------------------------------------------ A L L S O N I C ------------------------------------------ I can image being at an International class stereo show with Manufacturers from all over the world demonstrating their wares and lastest models in different rooms and areas throughout the convention center. My demo is set up in the middle of a large conference room of a that size that could hold 200 people if filled with chairs. A curtain divides this room in half behind which is my secret demo. The demo has taken some time to set up, especially in terms of where to recur the giant sound image. I had to choose between the 'sound' appearing more up front in the room, or 'imaged' further back behind the curtains. Having an image up FRONT or close up around the listeners would be like having them experiencing the performing of the music. Having the image more traditionally farther back (behind the curtains) means the listening point of view is the same as an audience listening to a performance on a band shell or stage. So I decided to have the sound recur behind the curtains. In other words, farther back. This is because I expect most who may come in are audience listeners anyway, rather than musicians and performers. But now it is 10 AM and the main door is open. People are walking back and forth in the halls outside. Every so often someone comes in. Every so often a few come in in a cluster. For people stepping into this room it is quite different than entering any other room in the convention center. I hate the feeling of closed stuffy rooms, so think of this room as extraordinarily bright with light. There is something extra clear in the air. The whole ambiance of the room scintillates with a higher energy. It could even be that a greater presence is being beamed in from upstairs to help this demonstration get its message across. I am doing whatever it takes to bring in listeners. These people are expected to appraise what they hear in terms of a stereo system being competitive with whatever price range they think the sound compares with. Nothing in my demonstration is being said about the kind of speakers or technology involved, or what company does or doesn't make them, since there is no company making them, and no stereo equipment is on display in the vacinity of the curtains. This is a teaser market survey, etc., and the carpet is liberally spread with farm overplus glistening in from the outside world of phony enterprises. Its not that this is a scam. It is simply that I am making a demo, no product to sell. I am actually demonstrating a concept no one believes is possible no matter how much you try and tell. Only I am not telling anyone this. My lips are zipped. I am not telling anyone anything. If any chance listeners and critical specialists want to believe that there are more speakers behind the curtains to produce the sound than there are musicians behind the curtains, well, let them think so, one way or the other. 'Nice sounding orchestra, but poor accoustics', one person has said, 'Who is the band leader, is it local?, any idea if they're available for a dance being held at the school where I teach? When they finish playing see if you can get the band leader for me, and give him this card'. The person gives me a business card. I didn't have the heart to tell this person it was the Spitfire Band Swing Orchestra playing on a cheap $2.98 cassette tape. I told the person that if they can make it back at 4 PM., there will be quite a surprise. Ho humm was sort of the response. 'Give the band leader the card'. And away that person goes as if heading for something really important, really vital; 'Panasonic's Super 92' Gold 94' Season Opening Premiere', or something like that. This was shortly after I'd thrown open the door after turning on my sound system. I keep saying to everyone that at 4 PM. I shall open the curtains and reveal the huge orchestra playing nicely at low volume behind the curtains, filling the room with the dance hall sounds of a professional orchestra. Mind you, I have kept the volume low rather than high, didn't want to disturb the distributers in the other rooms, due to the long distance Airframe effects in my demo, if you know what I mean. So I am lucky. At 4 PM. enough of the curiousity crowd have wandered back, enough to make it worthwhile to open the curtains. Without fanfare I pull open the curtains, then crank up the volume. A HUGE atmosphere balloon, I mean an ENORMOUS sound, swells into the area. And... the area behind the curtains is physically empty, almost. What IS there is a small table in the middle of the room. On the floor under the table sits an ordinary getto blaster consul of the Fisher 8400 class, price range in Canada about $350.00. It looks so uselessly tiny sitting there. Its antenna isn't even extended or raised. The antenna is lying flat as if carelessly left unadjusted along the back of the consul, just free from touching one of the clamps, to boost every one of the high and low frequency sonic resonances passing through the in-the-air metal arm of the consul's antenna but if touching the clamp it would have also imparted a hard ingredient into the sound stream. A small red light, the gain indicator, is leaping up and down in a vertical scale on the cover of a cassette tape compartment, the red light scale working entirely out of synch with the sound itself, having been built for an entirely different physics than the powerful pulsating music manifesting in the conference room. On the table itself there is no sound system. As for system stuff per se, there is nothing whatever but one speaker box, the little Left hand moulded box from the getto blaster. It looks so pointlessly small, sitting there by itself on the table, in fact sitting on end, pointing up to the ceiling. The box is sitting on a large metal brass hexagon shaped nut rumaged from a bin of factory plumbing parts at the junk yard. The nut is about two inches across in cross sectional diameter and makes a heck of a good little speaker stand on the spur of the moment. The point it, that this speaker isn't hooked up. There is no sign of the other speaker box since it isn't even in the room, it is out in the trunk of my car at the moment. Nice to behold are two gigantic atomic-like crystaline lattice objects. With many elaborate colors they sit in front of the speaker box, hexagonal arrays made with dozens of clear plastic snowflakes glued together in six sided lattices, plus a few more flakes below and on top to form points, sitting positioned out in front of the box like two elaborate mobiles a few inches off the table, since it takes two such mighty lattices to fully stablize the recurrance harmonics in the third dimension. These cubic pieces of wonderous art are sitting mounted on small extender hexagonal posts out in front of the speaker box on the table. One