Post by ChrisB on Sept 16, 2014 7:43:04 GMT
The subjective / objective hi-fi discussions that pop up from time to time have an interesting parallel in the field of musical instruments.
It's related to the field I work in and I've often noted things quoted by musicians about the qualities of particular woods and the often mystical seeming powers that these things can bestow upon an instrument. Knowing a little bit about wood, sometimes I can see how this might be explained, but other times I laugh to myself, roll my eyes and walk away.
Dalbergia melanoxylon is a tree which grows in Tanzania & Uganda among other places. Its common name is 'East African Blackwood' and it has become an alternative to the true Ebony timbers in the musical instrument trade. Some hi-fi folks will maybe know it as 'Mpingo' which is the Swahili name for it. If you feel sufficiently motivated you can buy Mpingo flavoured accessories for your hi-fi for excruciatingly high prices.
Now Dalbergia is a funny little tree and it's not at all naturally suited to manufacturing anything at all really, except for traditional African carvings. And this is what it's been used for, for a very long time. When the supply of true Ebony for the instrument and decorative trade (fuelled by the Victorian desire to own exotica) became compromised by irresponsible harvesting, an alternative was sought & the best they could come up with was Dalbergia.
Now, any fool will eventually work out that if you want to make stuff out of timber, your best bet is to find a tall, fat, straight tree and hack it about and butcher it, removing wood 'til what you've got left is your product. If your tree is tall, fat & straight enough, you can make lots of copies of your product more cheaply than you can if you start with a short, skinny, bent tree.
So, here's a quick quiz - try to spot the useful tree here
If you have to work with something of the dimensions of the latter, then the price of your product goes up....and fast!
If the wood of your choice is also a long way away and growing in places where it's hard to get at, and is not in huge forests but growing as one tree here & one waaaay over there, then your price takes another hike. If it's also a material which is very dense & therefore expensive to transport - guess what?!
Now, what if you find that every time you try to cut this stuff, it blunts your tools because it's so dense, and that the hardness means that it's also quite brittle, so you have a large number of rejects?
To cap it all you need to make a profit and all of your customers tend to be quite well off, so it won't hurt to load the price & make a big thing of the rarity of the wood.
What's the result? You end up with a highly desirable product, that's what.
The product is a musical instrument - let's say it's a flute for example. Now, the owner of the flute is very proud of this rare and wondrous thing and will be naturally predisposed to thinking that the material it is made from has some influence on the beautiful music that can be made on it. This music is so much nicer...........and musical than the music made on a plastic flute of exactly the same design and dimensions. That might be an argument that we could understand - after all, why would they make the best flutes out of this wood if it wasn't the best possible choice of material?
Some musicians might also argue that the wooden flute makes them a better musician because it handles differently to metal or plastic ones - they get some sort of response back from the instrument as they play - feedback, if you like, which allows them to convey the subtleties of a piece of music more convincingly.
Now we all love wood and it's a nice thing to touch and own, because it's organic and it's from the forest and somewhere deep down in our genetic make-up, we have a primal affinity with the forest. The long & short of it is that we get all touchy feely around wood.
Here's the alternative view:
If you talk to an acoustician, they will tell you that the material that the flute is made from is completely irrelevant and will have no influence on the sound whatsoever. They can produce measurements to prove this 'conclusively'. The reason for this is that the sound is not made from the vibration of the instrument itself, but from the vibration of the column of air within the instrument.
The musician will swear they can tell a difference.
The measurement guys say that the sound is the same when they compare wood to metal to plastic.
Someone even made one from concrete to try to prove the point.
They say it measured identically to the wooden one. They backed this up with blind listening tests.
The musicians say the wooden ones are better - sweeter.
Do you see the similarity between this situation and several issues in the world of hi-fi? So, is this different to our discussions or the same thing wrapped up in another package?
Who's right & who's wrong?
It's related to the field I work in and I've often noted things quoted by musicians about the qualities of particular woods and the often mystical seeming powers that these things can bestow upon an instrument. Knowing a little bit about wood, sometimes I can see how this might be explained, but other times I laugh to myself, roll my eyes and walk away.
Dalbergia melanoxylon is a tree which grows in Tanzania & Uganda among other places. Its common name is 'East African Blackwood' and it has become an alternative to the true Ebony timbers in the musical instrument trade. Some hi-fi folks will maybe know it as 'Mpingo' which is the Swahili name for it. If you feel sufficiently motivated you can buy Mpingo flavoured accessories for your hi-fi for excruciatingly high prices.
Now Dalbergia is a funny little tree and it's not at all naturally suited to manufacturing anything at all really, except for traditional African carvings. And this is what it's been used for, for a very long time. When the supply of true Ebony for the instrument and decorative trade (fuelled by the Victorian desire to own exotica) became compromised by irresponsible harvesting, an alternative was sought & the best they could come up with was Dalbergia.
Now, any fool will eventually work out that if you want to make stuff out of timber, your best bet is to find a tall, fat, straight tree and hack it about and butcher it, removing wood 'til what you've got left is your product. If your tree is tall, fat & straight enough, you can make lots of copies of your product more cheaply than you can if you start with a short, skinny, bent tree.
So, here's a quick quiz - try to spot the useful tree here
If you have to work with something of the dimensions of the latter, then the price of your product goes up....and fast!
If the wood of your choice is also a long way away and growing in places where it's hard to get at, and is not in huge forests but growing as one tree here & one waaaay over there, then your price takes another hike. If it's also a material which is very dense & therefore expensive to transport - guess what?!
Now, what if you find that every time you try to cut this stuff, it blunts your tools because it's so dense, and that the hardness means that it's also quite brittle, so you have a large number of rejects?
To cap it all you need to make a profit and all of your customers tend to be quite well off, so it won't hurt to load the price & make a big thing of the rarity of the wood.
What's the result? You end up with a highly desirable product, that's what.
The product is a musical instrument - let's say it's a flute for example. Now, the owner of the flute is very proud of this rare and wondrous thing and will be naturally predisposed to thinking that the material it is made from has some influence on the beautiful music that can be made on it. This music is so much nicer...........and musical than the music made on a plastic flute of exactly the same design and dimensions. That might be an argument that we could understand - after all, why would they make the best flutes out of this wood if it wasn't the best possible choice of material?
Some musicians might also argue that the wooden flute makes them a better musician because it handles differently to metal or plastic ones - they get some sort of response back from the instrument as they play - feedback, if you like, which allows them to convey the subtleties of a piece of music more convincingly.
Now we all love wood and it's a nice thing to touch and own, because it's organic and it's from the forest and somewhere deep down in our genetic make-up, we have a primal affinity with the forest. The long & short of it is that we get all touchy feely around wood.
Here's the alternative view:
If you talk to an acoustician, they will tell you that the material that the flute is made from is completely irrelevant and will have no influence on the sound whatsoever. They can produce measurements to prove this 'conclusively'. The reason for this is that the sound is not made from the vibration of the instrument itself, but from the vibration of the column of air within the instrument.
The musician will swear they can tell a difference.
The measurement guys say that the sound is the same when they compare wood to metal to plastic.
Someone even made one from concrete to try to prove the point.
They say it measured identically to the wooden one. They backed this up with blind listening tests.
The musicians say the wooden ones are better - sweeter.
Do you see the similarity between this situation and several issues in the world of hi-fi? So, is this different to our discussions or the same thing wrapped up in another package?
Who's right & who's wrong?
