• INVENTIVE LOUDSPEAKER TECHNOLOGY

• A bit of a story, as follows.

• The Amazing Ohmwatt Frequency Modulator

• While the sound enhancers were still under development, our next door neighbour Colin called to see if he could come over and see what I was up to. Colin at the time, was the business head of the then Atomic Energy Commission of Canada while it was still a commission. Like I said, our house was in an area with some ‘no way’ neighbours.

Collin was an engineer and also a sound aficionado. He was sore curious about what I was so earnestly doing that took all my spare time and that he could hear all day and night wafting across the lawn from our house.

Because the enhancers were still at a delicate stage of development, I figured it would be fairly easy for him to figure out the gist of what was going on. All he would have had to do was just think about it for a couple minutes after seeing them in action.

A good protective measure was needed as a beard. They say, when in doubt, baffle them with bs. So I quickly whomped up what’s known in the genre as a black box patent, in effect bull’it proofing it from anyone’s prying eyes.

Black box patents are often used when someone else could easily circumvent a fully disclosed normal patent paper. A black box patent is simply anything which someone can’t look into to see what’s going on. For example, ‘say’ the manufacturer of a delicate circuit board encases it in hard black epoxy. If someone else tries to break open the epoxy to see what’s inside they destroy the board.

Similarly, the innards of the box can be lined with lead before sealing it with the epoxy. If somebody tries to x-ray it, they can’t. Or alternatively everything gets fried to a crisp when they finally get frustrated enough to crank up the current and overdo it. Basically with a black box patent, your idea is theoretically safe from even the prying eyes of Superman and the plying fingers of The Thing.

In fact, black box patents are used in the electronics industry instead of legal official patent disclosures on a common basis. Desperate snoopers are forced to shave the object into molecular sized thin slices, then scan each slice, then painstakingly compile a reverse engineered picture of the eventual complete circuit board slice by slice at huge expense.

It’s only practical for someone to waste all that time and money if the part is highly successful commercially. Therefore, in most cases, black box patents work just fine. The only thing it hasn’t proven successful for yet are mutant vegetables and slimy green biological things.

Since I didn’t have time to whomp up anything fancy, I simply picked up a small simple black plastic box from Radio Shack, the home of all homes for any ‘need it now and don’t need it pretty’ electronic part. I drilled a hole at each end and ran a lamp cord in one end. I tied off the loose end with a big enough knot on the inside that it couldn’t be pulled back out.

I plugged the other end into a wall power outlet. I then stuck two pieces of speaker wire into the other end, and likewise tied them off on the inside so they couldn’t be pulled back out and blow the cover.

I finished by hooking up the other ends of the speaker wires to the left and right loudspeaker terminals of my test amplifier respectively. Then I carefully laid it out in full view in the middle of the floor like it was the engine controller from an aircraft carrier for Colin’s eagle eye and benefit.

I officially dubbed it my Ohmwatt frequency modulator. It was the ultimate black box patent because it in fact didn’t actually black box anything except itself. Don’t forget that the two sets of wires never met each other or anything else inside. Its only purpose on the planet was to divert Colin’s attention away from the real McCoy which was sitting in total obscurity over against the wall. Talk about diverting one’s attention to get their riveted attention by pulling off a cagey little slight of hand.

Colin came over. I gave him a quick run down on what I was doing, leaving out the key ingredients. I put special emphasis on the importance of the Ohmwatt distributor sitting there in the middle of the floor looking for all the world like the whole universe was coursing though it.

I did the demo while poor Collin spent the whole time continually nodding his head in approval. All the time he kept fixing his eyes hard out of the side of his head onto the Ohmwatt distributor, frantically trying to figure out what the heck secret electronic principle it could possibly be harbouring that could account for the sound he was hearing. And was also awfully sure it wasn’t from something he had been taught in engineering school.

I never had the heart to tell him how right he would have been about that last one. Then we moved away.

What Colin had been carefully diverted from noticing, was a pair of six inch speakers suspended in special brass frames sitting on a shelf over against the wall which is where the whole show as actually coming from. The gadgets were based on the principle I almost got patented.