can't help thinking they are peering upon principles in action in an atomic structure, blown up and magnified into cosmic proportions right out here in the room, as they view these sonic reflecting objects, their lights and facetings changing hues as you walk around the room. Of course no one knows that these are hand made sonic enhancing conducers. Everyone thinks they must be some new kind of light show like a toy from Taiwan, rather than a gift from the higher side of Reality. In the two far back corners of the conference room in the other half of the room now revealed when the curtains were opened, are giant snowflakes sitting upright on tables, each flake gripped in place with bits of sponge pressed into the open top hole of hexagonal hyrdro extenders being used as support posts. At each location the giant snowflakes are in a pair, sitting exactly about as wide apart as a pair of human ears. There are small white signs everywhere, with artistic lettering saying: PLEASE, TO TOUCH IS TO SPOIL. To complete the description, there are 24 giant snowflakes in the room, each made of 13 sonic snowflakes glued together in a hexagonal shape using Gell Crazy Glue. For instance two more pairs are placed on temporary shelves near the two front corners of the conference room behind the listeners. In fact I guess I should tell you, there are also 12 super giant flakes comprising 31 sonic snowflakes each, tilted upright at 60 degree angles from the horizontal and turned sideways to the main focus of the giant sound image by reflective angles ranged at 60 degrees also. A gizmo called a 'ferris wheel' is revolving. It is too complicated to explain its design in a few words but one thing I will tell you is that the six giant snowflakes in it are made of stiff paper, cut out with a pair of scissars. There are also several flow tube arrays. There each consist of two giant snowflakes mounted on a horizontal rod and each of the two giant snowflakes on a rod are separated about 5 1/2 inches apart. I won't go into detail explaining how THESE were focused, because that part of the setting up, took a lot of time at the last minute, just before opening the doors at 10 AM this morning. There are also a few single sonic snowflakes sitting in hot spots around the environment, pinned in place by small dabs of liquid honey, the honey having nothing to do with the principle of these tiny energy/action enhancers called sonic snowflakes. All the honey does is prevent the sonic snowflakes from moving around in the intensity of sound vibrations in the room. And in final conducing, several paper mobiles are hanging around, each having six sides or leaves made by three full sized paper starflakes formed together to form the six sided globular mobile, each starflake comprising a twelve sided star made of two Stars of David, one rotated by 30 degrees. The people who are in the room are at once curious about these many different hand made geometrical devices. The scene is maximized to the nth degree and is really revving up.... I crank up the volume on the getto blaster consul and the room really begins to reverberate. The system is playing a Manhatten Transfer cassette tape featuring their famous live performance of 'Tuxedo Junction'. The huge bass of this track begins to hork away in mighty roars filled with echoes, not to mention the band stand, and the rock festival sized audience out there beyond the band is in a second major sound area. The listeners start exclaiming since no one has ever heard a live performance like THAT before on a stereo set. The live performance has an audience which seems to go on forever way back into the depths beyond the rear walls of the conference room, like a rippling sea of excited people clapping along fully half a beat behind the beat of the band. I advise some listeners to close their eyes and hear the sea of people who are clapping all the way back to the far distant recesses of the sound image. These claps are real, they do not sound like frying bacon, or the splattering of raindrops, the typical sounds for the world's best stereos, expect for mine. Behind the small table, midcenter in the conference room, the Singers and Band are spread out on a stage almost as wide as the conference room in total. But the walls are deceiving, since the image of the live performance is far larger than the conference room itself, due to the demo's controlled principles of recurrancing, inherent in the sound stream. 'Hey, what's going on, I was way up the hall and around the corridor in the bar when I heard this fantastic sound... WHAT...'; someone just coming in the door talking thus stops in their tracks. See what I mean about 'Airframing'? . At this moment my system is playing a cut from the Golden Latin Favorites cheap cassette tape, followed by a Xaviar Cugat track circ. the 1950's, then the frenzied street corner scene from Side Two of the Dick Tracy sound track, then Caravan by the 101 Strings Orchestra. People are pouring in in droves, something about THIS sound attracts them. 'This is glory', says a listener listening to Caravan by the 101 Strings Orchestra. 'I'll bet this is what it musta sounded like in the studio during the recording session, except for the walking camels, you know, before everything was mixed into tapes and whatnot, you know, the finished product. It has to be, my system is completely custom made and it doesn't sound in the slightest like WALKING CAMELS. By the way, where IS this system'... and so on. Suspiciously, people are eyeballing the table in the middle of the room and its single small speaker box. But since nothing seems to be coming from it, walk on. One of the listeners who is trying to do a superior authority trip on the negative, has been arguing for instance that the equalizers have to be almost calibrated by Santa Clause to get the best effects from the best audiophile stereo sets, but a Fisher Model 8400 getto blaster has practically no equalizers, and for heaven sake the four simple equalizers on the consul on the floor under the table are all set to maximum so obviously the person using it hasn't the slightest idea of what they are doing, besides, it isn't working properly because only one string of speaker wire leads is coming out and up into the back of the single little speaker box sitting on the table, must have been left behind from a previous demo, etc., etc. This specialist is demonstrating how observant they are. "Oh wait a minute, its spliced!, and the other single wire is going out to the wall, and is splicing out in three more directions, must be wired in series, couldn't see the wire at first cause its the same color as the carpet..." But finally this nationally self-advertised specialist (I know who it is since I've been in their High Tech Stereo Store before, and seen their self-proclaiming ads for months on end on TV) gives up and agrees that the above mentioned custom made set built under the specialist's personal instructions can't even begin to compare to a sound like THIS in the conference room. Old habits can die hard in some people. 