MGM's Blind Ukulele Challenge

The Big Kahuna

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Just dug this out again to try & apply some science to it. The following are taken from the first challenge here:



Each image below is the same section taken from each of the 8 Ukes in order and viewed using the Spectral Frequency Display. If anyone out there actually knows what the materials for each of these Ukes were, have a look and see if there's anything there that is consistent.

uke1.jpguke2.jpguke3.jpguke4.jpguke5.jpg
 
I wish Tyll could see this. He founded a headphone store called The Headroom and is still active in the headphone forums. Anyway, he's got a very good measuring setup for headphones and amps and such. He also plays uke. If he could somehow put a transducer on a soundboard and measure ukes the way he does audio gear over at his Innerfidelity site, we'd see some interesting stuff...maybe.

I'm not the greatest at reading fr charts and square waves and such, but I wonder if anyone has tried with a uke.
 
On some of those there's a lot of high frequency "noise", but without knowing the construction of the top it's difficult (impossible) to come to any conclusions as to the reason. If, for example, we could say "look, all the laminates have a lot of high frequency resonance" or "the solids are much cleaner" it would be very interesting. I'd love to take a selection of Ukes without strings, slap a very high quality transducer on the top and then hook up a tone generator or some method of "exciting" each Uke in exactly the same way and examine the results.
 
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