 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2022-08-14 00:07
Designed properly, automobile catch cans separate oil from air in the engine, improving engine performance and reliability. Done wrong they can cause no benefit or harm.
I say this because it's the first analogy I thought of when I saw this :
https://store.weinermusic.com/products/reedgeek-clariklang-bore-and-reed-stabilizer
a device, like to my mind the catch can, that seeks to put lost energy from blowing, back into the clarinet.
I'm skeptical. Thoughts?
p.s. the reed geek website quotes Bob Sheppard as saying, "You need to hear it and feel it to believe it!”
I'd be inclined to agree.  . I'm not taking Mr. Sheppard's word for it.
Post Edited (2022-08-14 00:28)
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Author: kdk
Date: 2022-08-14 00:28
How is it supposed to work? There's nothing on the Weiner page you linked to explain why it "increases the efficiency of a well-balanced reed" or what "stabilizing the energy transfer through the mouthpiece and barrel of the clarinet" means.
Sounds like gobbledy-gook to me, but I'm right there with you in the skeptic realm.
It seems to install onto the ligature screw. It probably doesn't contact the mouthpiece itself, because mouthpiece blanks are of different circumferences and the ring might well not fit. Maybe it dissipates vibrations generated in the ligature screw, but someone would need to explain how that improves anything relating to the "transfer of energy..."
I guess the test would be whether or not it actually has a benefit the player can hear or feel. Maybe if a few thousand clarinetists bought one and tried it...?
Karl
Post Edited (2022-08-14 04:06)
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2022-08-14 05:16
I recall there was some product that was a metal bar that bridged the upper and lower joint. Haven't seen or heard anything of that one since.
............Paul Aviles
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Author: donald
Date: 2022-08-14 06:27
Better be careful what you say, they might email you threatening legal action!
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2022-08-14 19:04
donald wrote:
> Better be careful what you say, they might email you
> threatening legal action!
I'm honestly not sure if you're joking or serious.
If you're serious, well, people are entitled to have opinions.
Libel arises when false statements that are damaging occur. I would have had to articulate, which I' didn't, that the device never works for anyone, or is counterproductive to play for all players, to even approach such a standard.
Instead, I'm merely skeptical, which would be my right even if independent testers or Reed Geed had scientific acoustical proof and/or focus group testing by players and audiences alike.
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Author: super20dan
Date: 2022-08-14 23:49
these have been a source of humor and jokes for a while on the big sax site. but some ligatures incorporate this tech in them all ready to a lessor degree. the rovner platitumn and the Vandoren optimum
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Author: kdk
Date: 2022-08-15 00:09
How does the Vandoren Optimum incorporate this? I have two that I use regularly and neither has anything that resembles this Clariklang.
Karl
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Author: super20dan
Date: 2022-08-15 05:41
the oversize metal bars the screw goes tru to tighten the lig is heavy than it needs to be the extra mass adds volume to the sound. this is esp so in the rovner platinum
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2022-08-15 07:52
>> I recall there was some product that was a metal bar that bridged the upper and lower joint. Haven't seen or heard anything of that one since. <<
You are probably thinking of the Lefreque which you can still buy for up to $400 depending on size, material, etc.
>> the oversize metal bars the screw goes tru to tighten the lig is heavy than it needs to be <<
Sort of but not really. For example on the Rovner Platinum, regardless but also especially because of the many thin hoops design, the bars should definitely be attached to all them i.e. have that length. Although the they are also thicker i.e. the threads are longer than they need to be for strength, it's good to have longer threads. It's not that common for ligature threads to wear, for a couple of reasons it's more common than most threads.
Keeping all those specs but reducing the bars to some kind of optimal shape would likely make them (maybe significantly) more difficult to make, also depending on how they are made now which I don't know.
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2022-08-15 09:39
From reading the above comments, my understanding is that this new device supposedly increases the transfer of sound energy from the mouthpiece to the barrel.
The first thing that came to my mind was what Brad Behn said about why he uses "O" rings instead of cork on his mouthpiece tenons. According to Brad: "Cork dampens resonance whereas O-rings create a more efficient transfer of energy."
https://www.clarinetmouthpiece.com/single-post/2017/07/23/Whats-up-with-the-O-ring-tenons
If believe this is true because I have no inclination to doubt his mouthpiece expertise. It would then appear to me that the above mentioned new device and Brad Behn's "O" rings are doing pretty much the same thing.
Have any of you played Brad's 3 "O" ring tenoned mouthpieces and noticed any difference?
Whether you have or not, I look forward to your comments...
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2022-08-15 18:02
Thanks for sharing this Dan.
I had seen the design you speak of before, but its novelty in appearance, let alone its purpose for being simply didn't register much at the time I first saw it.
I wonder/suspect that Mr. Behn's Epic mouthpiece has 3 indentations in the mouthpiece tenon to accommodate the rings/prevent them from slipping up or down the tenon.
