Wood is Good
p2pnet.net News:- Once upon a time, you didn’t need electricity or electronics to listen to music. All you needed was a person-powered drum, or flute. Or a stringed instrument, maybe.
You blew through a flute, but the sounds made on a guitar or a drum depended, and still depend, on resonance: or if you want to get technical, on frequency response. And wood was the perfect material.
JVC engineer Toshikatsu Kuwahata also likes wood for sound reproduction and he was determined to find a way to use it in speaker cones, says a story in Spectrum online here.
Actually, making wooden cones wasn’t the problem – being able to make them in quantity was.
Like the parts of an instrument, speaker material has to somehow bent into shape and must also retain the shape. Kuwahata thought he had the solution years ago when he glued paper-thin sheets of wood into a cone, says the story.
But developing an economical manufacturing process proved impossible – until five years ago, a colleague, Satoshi Imamura, was dining at one of his favorite restaurants.
“Imamura contemplated the texture and malleability of the dried squid he was chewing.” says Spectrum online. “He asked the waiter how it had been prepared, and the waiter explained that the squid had been soaked in sake.
“Imamura and Kuwahata tried soaking the speaker wood in sake. It worked! (They also tried Suntory whiskey; it didn’t. Imamura isn’t sure why, but he theorizes that there is something unique about the acids in sake, which is simply fermented, as opposed to those in whiskey, which is distilled after fermentation.)”
This year, JVC started offering the EX-A1, an executive desktop-entertainment system with 30-watt wood-cone speakers – its first wood-cone speakers based on Imamura’s process.
It ships in May at a suggested retail price of US $550.
