blimme - never heard of that untill now! i could have done with a speaker system like that many a time! pesky feed back a real use for surround sound at live venues aswell ! orb use surround sound dont they - though im usually at the front to involved dancing to really notice! what im waiting for is a 5.1 mix of their albums - really suprized they havent done that yet! even tina turners got a 5.1 dvd out ! whats going on???? maybe its cause their are no visuals to match the audio ?? perhaps a live show dvd? with some video overlayed ontop! john b'ham ----- Original Message ----- From: Ben May To: orb@mailman.xmission.com Sent: Friday, January 03, 2003 1:15 AM Subject: Re: [Orb] new orb perspective It has mostly to do with the behavior of a massless wave. So, a sound wave as it moves through the air is really just a disruption of the normal air-interaction. It's essentially a force, and it behaves a lot that way. Think of how, when you hit a wall, in order to stop you, the wall exerts an equal force back at you (otherwise you would go through! :P). But walls and (presumably) you both have mass, whereas air more or less doesn't. At least, from the perspective of the wave, the air molecules essentially have no mass. Its almost like two waves in the ocean. If you have two waves, with equal mass moving at one another at the same speed, they will cancel in the middle. So sound waves do the same thing. Check out: http://www.atcsd.com/pdf/HSSQ&AVerC.pdf

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 08:15:29PM -0500, Ben May wrote:

...

thing that gets me is .... what happens to the signal thats canceled? converted to heat ? or does it get sent into an alternative dimention?

you cant distroy energy only convert , right?!

It has mostly to do with the behavior of a massless wave. So, a sound wave as it moves through the air is really just a disruption of the normal air-interaction. It's essentially a force, and it behaves a lot that way. Think of how, when you hit a wall, in order to stop you, the wall exerts an equal force back at you (otherwise you would go through! :P). But walls and (presumably) you both have mass, whereas air more or less doesn't. At least, from the perspective of the wave, the air molecules essentially have no mass. Its almost like two waves in the ocean. If you have two waves, with equal mass moving at one another at the same speed, they will cancel in the middle. So sound waves do the same thing. Check out:

http://www.atcsd.com/pdf/HSSQ&AVerC.pdf

( N.B. No HTML mail please ) Except that the signal hasn't been converted to a soundwave when the signals are superposed, it's still an electrical signal in the wire, so what's being cancelled isn't a compression or rarefaction in air, but a current in the speaker cable. Or have I totally misunderstood the mechanics of alan's budget phasing trick? Also, compression waves (such as sound in air) still carry energy, even if there is no net movement of mass. A sound wave that dissipates must still transfer its energy elsewhere (either as heat to the surrounding air or motion on your eardrum or another membrane) My brain is in no mood to think about physics. I'm going for coffee jon -- "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Phillip K. Dick