This design has me thinking. Just yesterday I recorked a mouthpiece for a student. I wonder if I took out my box of rubber "O" rings if I could find the right size ones to encompass the entire indented width where the cork goes on my Vandoren mouthpiece.
Not that recorking a mouthpiece is hard; it's IMHO trivial. But I'd think this rubber ring placement even easier and perhaps one where such energy transfer is superior.
Context: my inclination is that this energy transfer is more marketing than substance and best left to purists or the highest end players seeking even miniscule marginal improvements. Its the ease of permanently replacing the cork, no less "at the gig where I don't carry contact cement" with rubber rings, that has me intrigued over use of emergency teflon tape.
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-08-15 18:11
If anyone is interested in the physics of this, check out this website for a brief synopsis of vibrations...https://www.newport.com/t/fundamentals-of-vibration.
The summary if you don't want to read the physics is that adding mass to a vibrating system will make a particular frequency louder, and also lower frequencies will not be affected and higher frequencies are suppressed.
So this device COULD help or it COULD hurt the performance, just like ligatures do. Probably this will just muffle some of the high frequency overtones, which maybe will sound better to some people? I think this device would be more useful if it had a bunch of bolt on weights so you could tune the frequency response to what you want.
Personally, I use a Rovner Versa ligature on my eb clarinet with the max weight to do the same thing, I think it sounds better than my Bonade, which is very bright sounding.
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-08-15 18:21
I personally think the oring theory is wrong, orings are made out of very soft material, usually nitrile, which dampens vibration more than wood fibers, which are quite stiff. Also, mouthpieces are almost always pushed all the way in to contact the barrel directly, so the vibration does not need to go through the tenon seal alone.
The orings are certainly easier to replace, and an oring tenon is much cheaper to manufacture compared to cork tenons. And they are a easy way for a company to differentiate a product from competition.
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Author: SecondTry
Date: 2022-08-15 18:35
I must confess to a degree of hypocrisy. While I talk about this gear here, when students engage me in such dialogue I'm likely to retort, tongue-in-cheek "I have gear that's guaranteed to work better for you than this," whatever "this" is.
I then proceed to open Bearmann III (the gear here) to a certain page and say with a smile and wink, "practice this until you play it flawlessly at 110 bps."
Well, it's really not hypocrisy because unlike the student, I already know that the best gear is an etude book. Of course this is predicated on the player first having a good (if not the finest) functioning setup, and that some on the bboard are already outstanding players seeking the marginal improvement in play that such nuanced gear like that of this thread might afford.
:)
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Author: Dan Shusta
Date: 2022-08-15 22:12
Hunter_100,
When you stated: "I personally think the oring theory is wrong, orings are made out of very soft material, usually nitrile, which dampens vibration more than wood fibers, which are quite stiff. Also, mouthpieces are almost always pushed all the way in to contact the barrel directly, so the vibration does not need to go through the tenon seal alone."
I felt the urge to do some investigating...
I had to use a knife to pry the "O" ring off of my Behn's Prescott mpc. I put it in-between my thumb and first finger to test the softness of the rubber. I was quite surprised that I could not compress the "O" ring even the slightest. I believe that Brad is using what is called Dynamic "O" rings which have a shore number of 70-90 in hardness. According to Wikipedia, cork has a density of 0.24 grams/cm3. Dynamic "O" rings have a density of 1800 kg/cubic meter. When converted to cm3, that density is then 1.8 grams/cm3. So, from this little inquiry, it appears that Brad's "O" rings are around 7.5 times denser or harder than cork. Therefore, I believe that due to Brad's suspected use of Dynamic "O" rings, more acoustic energy is being transferred to the side of the barrel. (Through the top connection and through the side "O" rings.)
Now, one might ask about the bottom of the mouthpiece touching the top, flat, round section of the barrel. In another experiment, I poured a drop of bore oil onto this section. I carefully turned it and watched as the oil spread evenly all around. When I inserted my Prescott and pulled it out, the entire bottom of the tenon was covered with bore oil. After wiping the top of the barrel as clean as I could, I, repeated this test in the exact same manner. This time, I inserted a mpc I bought from a refacer in Hungary and inserted it. When I pulled it out, only 1/4 of the mpc tenon bottom had bore oil on it.
I wouldn't be surprised if some mpcs never even touch the top, flat, round portion of the barrel.
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Author: Hunter_100
Date: 2022-08-15 23:34
Dan,
I think density is the wrong parameter to examine. The better material property to look up is the elastic modulus, also called young's modulus, which is a measure of stiffness. It is orders of magnitude higher for cork than for the rubber used in o rings.
The mouthpiece shoulder touches the outside of the barrel, or the mouthpiece tenon touches the inside surface of the barrel (but I think there is usually a small gap there). But unless you purposely pull out the mouthpiece slightly, there will be a rigid contact surface between the two.
And of course, if the barrel is pulled out for tuning, there will no longer be rigid contact between the barrel and top joint unless you put a tuning ring in there.
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