This whole discussion about the soundboard being an amplifier or a transducer is quite interesting. Here is how I have become comfortable with the difference. A megaphone is: "A funnel-shaped device used to direct and amplify the voice." You speak into one end of a megaphone, and the sound is amplified when it comes out the other end. Clearly, a megaphone is a sound amplifier. There is another, more modern device called a bullhorn which is: "A portable device consisting of a microphone attached to a loudspeaker, used especially to amplify the voice." Clearly, the bullhorn is also a sound amplifier. But the bullhorn consists of several components. The first of which is a microphone which transforms the input sound into an electrical signal. The microphone is a transducer. Then the bullhorn has an amplifier that uses battery power to amplify the electrical signal coming from the microphone. And finally, the bullhorn has a loudspeaker that transforms the amplified electrical signal into louder sound. Overall the bullhorn is a sound amplifier, but it has sub-systems we can call transducers and an amplifier. Let's now visualize the piano as having three subsystems as well. First is the "action", which I will define for this discussion as everything from the keys to the hammers. Second is the string. And the third is the soundboard system. When the pianist pushes a key the action transforms that effort into vibration of the string. The string vibrates. The soundboard then transforms some of the vibration of the string into sound output. The string does generate a small amount of sound output all by itself, but that is not the majority of what we hear, and is not what the soundboard transforms into sound. So, visualizing the action as a transducer that transforms the pianist's effort into vibration of the string, and the soundboard as a transducer that transforms the vibration of the string into sound, there is no "amplifier" in the system. This has helped me to keep straight some of the technical details, and I hope it will help some of you as well. Best Regards, Steve Definitions courtesy of The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090510/b01f27c9/attachment.html>
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