'S OKAY, YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE THE PLEASURABLE SENSATIONS I'M GETTING'. That is what she said. So I left her, standing there directly in front of the humongous speaker box. She didn't move for another two hours till the band quit. And this was the first time she had ever heard a psychedelic band live, a 23 year old woman. Imagine! I sure wouldn't do that, I risked enough with my ear cocked to the ride cymbal for four years as a jazz and dance drummer. There was one time when my sense of hearing failed, as a drummer, this was circ. 1972 drumming in a band called Amethyst Star Family featuring a concert rock approach, lyrical, doing a noon hour concert in the main room of a big city Art Gallery, and band associates kept coming forward to the temporary stage between songs to tell me to tone down, to cool it, the drumming was TOO LOUD, and I got to the point of thinking I was hardly playing instead of the usual rock-like whap and rebounds on the skins, and still the urgent persistent requests to tone it down. The puzzling situation in this instance was the accoustics. Somehow, I could hardly hear what I was doing, compared to the mighty racket that was getting out there into the audience. I have to assume that some kind of sonic projection was taking place due to some unique sonic characterists of that room, or the particular way we had set up the band that noon hour. I do remember wondering for a while after if I was playing too loud because I couldn't tell, but had no doubt about the people who were trying to get me to tone down, this is the only time they ever approached me while playing with frowns on their faces, and these frowns were urgent to say the least. So I must have been playing REALLY LOUD, but couldn't hear the volume from where I was sitting playing the drums at the back of the temporary stage. And another (final) reminis. One of the tapes I have played with recently upstairs was made 10 years ago with a walkman sized IAWA cassette recorder with two cheap stereo mikes taped to a tabletop, in a bar in downtown Ottawa on Rideau street, featuring Tuesday night sessions with a band called MOON MEN comprising a handfull of musicians mainly from the Military Band and the RCMP band. This band's approach was something like Spiro Gyro. It turned out, unexpectedly, that one of the three young Lebonese brothers who owned the bar was a sax player, who got up and joined the band and I got recruited to get him playing a number with soprano sax on tape. Sure I said, since he was a friend of mine. Well, the band started playing an 'opus' ad libbing as they went along. However, as soon as the opus started, up jumped a big beefy fello who also knew the band, and, grabbing a cow bell, starting CLONKING on it, loud, metronomic, precise, not missing a beat, not slipping up once, through the entire piece, about fifteen minutes long, nothing but CONK, CONK, CONK, CONK, with the band playing in the background. Well, that was it for that recording, and that set. The band, when finished the piece, just politely put down their instruments and called a break. You can still hear the cowbell clonking away for the entire piece on the 10 year old cassette tape I have been using for a few sonic tests upstairs, since the whole background of the tape is filled with live audience sounds including waitresses going around and heavier drinkers complaining about the heat. And yet the purpose in telling this little episode is to tell first of all how interference from unexpected negative sources can harm or spoil, but also that the tape is still useable for sonic experiments because of the fact that it is both a poor quality recording made with a small pocket sized device, and the tape itself though 10 years old is still a live audience recording. Therefore all of these things combine to offer a good source for experimenting with how resonance sonics can improve on a poor original hardware technology, while at the same time making the tests easy to judge in terms of Mono in stereophonics. Being able to hear point source voices separated in different areas in space in a Mono sound source tells you instantly that you are getting stereo, for instance. SPECULATIONS FINISHED --------------------------------------------------------------------- I am now beginning to think in fact that an ideal system might be three similar generators, in an equalateral triangle configuration, the generators having to be specially designed speakers geared to work with heightened sensitivity as open air resonators. Like I say, there may be a new technology required to pass beyond a certain point in these experiments. But, maybe not. Every time I seem to start thinking with depression about a barrier, shortly after I pass beyond the barrier like it was never there. Except for the paper mobiles. They took 4 1/2 months to gell from idea to actually doing the work, which was easy when the time came to actually make them. The moral to this story is to not except limitations, because typically they are not there except in the lesser intelligent regions of the mind. SOME THINGS NEED TO BE REPORTED ----------------------------------------------------------------- Update September 8, 1992, 4:15 A.M. Today I did play with the system for an hour this afternoon with no breakthough advances to report, just some more gains in the overall fidelity and the theory. First it was rummaging through the coin can for enough pocket change to head around the corner to Cumberland Drugs (today is a Holiday) for a roll of 24 shots of 110 color film and back upstairs to photograph the Right hand faceplate lying on the floor about three feet away from the table, just in case anyone wants to dispute that this whole dialogue is fiction. Besides, I wanted a picture as a reminder. Took a couple of shots through both the left eye, then right eye, to see if I might end up with stereo in the photos. Then back to some sound tests. I tried refocusing the flow tubes to different alignments, including uniformly focused all the way to the back of the room to the 'ferris wheel' and found from this that setting up the flow tubes on either North/South or East/West alignments, relative to the four resonating speakers which are focused at angles, has for the moment marginally improved the overall fidelity of the system in a stable way. I began with symphony, and at the last, switched over to the GOLDEN FILM THEMES 2 tape, which came on quite good, in fact I went downstairs for a cup of coffee and while sitting in the livingroom could hear subtle sonic booms overhead from the infamous turbo roar cut of James Bond's 'Diamonds Are Forever', only this time there was TONE instead of roar in the turbo. At the moment the two faceplates are back into original positions focused directly toward the apex of the equalateral triangle where sits the 12 inch woofer tilted forward by 30 degrees to face the main giant sound image. One thing I did do that is different. Today I took the trouble to go into the system and remodify it slightly so that ALL of the four resonators are resonating in the open air with as little contact with solid physical objects as possible. For instance the Left hand faceplate, being supported using a copper wire empty coil slightly different in size than that for the Right hand faceplate, had always hung with the back of the magnet in contact with the thin piece of garden stake holding it up hanging in the air. By placing a pencil in a certain way under the coil, tilting it foward slightly, I was able to get the Left hand faceplate to hang free of all other physical contacts for the first time. Similarly, I modified the prop for the 12 inch woofer, using a roll of masking tape as a base with the woofer on top and the pipe fitter's hexagonal nut wedged in behind on top of the roll of tape so that the magnet of the 12 inch woofer is not making contact with the metal top of the ladder, ie., no longer gripping it with a vibratory kiss. These minor alterations nonetheless seem to have improved the overall hi fidelity of the system. The drums are sounding less crisp and more tonal, and hot instruments like trumpets and flutes are clearer. In fact for one moment I heard something unique. As I was standing behind the kitchen utility ladder making accutely small adjustments to the tilt and focus direction of the 12 inch woofer, I heard something which instantly caught my attention for it was such an anomaly; there was a sax directly in front of me, then a trumpet way off and far back over to the left, then the sax directly in front again, then the trumpet loud and clear way off far back in the distance over to the left again. It was a trumpet, and a sax, trading riffs one bar at a time in the music, back, forth, back, forth. There they were, ping ponging in rythm back and forth in precise full stereoscopic imaging in the sound stream, with the system at 100% Mono. So that puts to rest forever any and all doubts that Mono in Stereo may be an illusion or impression due to better dispersion, perhaps, in Mono regeneration of a sound source. Not so. Full stereo is without q