Synthesis Studios

What’s the first thing you do when you get a new stereo and speaker system? If you work for us, then it’s to really put it through its paces.

After picking up a Infinity 12″ powered subwoofer, we immediately hooked it up to a MacBook and listened to some hyphy (not my choice). The sub’s output was strong enough, that it shoved air up through a hole in our conference table, and began to cause a piece of foam paper to quiver. Being who we are, this perked our interest a bit.

We broke out our frequency generator, set it to 60Hz (a hum that we all would recognize), and a peak-to-peak voltage of 100mV. We wired into the inputs of the subwoofer, cranked up the volume a bit, and blasted away. 60Hz causes our conference room’s whiteboard mountings to vibrate a bit, and, interestingly enough, 47Hz seems to be the that room’s resonant frequency.

Given that: figure that the speed of sound is about 343 meters/sec, and let’s cheat and assume that the Synthesis conference room is one dimensional (a small cheat). The first resonant frequency of the room should be f = 343 / 2L, where f is the frequency and L is the one dimensional length. Given that we felt 47Hz — that should mean that our conference room is about 3.65 meters wide… and it is (approximately)! Feels like high school physics all over again.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Synthesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.