User Guides Tutorial: How to use your ATP3 to talk like a robot

Here's something funny and cool you can try with those costly speakers you just bought :) I wrote this article for my blog quite some time ago. I post only the important bits from it here:

.....

Due to my room's terrain and my desktop's oppulence, the only place to keep my speaker system is on my computer desk. The best place to keep a down-firing sub like mine is against a wall. But placing it on my desk has it's own thrills. Anytime a deep drum sounds, I can feel my desk vibrating as if it were the one that was hit. The effect is spectacular in games and in hiphop music, especially......

.... I downloaded a few tone generators and quickly liked playing with NCH Tone generator. Using the tone generator introduced me to an absolutely unexpected and mind-blowing experience with deep bass. It totally changed my appreciation for the speaker as well. After stepping through the numbers, I found the following "sweet spots" in the speaker's response. NB, I didn't test extensively, rather just stepped through at the program' spinbox's granularity.

88.10 Hz

93.34 Hz

117.60 Hz

124.59 Hz

Though not at the infrasonic range, these frequency spots shook the room pretty good. My favourite was the 124ish Hertz. At this frequency, the ATP3 seemingly produces the most bass output. The subwoofer and the mid-range drives started behaving like goddamn leaf-blowers, pumping a continous stream of air. At first I couldn't up the volume above three-fourth at this frequency because there were all sorts of whirring sounds, apparently, coming from all around me. That was the first time I discovered how many loose objects were on my desk and around my room as well. Loose changes and small boxes were the first ones to rain down on my desk from the subwoofer's perch. A stationery holder (full of stationeries) and the subwoofer of my old LC 2.1 system started moving fluently along the desk. The glass windows and a light-weight, free-standing dressing table were the source of the whirring sounds. After securing them down I was able to up the volume still more, but not completely to the max though as harmonic distorsions become too evident. But even then the effects of the bass was pretty exciting. I brought water filled vessels into my room to observe ripples of varying amplitude with varying frequencies.

That was when i noticed something more cool.

I remembered an episode of MythBusters where Adam Savage tested the myth of the Brown Note. The myth says that there is a subsonic frequency between 5 and 10Hz at which any listener supposedly involuntarily loses control of his sphincter.....

..Anyways, coming back to the topic, my plan wasn't to inadvertently stain my long johns, however. In the episode, when Adam Savage, surrounded by arrays of subwoofer spitting low hertzes, tried to speak, his voice came out on-and-off, coinciding with the frequency they were working. That was due to the rhythmic compression and rarefaction of his lungs by the massive wall of air being moved by the insane SPL audio drives. The effect was that Savage's voice sounded like kinda alien, even robotic.

What surprised me was that I was able to do the same thing with my stock ATP3 subwoofer!

It was great fun to talk normally and end up sounding like a robot on a vibrating spaceship. Of course, with only 103dB SPL, the ATP3 isn't the 60 inch subwoofer and definetly not qualified for no SPL competitions. Ergo, I have to stay within about a half a meter of the sub woofer to pull this trick. But the bass's bewitchment burns brighter and compels me to buy a bigger custom woofer unit. I wanted to know how low a frequency a sub can produce (not reproduce, as I believe most audio formats don't store them in the first place) and came upon "the buttkicker". The ultimate way to experience bass is, supposedly, up yours. The device attaches to the bottom of a seat or a couch and transmits bass efficiently through the solid medium directly to the "recipient". I only wish someone would buy this for my birthday or something.

So, try the little sinsoidal experiment and see if you can't experience the primal bass response of your subwoofers too. I am using the Creative Live! 24bit sound card and I did amp up most of the bass settings I could find. People with bigger speakers might find it easier to do, I guess.

And, of course, here's an obligatory note: Any damage to your equipment or to you or to your neighour's cat from trying out anything I said, is your own fault. The tool suggested here puts your speaker unit to a sustained high power output mode and hence should not be used for more than a few moment at a time, with the definition of "few moment" being left for your common sense to figure.
 
ps . the sweet spots depend on the room also. others might have difficulties getting result at the exact same frequencies. play around ;)
 
^ You are right, it does depend on the room itself. I also doubt you might get this effect if you damp your room like a recoding studio. But otherwise your freqs must be around those values.
 
Dont vocoders do the same thing...without any hardware requirements... U do have a lot of softwares that do these kinda stuff!!

Phase and channel vocoders can really produce some nice sounds with lower bitrate on any speakers!! So why do u have to use a ATP3??
 
^Coz it's nowhere near awesome or fun as being surrounded by a lot of bass. Besides, if you think talking like a robot is the aim here, you are missing the point :p
 
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