what do you think of this goban?

dankenzon · #1

It looks good.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-Solid-Wood-Fl ... 751wt_1366

mohsart · #2

My guess is that it is veneered.

/Mats

tchan001 · #3

Yes, looks veneered. The grains of the different sides of the board don't match up.
Compare how it looks with the masame floor gobans from Kuroki Goishi. Masame as in having straight lines.

Notice it doesn't have a pyramid cut underneath as well. So I doubt the maker is really concerned with how the click sounds when you place your stones on the goban.

Anyways, if you do buy it, it does seem a decent price for a floor goban but don't expect it to be anything worth bragging about in front of your go playing buddies.

bogiesan · #4

tchan001 wrote:

Notice it doesn't have a pyramid cut underneath as well. So I doubt the maker is really concerned with how the click sounds when you place your stones on the goban.

Don't take this personally. This remark about the resonance properties of top quality go boards is similar to the chestnut about parallax being the rationalization for the non-square grid.

I'm on a mission to kill out this reverberation and prolongation myth or, at the very least, insist on evidence beyond mere anecdote to back it up; something like objective audio spectral and amplitude analysis of a block of wood before and after the little pyramid has been removed.

My personal experience as a woodworker is that, regardless of its density, removing anything less a whole lot of material form a massive hunk of wood has zero effect on said wood's sound transmission or sound altering properties.

You can perform a relatively simple test yourself. Find a nice hunk of wood, say, a 4x4 or 4x6 of fir or cedar or pine or walnut that's about 3 feet long. This represents about 1/2 of the volume of wood in a nice floor board. Hold it up to your ear or, better, use a stethoscope. and ask your go-playing buddy to repeatedly strike it first with a slate and then a shell stone. Take a saw or a plane and slice away 2% of the mass from anywhere and repeat the sound test.

I believe you will find that you must remove much more than 10% of the wood to have a discernible effect on the sound transmission properties of the wood. That;s not to say a precision measuring instrument would not be able to graph differences earlier in the tests but I don't think anyone with normal hearing could detect a change. Heck, there's probably a formula for this.

jts · #5

bogiesan wrote:

My personal experience as a woodworker is that, regardless of its density, removing anything less a whole lot of material form a massive hunk of wood has zero effect on said wood's sound transmission or sound altering properties.

...

I believe you will find that you must remove much more than 10% of the wood to have a discernible effect on the sound transmission properties of the wood.

How would you compare this to the claim that extremely small changes in the mass and curvature of instruments with wooden sidings produce notably different sounds? Surely when we talk about striations on the inside of a Stradivarius we are talking about a small fraction of 10%. Do you think these claims are nonsense as well, or does the proportion of the mass not scale linearly?

Horibe · #6

bogiesan wrote:

Don't take this personally. This remark about the resonance properties of top quality go boards is similar to the chestnut about parallax being the rationalization for the non-square grid.

I'm on a mission to kill out this reverberation and prolongation myth or, at the very least, insist on evidence beyond mere anecdote to back it up; something like objective audio spectral and amplitude analysis of a block of wood before and after the little pyramid has been removed.

At the risk of risking hijack, I find this post interesting. I agree about the sound, Fairbairn in the Go Almanac suggests that the more likely reason was to reduce warpage - but acknoledges that board makers themselves really do not know.

But I always thought the parallax thing made a lot of sense...can you explain why you do not buy that one?

judicata · #7

Agreed about the veneer, but seems like a very reasonable price to me.

go west young man · #8

Horibe wrote:

I always thought the parallax thing made a lot of sense...

Me too.

tchan001 · #9

bogiesan wrote:

I'm on a mission to kill out this reverberation and prolongation myth or, at the very least, insist on evidence beyond mere anecdote to back it up; something like objective audio spectral and amplitude analysis of a block of wood before and after the little pyramid has been removed.

Obviously if it is your mission to kill out this reverberation and prolongation myth, then the burden of proof is on you.

As I have mentioned before in one of my blog posts,

Quote:

the pyramid cut is called the 音ウケ. This means that it is also for the production of a pleasant sound.

So I'm not really prolonging a myth, I'm just referring to what some people call it in Japanese and what that name implies.

----------

Do note that if you intend to do some analysis, it'd be best if you use a properly dried kaya wood with the same cut and size as the floor goban you intend to measure against. And kaya takes many years to properly dry in the right conditions especially if they are thick cuts.