'It's just G R E A T !' is that specialist's most oft quoted, most joked about, line. On the sly I reach out and adjust (refocus) one of the giant snowflakes on its temporary little shelf, in the front Right corner of the conference area. This is easy to do since the shelf is at about the top of my stomach height relative to a body height of about 5 feet, 8 inches. After about 3 seconds delay, the sonic effect gells, and it is as if a little more volume gain has been added into the sound system. Many people notice the change, thinking maybe some new technology has just been turned on as part of the demo. For instance more vibrations can be felt in the coffee cups several people are holding. I go to adjust the other giant snowflake of that pair sitting about as wide apart as a pair of human ears), and oops, oops, Oh No! abruptly the bass frequencies start going into a turbo roar, heading straight toward a total collapse in chaos. Talk about RACKET! Even as I look around the mindless turbo roar of the bass is getting louder even as the rest of the sound is rapidly squeezing up, like a worm snuffing up and vanishing from existence. Oboy. Oboy. Talk about emergency. God I have to be so careful. Turning the giant snowflake verrry slowly back to its previous position. And Lo and Behold am I lucky, because the whole thing stablizes again and the sound in the conference room suddenly gells and glory be, is better than ever. Thank God my hand didn't start to jitter in the adrenaline rushes until after the emergency was over, because I never could have retuned it if my hand had even a slight jitter, so subtle, so discrete, was the tuning at that precise moment, it taking seconds for any change in the sound stream to gell anew after merely TOUCHING any one of the sonic objects. I am looking over my shoulder, hand still reached out toward the shelf near the giant snowflake. In looking around, I see that nobody has really noticed me or what I was doing with the giant snowflake, standing there at the shelf my right hand touching one of the giant snowflakes. Eyeballs big, looking around, not at the people but toward the giant sound image. You see, the sudden turbo of the bass frequencies heading straight into a 'Collapse In Chaos' had obviously caught everyone's attention and there are thoughts banging in the air, that this was supposed to have been part of a demonstration. But it wasn't, it was just me trying to go for an iota more of sonic ultra fine discrete tuning, and almost blowing the setup. Just to be safe, I go over and refocus a couple of the sonic flowflakes, or flow channels if you want to call them, and deem that the overall sonic recreation in the room is a little more stable, at this moment in time. However there is still a touch of an intuitive uncertainty inside, the way I am feeling about things, and the feeling centers on the 'ferris wheel'. So over to it I go and give it a discrete adjustment, just ever so slightly turning it through a small range where it sits upright on a small shelf along the rear right wall of the room, and, ahah, I knew it, there is a distinct overall change in the quality of the sound, not an obvious boost in volume, but in a form of a new clarity in the background, to wit, a slightly discolored echo-like sound in the background range of the music (toward the rear of the giant sound image), changed its timbre and became more real sounding. The 'Ghosting Echo' effect vanished. It had been a slight problem with the cross talk echoes working back and forth in the stereo background of the music. It was now gone. Nobody, I think, would have heard a distinct change when I refocused the 'ferris wheel', although a few people did look more alert and turn their heads peering around the room, not sure what it was that prompted their keen listening. 'Wonder what kind of Cross Over Networks are being used ', mutters someone with a goatee-like beard with some kind of monitoring instrument in hand which doesn't seem to work because the technical type with the beard can't seem to find a specific place to focus the big instrument's mike port. Apparantly this individual is an observer on the sly from a major audio corporation, spying out the competion on the sly, but obvious in appearance that everyone knows that spy is taking place. Such is big business. 'I don't think Flat Curve Response matters', another listener is heard to say aloud during a pause between tracks being played in the room. 'Well yeah hey no way there's gotta be some kinda spec sheet with the flat curve responses, no one can build speakers that sound like THIS these days without getting the flat curve response tested in an anechoic chamber lab first...'. This particular talker is soft skinned round faced middle aged tall with round small glasses and talks with a hooked finger poised in the air. 'Wonder where they've got them hidden', he adds. Funny thing is, at the point where the person is saying how they don't like the sound, too 'live' too 'real', not smooth enough, someone tells the old tool to shut up. Anyway, I'm not really listening to this kind of nonsense, this babble, this chatter. I'm busy watching the audience's faces as I walk over to a small stand near the rear of the conference room, and first double checking the single little oval speaker (propped up at a 60 degree tilt in the open air) to see if it had skooted out of place during the turbo roar (it had a bit but readjusting it takes only about five seconds) I come back and stoop down reaching toward the feeble looking getto blaster consul sitting on the floor under the table, and turn up the volume a bit. Actually, I turn the volume back and forth very slowly through a small higher range, until I find a new 'hot spot' for the volume gain to take maximum effect in the peaks and valleys of the system's basic volume responses. When the best gain comes into effect in the sound stream, I know it is because of final overall resonance resonsponses consolidating their moire pattern effects in the air and the solid materials in the room and the walls, and cavities beyond the walls, all imparting input into the resulting sound. Plus rebound echoes coming back through the open front door of the room from more distant sources out there in the conference halls, due to the 'Airframing'. Needless to say, these people (the listeners in the room) are impressed. But they are puzzled, where is the sound coming from, the ceiling? behind the walls? where? I smile, and turn up the volume some more. No one can seem to find a 'head in the vice' optimal listening position. Well, I would have been surprised if they had found one, since there was no 'head in the vice' when I'd set up the system during the dawn hours. No matter where you moved around, you could hear the sound in full stereo, even when standing at the back of the room against the rear walls, in which case the giant sound image would be heard to be entirely up front at the other end of the room. Which is entirely correct for my kind of demo. A new buzz begins to take hold of the room. 