Well... this isn't a thread to get you steamed about your opinion on the worst sounding preamp you've ever used. I just wanted to trap you into reading about this stupid thing I thought of today while walking home....

....I was reminiscing on the show I had just saw at a small jazz club. The fellow playing was Andy Klehen. Benny Goodman kinda stuff. I was thinking about how cool it was to see a guy up there rockin' the clairenet. He had all sorts of neat tricks and bends and slurs and runs. Then I thought of the tone he was gettting. It's a small place yet he had so much tone even at a low volume.

So, sound doesn't exist without air, right? If Andy was pumping lots of air through his woodwind, he would have been too loud. So it must be the quality of air he's putting through the instrument to produce his tremendous tone. So what would happen if you were to increase the quality of the air in the room you were recording/performing in? Would this increase the quality of tone? A 100% oxygenated room.

jl

HUH? I don't think it was oxygen that was filling that room............





Just messin' with ya...

I think its probably more that you just witnessed a guy who knew how to play his instrument... which is becoming so freaking rare these days, mediocrity seems to be the norm now. So when you do see/hear someone who can really play the sh*t out of their instrument, it amazes you.

Well, for starters, the room would go up in flames the first time anybody lit a cigarette.

JSL

A room filled with Methane gas would yeild the same results...

Forget Andy the clarinet player. I didn't say "I saw a clarinet player and gosh he's swell."

Think about it. Everyones on this forum raving about $300 patch cables, $2000 converters, $3000 mic pre's, $6000 compressors, $50000 boards and blah blah blah. Every good engineer will tell you the most important piece of gear for a recording is the source. The instrument, the fingers of the person playing it, hell the strings or reeds and heads probably have more to do with quality of tone than a microphone or a pre-amp.

But one step further from the source is the air around it. Sound can't travel without air. If everyone's bent on spending $100,000 on gear to find the perfect sound, isn't this something over looked? Look what happens when you dangle a piece of carpet in front of an amplifier. It gets muffled. Pull it away, and it gets all pretty again. Now what would happen if you cleared all the other little molecules floating around in our air pockets muffling the sound? This is just as important as a $300 6" cable patching on piece of gear to the next.

Anyone? Anyone with an oxygen tank to test this in? Any audiologists or physic majors to speculate?

jl

Have fun reading this shite

Music And Sound Waves

The quality of air will have no effect on the sound quality. Different amounts of various gasses will change the density of the air and therefore change the speed that sound travels, in an imperceptible way.

Actually, I have no idea what the fu*k I'm talking about. Nevermind.

tutt tutt tutt

Please don't post this stuff here. Please don't start fake threads for your own personal masturbation.

tutt tutt tutt

That's what I'm getting at. One I don't think anyone here knows this answer and two, if the air is the conductor for the sound waves of the source, wouldn't this have a greater effect on the tone than a Mogami cable transferring a processed version of the original? Everyone can hear the difference between different metals in cables. Why not different gases in the air?

jl

You are making a leap here, that it is specifically the oxygen that is passing the sound, and that everything else is "muffling." But there is no basis for making that assumption. For all you know, the oxygen is worse at conducting sound than the other particles.

Sound as we know it, as our ears have developed to perceive it, is entirely based on the way that air as we know it transmits sound. Sound is far different underwater but it's still sound. If you're going to redesign the air, you might as well redesign our ears while you're at it.

JSL

The assumption that air quality and sound quality are 2 variables that somehow relate to each other is bogus.

Sure, if you change the medium the sound travels through it will be different, most likely a small, undetectable change in pitch.

I wouldn't waste too much time thinking about this, humans need to breathe oxygen, so that limits you as you what gases you could pump into a room to test this theory.

I could have sworn that the other day in a recording session, after 4 of the band members farted, the whole live room became more live, and the sound really improved... methane gas...that´s the ticket !!! It´s not the gasses in the air that make sound better or worse...it´s the atmospherice pressure, from what I´ve heard. ... Isn´t it true that at sea level, since the atmospheric pressure is higher, that music will sound better because more air molecules are being moved , since the air is more dense ? Anyone hear of this phenomena, or the idea of music played under a vortex will sound better because of the same concept of Bernouli ? that air going under a wing produces downward air pressure, thus making the air more dense under the vortex ?

Yes, you are right. Sound would be transferred better in a room where the air is more dense. This is why I keep my studio pressurized to two atmospheres. An additional benefit of this is that musicians absorb more nitrogen into their bloodstream and begin to experience mild narcosis (just like scuba diving), which loosens them up and causes them to play better. The downside is that after prolonged exposure you have to go thru decompression to avoid the bends, a small price to pay for a truly great recording session tho.

This is extraordinary. Maybe I was wrong in thinking that it's the quantity of oxygen that improves the sonic resolution. Digi_wiz mentioned that air pressure improves the performance of the musicians. And jslevin pointed out that sound under water is still transmitted and that maybe oxygen is the worst transmitting form of gas. Some people say water is a better conductor of sound than air since there are more oxygen molecules present in water than there are in air, (20%-25% in air and 33% in water. H20 = 2 parts Hydrogen and 1 part Oxygen and the 5% variable in air apparently depends on how many musicians and techs are farting in the room.)

But if I were in outer space there are no air molecules and there for not oxygen molecules. The end result is silence. Maybe there are better combinations of molecules in the surrounding environment that can conduct the sonic frequencies more efficiently but so far, no one has really come up with a good argument that inceasing the percentage of oxygen in an area is a bad idea. If anything there's more hard evidence supporting it and lots of useless banter from people who just say, " I farted in a room and my recording sounded funnier." I think this dumb idea I have is actually valid! I'm still convinvced that oxygen is the key ingredient from all ends. Sonically and from a human performance stand point. All credible information is pointing in that direction.

jl

Mann... I was pretty sure you were doing all this for a joke..... hoping you weren´t serious.... but with every continuing post you make, I´m thinking you´re either ********, smoked too much pot, or can´t for the life of you figure out why your recordings suck, so you have to blame the amount of gases in your recording room..... GET A LIFE !!! Stop posting this crap on this forum !! Jules should know about this crap !!!

Arnie,

It is common knowledge that the quality of the air can effect the transmission of high frequencies. In a smoky room (as found in a Jazz Club), there will definitely be less treble, hence the warmer sound of your sax player.



But, I do know of experiments conducted by well known acoustician Michael Rettinger who used dichlorodifluoromethane gas to increase the reverbration time of a reverb chamber by 3 times, compared to air. The lighter the gas, the faster the sound travels.

Tim.

I addressed the issue of air quality and clarinet playing (as I'm a clarinetist and can speak from experience) in the cross-posted version of this thread over in the other forum.

I'm not going to write it twice... dfegad crossposters

--Ben

"this is the police.... put down the bong and step away....."