From SL on the drying of kaya wood.

Quote:

Kaya must be dried before being made into boards. The drying is a painstaking process, involving wrapping both ends of the piece of wood in paper to avoid cracking, then placing it in a shaded drying room with no wind for six months for a 2-sun table board, one year for itame, and three years for masame, although five-year and even seven-year drying periods are also possible. Of 50 pieces of material so dried, only 10 emerge from the process without cracks--another reason, in addition to the rarity of the material and the cost of capital and facilities costs for drying--that kaya boards are so expensive.

From Kurokigoishi

Quote:

It usually takes 15years for Go boards made from Kaya wood to be completely dried and totally stabilized. Log is roughly cut and air-dried for 4-5 years before it is processed into Go board, however, the wood is not totally dried at this stage.

go west young man · **#10**

The 6.7 sun kaya tenchimasa goban I got from KGT is now 20+ years old, and it goes through seasonal changes. It hasn't cracked yet. Knock on wood. I believe the stresses it goes through every fall are alleviated somewhat due to the heso. As the ends dry out, the center of its mass does so in unison, with moisture escaping through its mysterious pyramid simultaneously. Were it not for the heso, the ends would dry rapidly, and the center slowly, thus creating the imbalance that results in end grain checks. This is an opinion, not a science experiment, and naturally does not take into account the effects of the blood of onlookers collecting in its dark recesses, nor does it minimize the joyous clack of a play that has just spelt death to a handful of enemy stones.

illluck · **#11**

jts wrote:

How would you compare this to the claim that extremely small changes in the mass and curvature of instruments with wooden sidings produce notably different sounds? Surely when we talk about striations on the inside of a Stradivarius we are talking about a small fraction of 10%. Do you think these claims are nonsense as well, or does the proportion of the mass not scale linearly?

The mechanics of the sound is of course not the same between a string instrument and a percussion instrument. A closer analogy would be whether the striations on the inside of a Stradivarius would cause a noticeable change in the sound when you bang on it. Also, for hollow bodies the acoustics would probably change more with a smaller portion being removed. I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but the idea that the pyramid is to prevent uneven shrinkage seems more realistic to me.

Edit:

tchan001 wrote:

Notice it doesn't have a pyramid cut underneath as well. So I doubt the maker is really concerned with how the click sounds when you place your stones on the goban.

This does not seem to be "just referring to what some people call it in Japanese and what that name implies." You are clearly making a statement about whether you believe the claim to be true (or at least claiming that the maker should believe that the claim is true).

tchan001 · **#12**

The opinion of go west young man does indeed show one of the logical functions of the pyramid cut but we still do not have the evidence (as required by bogiesan) to prove whether it actually makes a difference in the sound.

bogiesan wrote:

something like objective audio spectral and amplitude analysis of a block of wood before and after the little pyramid has been removed.

So we cannot truely say that it is purely a myth at the moment. Meanwhile we do have written records of Japanese people using the words 音ウケ regarding the pyramid cut which suggests that a function of such is for producing a pleasant sound.

And the other traditional name regarding the collection of viscous red liquid suggests that such an event could have happened in an earlier period in Japan populated by samurai with sharp swords.

On the other hand, I can say that calling the goban in the first post a 6" Solid Wood Floor Go Game Stage 15CM when it seems veneered is somewhat misleading. And I doubt the maker of this is concerned with the sound quality of the board when the descriptive words associated with the board are: elegant, detachable, polished, smooth, convenient, and fun.

For myself, I would prefer a traditional Japanese crafted thick kaya floor goban with a pyramid cut as opposed to one without. And go west young man's 6.7 sun kaya tenchimasa goban from KGT sounds wonderful indeed. I would love it if we could have the pleasure of some pictures of the said goban for our enjoyment.

Of course, I have posted on my blog about my most prized goban which happens to be just a beat up old thing which I rarely use at all.

go west young man · **#13**

I posted a few photos some time ago, but they evaporated, so here you go.

"Go sightings" is really great, tchan001! Please post more pictures of the beat up old relics you find. You obviously frequent a better class of flea markets than I do!

tchan001 · **#14**

Thanks for the photos. Beautiful goban beneath a great calligraphy scroll. Who is the scroll by? I can just make out the character for "heart".

go west young man · **#15**

The "Buddha Heart" calligrapher is unknown to me. Probably not someone famous, it cost 5 bucks at a yardsale, but I like it.

what do you think of this goban?

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