'Where is the sound coming from'? everyone is asking. Ie., the sound generating source they mean. The listeners are walking around trying to find out. Two unused $25,000 Tanoi speakers are sitting against the wall around the corner inside from the door that opens into the outer hall's corridor. The Tanoi pair are spread apart like a stereo pair and are the most expensive pair I could borrow on short notice. They are not plugged in. There is utterly nothing coming from them. Yet around these speakers certain people are gathered and mutter about how impressive they are, even insisting how they can hear the speakers working at maximum efficiency! This is what I call fooling a guru. However it is the wives who are alert. The wives keep telling these self deceived suckers that they are imagining things, the pair of Tanoi spreakers simply aren't working. I find it hard to spiritually like guys who argue and have logic like that. 'Yeah, yeah, I can hear it', a man says with a strange swimming look entering their eyes, ear cocked close to a Tanoi, feeling its fine wood, insisting they can hear it play, even though its speaker wires trail out from behind and come to a coppery stop on the carpet, kept leaning his ear to a Tanoi and hearing it, wouldn't believe his own senses or intuition, wanted to believe his cunning mind, its true, there are many people in society who can be so asleep by such nonesense. Its why I don't ever want to argue with anyone about the sound system being demonstrated in my conference room. Just to emphasize the point, I recruit a couple of volunteers and we truck the big Tanoi speakers out into the hallway, and close the door. The point being made I open the door again but leave the Tanois outside in sight of a security guard and come back inside. Now it is getting right to the nitty gritty. Something is starting to become obvious about what's in the room. All there is are three single little MONO speakers, not even a foot across, wide, or deep, not even mass produced in cheap moulded plastic boxes in an Oriental factory enclosing one five inch paper cone tweeter as a driver, and two metal one inch tweeters as exciters, that dummy is sitting on the table in the middle of the room and is not hooked up. Only three small open air speakers wired in series in MONO are doing ALL of the work in generating the sound stream. In fact you can't even tell they are working until putting your ear to about a foot away from one, then watch your ear drums. The best is being produced entirely in the room tuning use of the sonic snowflake and starflake controller objects. They three speakers hang from elastic bands. The cheap paper cone and small piston center of any one of the three open air speakers themselves are totally immobile, locked solid in impact vibrations, so locked solid you can't see so much as a glimmer of vibration or blurr. Physically they look like they are not working at all, so perfectly are the little speakers working in generating the sonic manifesting harmonic energy which fills the room. I smile, and turn up the volume some more. One listener has been aware enough to cock an ear close to one of the single little speakers and is surprised, standing back looking around hoping that no one had seen the look on their face, since this is one of those type of people who is always concerned about their image and appearance. Someone else, ignoring the little sign lying on the table which says: PLEASE: TO TAMPER IS TO SPOIL touches a large geometry object sitting in front of one of the little speakers and spoils the sound. In a hurry I get to the table and hovering over it, re-adjust the geometry object and in an instant the glorious sound is back in full. Not anyone really notices this mini adventure, because that careless person had hardly touched the geometric object and I could have (to all extents and purposes to anyone watching) not moved the thing at all when refocusing it precisely. They would have thought I was another stray cat in the room curiously inspecting artistic objects. The object as already described contains six giant snowflakes arrayed as a standup device like a gigantic crystaline atomic lattice, six sided, with points top and bottom, and is one of two sitting in front of open air resonating small speakers, playing no differently than if you held a speaker from your stereo set pulled from its enclosure and held in your open hand. This FANTASY is still going full rev, so in the fantasy the following happens: As a prop, the cardboard carton that had held the getto blaster when carried from the store, is sitting open against the wall near the entrance. In the box is the usual clutter of stuff, the wrapping, the white styrofoam retainers, the user's manual, the guarantee. I switch the sound system to my favorite FM station, and pause to listen. Oops. I go over and slightly adjust the cardboard carton. A faint trace of so-called FM hiss disappears completely. There is a profound new kind of silence in the room, including between the words in the station break. There is not a trace of hiss. It proves in an instant that such FM hiss is not caused by frequency drift in the broadcasting of the FM stations. After the station break, after the commercials, the FM plays two tracks by the Frank Purcell Orchestra. The set continues with a new lyrically harmonic, very lively music by a Cosmic Orchestra name Amethist Star Family, the music is entitled 'On The Sea Of Discovery'. Just for the heck of it, I switch the radio to the city's number one AM ROCK station, and except for more noise in the raw statics of Rock and Roll, there is no change in the stereo or the awesome size of the band playing away in stereo images right down to the bottom most points of the bass notes. The lower echoes of the bass drum is rocking the walls. Two announcers chatting back and forth in the 'On Air' booth can be heard about six feet apart, you can even hear a wheel on one of the announcer's chair passing back and forth over a piece of cellophane on the studio floor. All of this, over an AM station, a station which has to be, by fundamentally defined physics, totally 100% MONO, except that my demo is re-creating everything from the station, and on the recordings, in full 100% stereo, after the fact of the sound re-generation, using the sonic devices being employed in the room. Some of the listeners are beginning to discover that the whole sound, everything, is coming