Hey guys, I'm Nate welcome back to our workshop.
Today we've got a fun experiment where we're going to see what happens if we put a microphone and a speaker
In our vacuum chamber. As many of you probably know, sound waves are
vibrations in the air around us and so,
in theory: if we take away that air those sound waves should no longer propagate
and we shouldn't be able to hear anything.
We want to try putting that to the test in a few different ways.
As first test let's try putting our speaker into the chamber but leaving all of the air in
and see how much of the sound our microphone can pick up right outside the glass?
Wow... that's a huge difference right there!
Well, I guess we know that glass and thick Plexiglas does a good job of dampening sound all on its own.
All right, I think we've pretty well established
What its gonna sound like with our speaker in air inside the vacuum chamber. So now we need to try pulling out the air.
But I also want to make sure that we aren't just blasting too much sound straight into the glass
because that can also conduct the noise. So to add a little bit of padding
let's throw some cotton balls down into the bottom of our chamber and make sure that our speaker is facing the correct direction.
This speaker actually blasts the sound out of the back
So we'll try putting it face down on
Top of a pile of cotton balls to make sure that we're really playing into a vacuum as much as possible
That seems like a good amount of cotton balls
it should keep our speaker off of the glass so
the sound is just projecting into the air or the lack of air once we pull a vacuum
Now let's try pulling out a vacuum, hope that our Bluetooth speaker still works in a vacuum, and see if we can hear it.
All right, air is being pulled out!
I Admit, I hadn't actually tried seeing what happens with cotton balls in a vacuum before just now
I don't think it's gonna do anything, and it looks like I'm right
They aren't puffing up the way marshmallows do because they aren't holding any air. There's just air in between the fibers
This is looking good. Almost up to a vacuum...
We have very little air in there right now.
At about 25 on this pump the most vacuum. It pulls is about 26 inches of mercury
All right that is really close. We're gonna try calling that good
Let's see how well we can hear our speaker or not with a vacuum!
Here goes playing the same clip of music
If I attack my ear to it, then I can hear a little tiny bit
It's extremely quiet
I can't hear anything if it's on the glass
It's only on the Plexiglas side where the speaker is actually pointed right at it, so there may be a tiny...
tiny bit of air still in there or maybe it's conducting directly through the speaker into the cotton balls into the glass
through the rubber to the plexiglass. I don't know I'm not sure how it's getting there, but like this
Can barely hear the faintest music other than that...
' See, I'm gonna try it like pushing it touching this microphone to the plexiglass. I don't know if it'll pick anything up
So quiet...
All right, let's let the air back in while it's still playing and we'll see what happens
Letting it in slowly so we can kind of see at what point we can hear it
I'm hearing a little bit of it now
All right, that seems like a pretty good conclusive test to me that this does not play well through a vacuum.
There was just the Tiniest bit of sound that was able to get through
somehow, maybe, there's just a little bit of air in there,;
maybe was conducting through the other materials inside the chamber, but it was almost completely silent
So now, let's try switching: put the microphone inside the speaker outside and see if the microphone can pick anything up.
All right, let's pull all the air out, and then we'll turn on the sound and see if the microphone can pick anything up.
All right, let's call that good.
The microphone is still recording. We'll see if it can pick up any of the sound here goes
All right, now also as an experiment
let's try touching the speaker to the glass and the plexiglass and see if it picks anything up like that
All right, let's let the pressure back in and we'll find out how it went.
I'll try letting some music play while it depressurizes to see at what point the microphone starts picking things back up.
There we go. Microphone in the vacuum chamber with the speaker outside the vacuum chamber
Now I want to try putting both of them in the vacuum chamber with the cotton balls
and then pulling the air out
and I think I might actually try letting the sound run as the air pulls out so we can see if it just
slowly drops off as we run out of air. Let's give a shot.
Speak here in here make sure it's not touching the walls
microphone in there
All right, there we go. We've got both of them in there.
Let's get the sound going and then start pulling out the air and see if we get that sound
to just seem like we're turning down the volume knob.
Very quietly I can hear if I touch my ear to the Plexiglas like really press it on there
Think I can even hear it a little bit with my ear on the glass itself this time
Super quiet although. Alright, let's let the air back in while it's still playing see what kind of result we get.
All right.
There we go!
Both the microphone and the speaker in the vacuum chamber at the same time, pulling the vacuum while it's playing music.
So hopefully we can hear the sound diminishing as it loses the ability to transfer the sound through the air.
Now I've had a chance to go and listen to the sounds that the microphone recorded while the microphone and the speaker will both inside the
vacuum chamber with no air
I really thought that the sound is gonna be almost nothing that it would be almost completely silent
But the microphone managed to pick up quite a bit of the music from the speaker
so something in that chamber is still vibrating enough to get the sound from our speaker to our microphone.
There you have it playing sound and music inside a vacuum chamber,
we tried a whole bunch of different varieties with the speaker
or the microphone inside the chamber, outside the chamber, both inside the chamber,
and I think we got some really good results
and luckily for us our microphone does still function in a vacuum! That was good to learn.
This has been a really fun experiment
I love learning and testing new things like this
Thank you for joining us for this video today and remember to come gear yourself up with products and merch at the "kingofrandom.com"
See you there!
Hey guys, I'm Nate wel- man!
A little worried about the LCD screen...
So far it seems alright
Sorry I'm super weird