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Can a tiny silver bowl affect music reproduction

I am speaking of the Ziplex one half inch wide silver bowls, but the same questions apply to the Synergistic Research ARTs.

About two weeks ago I had four audiophiles in my listening room. We were listening to the impact of the Tripoint Troy Signature. I was standing and noticed that one of the eleven Zilplexes in my room was laying flat on the three silver support rods on the wall. It was the one that is about midway down the left wall and about seven and a half feet off the floor. It is supposed to be at a 45º angle facing the wall. As unobtrusively as possible I stepped on a foot stool that I leave there as this is a common happening and carefully inclined the bowl into a proper condition. I then returned to where I was standing.

Someone asked what did I just do, and I stated the above. They all were in disbelief about how it could have such an effect. I told them that Zilplex had been at CES and at the RMAF about a year or two ago, I repeatedly did their demonstration of removing all eleven Zilplexes. Always those in the audience said exactly what my four friends had said.

Having stumbled onto these a couple of years ago, I said that the inventor and owner really didn't have an explanation for the effect that it was all a trial and error process, which, of course, had taken countless hours. Synergistic Research also has a comparable bowl device, which Ted Denny attributes to his hear Tibetan monks and their bowls. There are of course Tibetan bowls. Syn. Res. ARTs are bigger than the Zilplexes but neither is the size of typical Tibetan bowls.

Tibetan bowls, of course, resonate when struck or rubbed at the rim. SR ARTs ring when knocked together. Zilplex don't ring. I asked Zilplex about this and was told they ring but at a frequency we cannot hear. My question is why would ringing bowls located variously in a room, greatly improve the apparent size of the rooms and the realism of the reproduced music?

All I can say is that they do, and I have heard no real explanation.
tbg
teo_audio
2,197 posts
 

Breaking the symmetry of sound waves allows the sound to be directed to a certain place

Research undertaken by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) has concluded that sound can be directed to a certain place if the sound waves' symmetry is broken. In order to carry out this work, recently published in the journal Nature, researchers used the whispering gallery phenomenon, a circular, vaulted room in which you can hear what is being said in a specific part of the room from anywhere, even if it is being whispered.

In order to undertake this research, the research team created an artificial whispering gallery in the laboratory that reproduces the same type of effects. Once developed, they added two elements to break the symmetry of the waves, which is what makes it possible to hear the sound from anywhere in the room. On the one hand, they added gain, which allows the waves to be selectively amplified, and, on the other hand, they added topology, which allows the waves to circulate in the desired direction.

"By using specific geometric arrangements, such as topology, we broke this rotational symmetry so that the sound can slide through the whispering gallery in a fully controlled manner. In addition, we also added gain, a property that allows the wave to be amplified in order to break the chiral symmetry (an object's property of not being superposable with image)", notes one of the researchers, Johan Christensen, from the UC3M's Department of Physics.

tomic601's avatar
tomic601
12,911 posts
 

carbon nanotubes…… why not…. Don’t we all wish for a 2014 do over ?

nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,849 posts
 

The great Mayan ball courts are 225 ft wide by 545 ft in length, surrounded by stadium style seating. You can stand at one end of it and talk to someone standing at the other end and have a conversation without raising your voice. No need to yell. We don't know everything already but discovered ways of doing some things by trial and error, happenstance, etc. People just need to accept some things and get on with life and when time and opportunity permits, figure out why. No need to disregard some things because you can't wrap your head around it.

All the best,
Nonoise

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