Hi Glupson
Thanks for your recent questions.
"I get the temperature part, but am surprised by humidity statement. How can brass be more affected by humidity than wood?"
I think that the audio industry (hobbyist included) would do themselves a favor taking a course that explains and has lab work on the Fundamental Forces. It’s a lot easier to learn the long versions of this stuff rather than discussing the short versions on audio forums when so many are trying to one up each other. I also think I shouldn’t have pushed the wrong button when I went to post my longer answer a few moments ago LOL
Oh well, my post was about the history of my discoveries of when I started to hear problems with the Audiopoint and what my process was in my own evolution of designing the cone and other important tools. I can get back to that version anytime but here’s a shorter one, sorry.
About a year into my distributing of the Audiopoint is when I first started to be bugged by certain problems. Once I started hearing it I began to think Yikes, this isn’t good but no one was complaining so the panic didn’t set in (yet). I’m like that with my audio. Once I hear it, and hear it repeated, it becomes that thorn in my listening side. This is what brought me to ditching HEA chassis designs and a host of audio product designs.
HEA products for the most part are way over built and very cramped. Setting a big transformer down inside of a metal box is crazy, yet a whole segment of this industry did it. When you set that big field creator down inside of a box of chargeable parts your making a landmine of problems.
While dealing with what I was hearing with the Audiopoint I found a few interesting facts. One the cone is directional, two the cone is a conduit for fields and three the cone was very reactive to environment conditions. Later my friends from Conn and King instruments were like Duh where have you been lol.
"I can imagine some oxidation taking place and changing properties, although I would expect that to be a relatively slow process."
Glupson take your thought there a step further. Materials are what? Programable. Metals do what? Attract fields, reject fields, reflect fields, pass fields’ info and be charged by fields. Listen to your system when it is very dry, then, compare it to the sound when it’s raining outside. It’s not just the humidity but the....charge in the environment that changes.
"Wood, on the other hand, swells and what not, when exposed to the water/humidity and effects I have seen so far can appear overnight, if not sooner."
Same with metal.
"Is there a secret in wood processing. painting, or something else, that makes wood less susceptible to humidity exposure than brass?"
I don’t think it’s a matter of less or more but a matter of what happens to your sound.
If you take the time and carefully listen to your system you will hear it go through four main listening cycles every day. You as an object go through these same cycles. You as an object with a brain and live body....you get what I mean. listening is a moving target not a fixed snapshot. the guys who come up and say their system always sound the same, need to take up golf or something else other than audiophile listening cause there’s not a truthful guy on the planet who has not been a part of system change, and the continuum of sound. It’s not a fixed quantity from us as humans or our systems sitting on a revolving planet in a moving system. It’s just kind of goofy trying to sort through half baked theories. Fun as it might be for some, stretching their egos to the max trying to gain a following, there’s talk and then there’s walk. And walk is motion.
Michael Green