Tonight I was playing around with my chimes.  I made a new one tuned to 432Hz.  If that frequency has no real meaning to you, read my very short paper on "What is Sound".: https://www.decware.com/newsite/DECWARESOUND.pdf

When I was striking the chime I know how much energy I put into it with the strike, and then I listen to the intense volume of the chime and the 2 minute decay as it releases all the energy, and it become more than obvious this is an extremely efficient energy conduit. I wouldn't even be surprised  if the output energy exceeds the input energy... seriously, in fact I'm pretty sure it does sometimes.

We know that Tesla almost wrecked a large building with a small resonating device strapped to a support column in the basement...,This is blatant proof that you can exceed the input energy by thousands of times with resonance/vibration/sound. I experience this with the chimes. You might think it's SPL, but sound pressure level has nothing to do with it.  It is frequency.  Frequency is a notch in the key, whereas Frequency and harmonics is like the whole key.  To bring down a building the frequency had to be very low. Probably sub 1 Hz. The harmonics of all the individual building parts are what kept that horribly slow frequency not only alive but allowed it to build into a near earthquake that could be felt for blocks.

You can see then how difficult it is to build speakers since they are meant to reproduce sound without actually making any sound while doing it and how easy it is for a particular frequency or group of frequencies played in the right order to suddenly flex the cabinet in sonically damaging ways not to mention the model resonances in the speaker cone itself... This is what probably drives the industry to low efficiency / high mass drivers... of course around here we know it is possible to create cabinet designs that are self-regulating making possible ultra light weight cones moving at lightning speeds.

To leave you with another demonstration of the "output exceeds the input" of sound, back when Decware was just getting started as a speaker company, we made an Imperial horn driven by a single 12 inch driver in a 1 cubic foot sealed box inserted into the cabinet backwards.  The speaker module itself played down to 100Hz and was nearly 100dB efficient at 1 watt / 1 meter.  This created a ultra-high gain bandpass horn-loaded subwoofer with a super high Q at 28Hz.  Believe it or not, the speaker achieved 22dB of gain from 100 Hz to 22.5Hz.  I played this speaker on a frequency generator every day during lunch break to hear this incredible bass wave.  It literally moved a beer stein collection on a friends shelf in a house across the back ally and 5 houses down.  It also had the second shift worker in the other direction about a half a block away running out in the yard in his underwear on at least 9 occasions trying to find the little FK that was making all the bass.  That was over 250 feet from where I was playing the horn.

It was experiences like these, and I've had hundreds, that drove me to create this business because I could see a magic in sound and simply had to have it. Of course at that time I had no idea about the universe, 432Hz or any of that crap, and I didn't need to know it because I could see it happening before my very eyes. I actually had sound grab me once like one of those little peas in the anti-gravity documentaries where sound levitates tiny almost weightless objects in a lab. Hell, they should have been in our 1991 lab!  I was standing on a milk crate in front of this monster speaker adjusting something on the top of the cabinet, (sandbags) and my friend Paul started playing his bass guitar through it on 800watts and it literally moved me back and forth in a twisting motion that would have took a pretty serious heavy duty machine to replicate.

With all this never ending talk of free-energy but never a single diy plan that actually works in 20 years of the internet, I don't think magnets is where it's at.  It will be sound.  Think about this for a minute... we are trying to create free energy devices, motors basically, that perform work against gravity and inertia.  Well, what if we just eliminated the gravity and inertia... then a flea powered device could move mountains.  The most documented thing that creates anti-gravity is sound.

Happy listening!

Steve

Steve said: "speakers are meant to reproduce sound without actually making any sound"

I wonder if this is part of why Open baffles are so well liked.  It seems to me they would produce less sound of their own than would a closed box.  

Brian

Interesting. Fun stuff!


Brian