from 100% pure MONO. It has been doing so all along, starting this morning. The three small open air speakers sitting around the room wired in series to one channel of the getto blaster are doing ALL of the work in generatating the sound stream. And yet, how is the single stream issuing from the speakers being rejuvinated into such a Glorious loud volume of sound? And gigantic stereo Image? The change in the sound of the voice of each discoverer is hard to describe. Free happy shouts are being heard amidst the chaos resolving itself into the most harmonious kinds of human inner activity. A New Ager is eagerly talking with a friend, saying, 'of course, it makes sense, the single all seeing eye is able to see into depth, so Mono sound in stereo, why not, even the American one dollar bill has a symbol of the all seeing single eye on it, I didn't just make that up, the whole of America was supposed to be already translated by the middle of this century but it hasn't happened yet, and why...? and why...? Ahah. But. No one knows what the surprise is in store for tomorrow. Tomorrow the plan is to try an entirely different array. Tomorrow there will be a central six-sided hexagram array with an open air resonating speaker (no box or enclosure) operating at each of the six nodes of the hexagram, plus a seventh at the middle in the point of center. The speakers in use will be as open air as if you merely held a tweeter or woofer in your hand and turned it around in the air freely while it played. Instead of the typical tiny tinky racket any such speaker produces, these open air resonators will, due to the system's structural array and the sonic tuning devices to be deployed, produce a surround sound presence so strong, with so much P O W E R, and such a mighty H A N G in the reverberating echoes, it will seem like the listeners are walking around on stage mingling amongst the musicians in an orchestra itself. To aid in this, I've arranged to have the door opened to the next room adjoining, so that I can install and focus a few sonic devices in the other room to kick in more 'Airframe' principle in the long distance tuning of the demonstration, and plan to have the main door of my demo room open, with a couple of sonic tuning devices focused and in place at the far ends of the main corridor outside. I am hoping, if everything works like it is supposed to, that tomorrow I can start talking about Cosmic principles rather than just some curiosities which have been historically overlooked in the local Earth theories of the physics of sound. Lets see what happens tomorrow, hmmm? March 10, 1992 Revised June 12, 1992 Revised Oct. 25, 1992 Revised Oct. 28, 1995 R. S. Livingstone. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� RALPH'S HOME DEMO 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� ..................... The following is taken from the end of a novel called 'The Farstar Stories'. The novel is in a shareware package called FARSTAR.ZIP. The same passage is also in NEWSOUND.ZIP, Appendix.3. The 2 stories ALLSONIC, and RALPH'S HOME DEMO, are two different points of view as to how sonic experiements demonstrating Stereoscopic sound from 100% Mono sources can be done with the right knowhow including at home with nothing but a cheap old Mono color TV set as the sound source. ..................... ........... 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� Something I have noticed ...(NANCY HAS RECORDED FROM HER PRIVATE THOUGHTS SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY IN HER FARSTAR)... is an effect which can only be called, I guess, a Mono in Stereo effect. The interesting thing about THIS is that it occurs in many areas of perception. For instance, I have noticed that in playing around with stereoscopic effects in Farstar with one eye closed, it is clear that, when I get things J U S T right, there are major separations between colors, so much so that I can create a stereophonic image using such colors, which is obviously STEREO even with only one eye, a single all seeing eye, to see them. The difference is there though, you cannot perceive a sense of real space between the colors, with bits of dust or the surface texture of paper or such between the closeup and farther indepth parts. It is something like hearing stereo sound with one ear covered. But not quite. When Ralph had us over to demonstrate how he was getting STEREO from an old MONO TV set, the room and house was filled with echoing STEREO sound including the deep bass notes, all from one single 4 inch tweeter (that's what he said) in the old TV's cabinate, in spite of which, the way he had engineered a new technology sitting around the room in the form of six and twelve sided perfectly geometrical devices, big bass notes were vibrating the floor, I couldn't help but notice the significance of THIS, concidering the sound source was the old TV - everybody KNOWS what old original TV sets SOUNDED LIKE!, it was the world's worst criticism of high tech. But Ralph's demo was totally and completely DIFFERENT. You could hear that it was without doubt STEREO, produced entirely from a MONO sound source. Boy oh Boy was SLUGGO ever impressed. We could hear someone's footsteps in a subway station to the far left of the livingroom, and voices talking behind the TV set at the far other end of the room, and echos of a subway train rushing forward into the station, in a BATMAN cartoon. The separation between the voices and the footsteps was more than 25 feet, I noticed at once, concidering the deep depth beyond the corner behind the TV set, to the footsteps along the wall at the other end of the room. I quietly paced the distance when no one was looking to make double sure that at least 25 feet was the distance. But... the TEXTURE of the STEREO was different, cupping my hands over my ears and pointing the palms forward like clamshells made the whole thing sound IMMEDIATELY like full LIVE REAL STEREO, that's what I mean by TEXTURE. The sonic leap in STEREO effect by cupping the hands over the ears, is entirely the OPPOSITE of what happens when the hands are cupped and pointed forward over the ears when listening to true STEREO sound generated with two more more stereo channels and speakers. The hand cupping was something I discovered, when listening for different effects. "Hmmm, Sluggo said, trying it a few times. "What a difference", he remarked between sips from a Pepsi can. But Ralgh was suddenly yelping with joy the moment he tried it. "All these weeks and I was wondering WHERE the total STEREO presence WAS in my settup, and THERE IT WAS, ALL ALONG, just by CANCELLING OUT overabundant cross room interharmonic echoings", he shouted, listening so intently and so eager, his hands cupped over his ears, facing in this direction, that direction, walking rapidly through the whole house and coming back to stand