Originally Posted by
Dave Cohen
I didn't want to post on this, but this tone traveler thing was just too much.
From the Dr. Herringbone website, on a page entitled "Why it Works" (or something like that):
"The Tone Traveler delivers a set of fundamental tones and corresponding overtones that have been meticulously engineered to condition the wood of your instrument, unlike any of its predecessors. As the Tone Traveler begins to open up your instrument it becomes clear that the Tone Traveler adds the same clarity and focus that only hours of time spent playing an instrument can produce. Unlike any other device on the market, the Tone Traveler is a musically tuned poly-phonic system, the first of its kind in the world of instrument play-in devices."
There are so many things in that statement that evoke something like a patent medicine show. I'll try to be as brief as possible. The hyphenated word "poly-phonic" should tip one off. "Polyphonic" is a compound word that refers to two different melodies played simultaneously in a piece. So whatever Dr. Herringbone had in mind, his use of "poly-phonic" indicates a lack of actual scientific or engineering expertise on the part of whoever wrote that blurb.. I don't intend to be picky, so I'll assume that the use of the word was intended to describe a multi-frequency excitation, which is what the blurb seems to imply. A further implication is that the frequencies are the same as those of the string first harmonics (what Dr. H called fundamentals) and higher harmonics (what he called overtones). Now, is that really unique and/or new? The short answer is no and/or no. True enough, the "ToneRite" (sp?) used a 60 Hz excitation frequency. But was that a specific limitation? As I remember it, the ToneRite sat on the bridge and applied that 60 Hz excitation to the instrument, INCLUDING the strings. Regardless of how one excites the strings, they move in their normal modes of motion, and not anything else, just as the plates and the rest of the instrument parts do. That was already pointed out by Sunburst. Note that the string frequencies are usually not the same frequencies as the body mode or body & neck bending mode frequencies. The string frequencies include their first harmonics ("fundamental") and higher harmonics. However you excite a string, you excite essentially ALL of its modes (with a few exceptions, depending on where you excite it). In turn, those string motions excite essentially ALL of the instrument body modes, and in turn its air modes. Further, if the ToneRite used a 60 Hz square wave excitation (I don't remember at the moment), it was actually providing a multi-frequency excitation, since a square wave has many Fourier components in addition to its fundamental.
So now that we've shown that the TT excitation is not all that different in substance from "its predecessors", that brings us back to the Stanford study (provided above by Sunburst). The Stanford study showed pretty unambiguously that the TR did essentially nothing to an instrument, per a statistically valid evaluation by a sufficiently large panel of listeners. Admittedly, the study was done on the TR, and not the TT. But given the point I made above that the TT excitation is not actually different in substance from that of the TR, the case for skepticism of Dr. H's claims is pretty strong.
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