in the doorway of the livingroom, listening. "NO DOUBT"; he proclaimed; "there it is, REAL HONEST TO GOD STEREO, and ALL I am using is one single four inch TWEETER in the TV set to generate it, plus the 12 inch woofer to give it some kick", he said, pointing to it sitting propped upright in the open air on a small stand on the floor at the other end of the living room, facing the TV set. "Its resonances are kicking POWER into the sound stream", said Ralph talking in eager, his hands cupped over his ears like clamshells, his head tilt wrong, his voice changed with an out of character higher edge to it. Careful, don't overjoy yourself, or you might win the Nobel Prize, mutters Sluggo, sipping fizz from the bottom of the can of Pepsi, a long s l o o p finishing the sentence as the can gets winged with a k o n k into the fireplace. Everyone laughs. When we asked Ralph how he's done this, this STEREO, all he did was grin and eat a handful of giant cashews. I5 months of research, he uttered between crunches, and I've barely scratched the surface, he said. Then Sluggo accidently merely TOUCHED the 12 inch woofer that was sitting propped upright in the open air on a small stand on the floor at the opposite end of the room facing the old TV, hooked in series to its Mono amplifyer. The woofer fell over bouncing on the floor, poof, much of the stereo quality vanished in the instant. Instantly Ralph was over, telling Sluggo not to worry, the whole thing was very fragile, trying to get the woofer to balance upright again, propped up from the rear by its magnet on a roll of carpet tape. After a long moment of fiddling and fuming Ralph got the thing to stay in place long enough for a quality stereo effect to come back into the sound stream. This time, Sluggo cautiously tapped the edge of the woofer with a forefinger, and some sound disappeared, then wetting his finger in showing off with a bit of style, tapped the edge again and a whole new swoop of deep and clear bass ranges swelled into the sound, even more than before after Ralph had re-established the knocked over assembly. "Wait a sec", said Sluggo, and tried it again, and lo and behold MORE power came into the sound stream, with Sluggo walking around the room holding up his finger as if IT held the power, then saying to Ralph, "I don't know what yuh did to crank up the power but it wasn't my finger". Then it was my turn. One thing I noticed right away, you could not see the paper cone or center piston of the woofer moving so much as by even a tiny vibration. Yet in bending over and putting my ear close to it, I could hear a major volume level coming from it. And when touching the cone, the woofer abruply responded with a loud RASP as the cone hammered hard against my fingertip. For some reason, the words 'impact vibrations' came to mind as I lept back in alarm and the RASP abruptly stopped again. So I tried just touching the rim itself, lost some sound with the slightest of lightest taps on the woofer's rim, then got the sound back with the lightest touch I could muster. I SWEAR the woofer did not move at all, so lightly did I touch it. But it obviously HAD moved minisculely enough to 'refocus the rejuvinated sound pattern matrix' said Ralph. THAT much difference could make or break the sound, nevertheless. I began to appreciate how truly delicate some things might actually be that are going on in Reality. When nobody was looking I moved a newspaper on the floor ever so slightly with my big toe and heard more improvement in the sound, then the improvement disappeared when I touched the newspaper again with my big toe. Ralph noticed, of course, watching me discretely. He came over and privately said you're the only other person who has ever caught on to the extent to which ROOM TUNING is needed to get this sound, he said. But, he said, I think devices can be designed that can get around the problem of room tuning, he said privately to me sweeping his arm around to show the geometrical devices already set up around the room. "These are crude prototypes I built by hand", he said, "they are about 15% of the potential". And then the demo was over. The demonstration was illuminating for another reason. In inter- dimensional experiences, for instance when lying full awake when physically sound asleep, I have always noticed that stereo vision in these scenes is as by a single all-seeing eye, that is, that stereoscopic is there, but not the same as with two eyes wide open in the physical world. The TEXTURE of the SPACE is DIFFERENT. So that's three different places where the TEXTURE of SPACE is different, even though stereoscopic depth and presence is in, er, full, no, er, uh, ah, obvious, effect. In fact, in all three - the stereoscopic effect of colors seen with one eye for instance in my Farstar Unit, plus Ralph's STEREO in Mono sound demonstration, and in interdimensional and Cosmic communications - the texture of space is similar. Interesting, but HOW and I mean HOW am I ever going to point this out to the ACADEMY. Even Sluggo, when I tried to show something to him in my Farstar Unit, was, ahem, quote, too goldarn busy right now sorry Nancy got things to do my Farstar hiccupped and farted this morning and I can't find the short circuit in the wire to the 'Sting' button and Eebles is due in an hour, an HOUR, and I can't get the 'Sting' working. So much for Sluggo. Poor guy the effort he puts INTO such THINGS. Oh, oh, I feel better for him already, He's just got the 'Sting' button working again. That hunch I see over there caressing the 'Sting' button and saying 'thank you Juh-Eee-Uh-Zuz' is Sluggo happy that he's going to be able to, quote, "Sow, Hoe, and Reap Eebles", after all. "Yes, lordwork is working full power on ME today", says Sluggo, getting ready to reap. (Out of nowhere a voice echoes in on Sluggo's Farstar Unit, captured in the room echoes of Nancy's Farstar in the replay she is just now cruising through, the distant voice saying): Hey, Sluggo, I didn't know you were BORN AGAIN'. 'Not', answers Sluggo back, 'that's what YOU were saying the day you got your grant back'. 'It wouldn't hurt you to say a prayer now and then', says the distant echoing voice. 'It wouldn't hurt you to say a few less', answers Sluggo back while sitting upright and starting to get hostile'. 'Whoah, wait', someone else hastily interjects over the Farstar, 'I thought we'd already gotten rid of all of the religious kooks'. 'Well, you're not going to get rid of ME', says the first voice, upping the shout to high volume. 'Already, have', says Sluggo, shutting his Farstar OFF. Some fades, and a few bars of nonsensical music, finish up the replay. Nancy shuts her Farstar OFF on STANDBY, and goes for lunch. R. S. Livingstone Oct. 29, 1992 Orleans, Ottawa, Ont. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� RALPH'S HOME DEMO - PART 11 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� ..................... Something I want to make note of ...(NANCY HAS RECORDED FROM HER PRIVATE THOUGHTS ALONG THE WAY IN HER FARSTAR)... is the latest demonstration made by Ralph, in which it is prooved that STEREO information is contained in 100% MONO sound sources. But, mmmmm, feel lazy today, don't much feel like writing, but, a few minutes to spare with nothing to do and Sluggo gone to the lunch room for coffee's for both of us and me with thoughts roaming around I want to get rid of, so here goes. Writing them down even no matter how poorly, can get rid of such thoughts, so here goes.... It was pushing into christmas when Ralph called us over to his house again. That was last week. I am now getting around to writing a summary about what happened so here it is. This time when we walked into Ralph's living room there was on the floor, a laboratory stand like ones used in the old high school days - it was a Fisher stand with a large white porcelain base and an upright post - on which was clamped a horizontal piece of 1/2 inch diameter copper pipe, from where were suspended from elastic bands four 8 inch woofers hanging suspended in the free air, all in a row, each about 8 inches apart, in the middle of Ralph's living room floor. The getto blaster consul on the floor over by the TV set in the corner was playing away, obviously, because you could see a little red indicator light running up and down one of the signal indicators on one of the 2 vertical indicator strips on either side of the doors of the blaster's 2 cassette tape decks. And something was playing loud and reverberating in the room. And I mean LOUD, and REVERBERATING, the, ahem, sonic BOOMS of the bass was causing the floor the furniture and my hair to vibrate. It was magnificent stereo in any language. There were cymbols and a triangle playing way off to the right, way beyond the physical range of the living room wall itself. And way off to the Left there were things going on in the music that were W A Y Y Y Y out there beyond the boundry of the left living room wall itself. And then the switch to the 'Save the Rain Forests' add. Someone had actually gone into a Rain Forest and recorded the jungle. There were hoots and howls and tweets and screams and chirps and whatever coming from EVERYWHERE beyond Ralph's living room wall, and in the living room as well. ALL of the sounds were point source, in this vast fantastic stereo image. I make special note of this because all of a sudden a loud high speed car came roaring in from the right and hurtled past us at high speed and continued far down the road into the distances of the park and expressway deep into the left behind the living room of Ralph's house, me, the whole time, standing poised in mid-move in freeze frame, a step half taken, a finger half raised in the air, the form of me frozen for seconds listening to this effect, until all of a sudden an announcer's voice broke in to advertise some urgent news being introduced by the speeding car. And then the kicker, the grinning Ralph telling us that; yes, folks, you just heard the station break, this is the famous station called '54 ROCK', it is AM Radio, it means the sound source HAS to be MONO, it CAN'T be stereo. And yet you all heard it, you all agreed that this is without question stereophonic sound, what you didn't know is that ALL of the stereo is coming from a 100% MONO source, all piped in from an AM station and run in series off the Left hand channel of the getto blaster through the five open air resonatng speakers Ralph has hooked up for this demonstration, and so on. I can remember Ralph saying, 4 of the generating speakers were the 8 inch woofers hanging by elastic bands from the laboratory stand, the fifth a 12 inch woofer hanging by an elastic band from another laboratory stand set back near the rear left corner of the living room. Mind you, not that five speakers were needed. Ralph bent down and fiddled with a worm pile of thin wires and alligator clips running helter skelter around the floor and the sound changed, not so big, not so boomy, not so wide spread, but still STEREO, and still fidelic (fidelic is the word Flo and Sluggo kept saying). At this point Ralph gets a couple of us to line up in the doorway to the living room to guess which speakers are playing and we all guess wrong. It turns out there is only ONE speaker, playing at this moment, only one 8 inch woofer, one of the four, hanging by an elastic band from the copper pipe cross piece attached to the laboratory stand. VERY IMPRESSIVE. How was it done? Apparently the plastic snowflakes sticking up in pairs around the room had a great deal to do with achieving the final stability factor to be able to go for the final iotas of focus to get the great range and fidelity, and the sharpening of the 'point source imaging' in the stereo itself, or something like this, as said by Ralph, the point being that extra clarity in the stereo-ness came from letting two of the speakers tilt and cling to each other as they hang suspended by elastic bands, to induce magnetic coupling between the speaker's powerful magnets, the magnetism amplified when the speakers are turned on. Ralph demonstrated this by hooking up a second woofer, and getting the two to hang separate, then tilting one back slightly until it came into reach of the magnetic coil of the second which sucked it right over, the center of the back of its magnet clinging firmly to the lower rim of the other woofer, whereupon the stereo-ness of the overall sound jumped like a door had been thrown open. Funny thing is, you couldn't hear this change if kneeling right beside the woofers, it was only when standing back that the stereo jump was appreciated, when right up close in fact the sound could seem to harden up instead of open out when the magnets coupled directly via physical contact of the woofers. To show us how much magnetic inductance was happening between the speakers Ralph got each of us to run our hands between the two hanging speakers (after de-coupling them so they hung suspended alone by their elastic bands), and oh wow creepy you could FEEL the magnetism shooting right through the center of the palm of your hand, it made Roger immediately think in fact that perhaps such sonic/magnetism could be conducive in Cold Temperature Fusion experiments, and made me immediately think of medical healing applications through such sonic/inductant magnetism. I should mention that in this case one of the 8 inch woofers was hanging by an elastic band that was twice as long as the band hanging the other so that the rim of one of the woofers was climped directly to the middle of the magnet of the other when the two were physically coupled, hanging there. Anyway, that is the story of the latest visit to Ralph's house. The plastic snowflakes were a gift from God, said Ralph, jokingly. They turned up on sale in a local giant toy and hobby store featuring big sales for christmas, and had been made to simulate a snowflake rather accurately, with most of the parts of the intricate design of the plastic snowflakes accurately in the form of 30 - 60 degree angles. A second version of the same snowflake image, the second being covered with glitter to be very rough surfaced, did not work at all as sonic conducers, according to Ralph. It was the smooth ones that did the job. Ralph had found that a pair of these snowflakes, mounted in a base made of a styrofoam piece cut into a hexagram, with the two plastic snowflakes set in the base at a 60 degree angle, was what was needed to stabilize the sound stream being produced from his 100% MONO sources so that the sound stayed much the same no matter where in the room you wandered, in contrast to very abrupt peak and valley and transient stereo effects so much in evidence in his first demonstration when he had had us come over to his house for a listen back in October. In all, there were a dozen plastic snowflakes sitting around the living room in 6 pairs, the location of each pair was not a real critical factor in that a plastic snowflake pair seemed to work in just about any place that was a sonic hot spot in the room, according to Ralph. Mind you, setting up the six pairs in a single hexagonal array definately was the quickest way of turning the TV set with its single little tweeter speaker, into a stereo set, according to Ralph. Mind you, a number of major problems still had not been solved, according to Ralph. For instance it still took adjustments of less than a 32nd of an inch to tune any one of the snowflake pairs and other sonic tuning devices set up in the room, all having basic six sided hexagram and twelve sided star matrixes featuring 30 and 60 degree angles. The point was that a whole lot more was able to be focused at once with a tiny adjustment of any one of the devices, much more than before, much easier to hear, with the simple inclusion of the plastic snowflake sonic baffles, the snowflakes being of size of roughly that of a teacup saucer. 'Ten minutes to set it up now, instead of three hours', was Ralph speaking at random. After that, the talk got too technical for my liking, with Dumglo arguing that the principle must be absorption for the sound to respond, and Ralph responding that its because of reflection and refraction, very much similar to laser light, and that even just one mike stuck up in the air recording a symphony orchestra on stage is capturing ALL of the sound that would be coming to a listener including the sideways cross harmonic room reflections and that the only reason that STEREO has never been heard in a MONO reproduction was the technology of the speaker enclosure itself which over the decades has supressed any chance of cross echo harmonics to be re-created, set up in a room after the fact, and so on. Can't see any commercial device out of this, at least, not right away, Ralph told someone. Tuning the whole environment to become a giant sound regenerator is one thing, doing it with a single device on display in a stereo store is quite something else, said Ralph. 'This can't do that', or some such thing, is how Ralph ended that arguement. I went out to the kitchen to eat pizza and left the boys to enjoy their brain buzzes, arguing, all except Ralph, he was getting everything BUT joy from the kinds of questions he was having to try and answer, expecially from the Department Head, although the Supervisor seemed to have caught the wind for he was interjecting on Ralph's behalf everytime the Department Head got really trivial. I've heard better questions in kindergarten. Anyway, the pizza this time was a lucky strike, a way better than average. I can remember me'n Ralph standing in the bright sunlit kitchen trying to feed hot pizza into our faces, the pizza dripping, Ralph between gulps saying how the plastic snowflakes had instantly solved problems he'd been fighting for over sixth months, now, for instance, batteries of violins playing high notes has philharmonic sound instead of compressed shrieks with an occasional philharmonic coming in after hours of tests as was the former case with the setups of certain sonic devices, before finding out about the plastic snowflakes whose effects mutually enhanced the four 8 inch woofers hanging in series from the laboratory stand. However, with this new system the philharmonic is there to begin with, but now there are other problems. For instance, even though it is a lot easier, well, almost trivial now, getting full STEREO and fidelity and such from a MONO sound source, the whole thing is in some ways even more fragile than before, in that just the SLIGHTEST disturbance in the sound stream can disturb the best of the fidelity of the sound, and a few distubances can snuff it completely including the stereo. I knew at once what he meant. Sluggo had just at that moment come into the kitchen and put down an empty coffee cup even as Flo had picked up a coffee cup, and Roger had been walking along gazing at the stars in his head and accidently kicked the Fisher laboratory stand. Not to mention that the Department Head had been fiddling with one of the pairs of snowflakes and at this moment it was turned around backwards to where Ralph had originally had it. The result of all this was that right at this moment, with Ralph and I standing in the kitchen listening, the sounds eminating from the living room from Ralph's experiment were god awful. Yipe what weird sounding distortions and high volume racket were coming from that experimental system. But, then, Ralph just merely reached into an open kitchen cupboard and tapping a bottle of iron pills sitting on the shelf a few times and lo and behold back came some major fidelity, then Roger twisted one of the coffee cups on the kitchen counter slowly by a few degrees until its 'handle became focused' and back came some more fidelity, then Ralph went into the brightly sunlit living room and nudged the Fisher laboratory stand with his big toe a couple of times and back came more fidelity again, then Ralph turned around the snowflake pair that had been fiddled by the Department Head, and with a couple of none existent adjusts of a couple of other pairs of snowflakes back it came, the sound was back to where it was fifteen minutes before, full glory. The supervisor was amazed. 'Every text book in the WORLD will have to be re-written because of these discoveries', and so on, the supervisor was ranting, and me, I just kept eating the pizza, catching dripping sauce in my hand. Oops, there goes Clango! the Bell. Gotta buzz off for another test. This has been a real busy week at the Academy, what with Sluggo getting promoted and all that. Greydon Moore Dec. 13, 1992 Orleans, Ottawa, Ont.