So this is my take on information distilled from the Shun Mook web site, let me know what you think. All I know is that it works, it really works!
Sympathetic resonances occur all around us in the natural world, this fact is used by all musical instruments to produce their natural timbre.
This is the principal that is is uniquely exploited by Shun Mook products.
Shun Mook is made from Mpingo Ebony wood. Mpingo – in Africa means, tree that sings. Ebony wood has particular resonance characteristics that give it the most musical properties. For this reason it is widely used in string and woodwind instruments.
Looking at a section of this wood reveals thousands of tubes, or cellular structures, like a micro-sized pipe organs. When energy is applied to this material it creates multiple complex vibrations and resonances within the cellular structure of the wood.
The Shun Mook disc is like a musical instrument, receiving sound energy from the speaker it becomes excited and resonates. The trick is making a disc that will resonate at an enhanced rate with the effect of masking the non-musical frequencies and harmonics while amplifying the natural musical tone spectrum. It is acting like a tiny amplifier in a sense that it will energize, absorb, resonate and radiate to its surroundings.
Most tuning devices aim to cancel or absorb resonance and are often made from non-musical materials, like steel, brass, lead, glass, marble, granite, plastic, rubber, MDF wood, etc. The resonance from these material are damaging to sound produced by the loudspeaker and therefore have to be controlled. Energy cannot be (created) or destroyed, that is a given in physics, as far as we know!
Most devices attempt to damp, absorb or isolate the vibrations. Rubber feet on an amplifier may dampen the vibration, yet in fact they only store the energy for a moment and release back into the system (with the rubber resonance mixed in) as feed back. This principal applies equally to air suspensions as well as heavy composite of steel, lead and plastic. They all just delay the bad resonances and smear the signal with a few micro seconds delay.
With Shun Mook the bad sounding resonance energy is channeled away. (it cannot be destroyed!) Just as you cannot stop a flood with a wall you, have to dig a channel to divert the water. So Shun Mook adds a Diamond tip to its resonators.
Diamond is the hardest material on Earth and releases (transmits) the vibration instantly into the ebony wood body which acts as a reservoir, excites the sympathetic resonance energy of the wood body. Hence this musical energy is feed back into the system while the diamond acts like a mechanical diode – passes the unwanted vibration out. Of course we have some trade secrets as how to enhance this wood and determine the maximum direction of the flow resonance energy in a piece of ebony.
Anyone can make an ebony disc with real ebony and some have tried. In fact 20 years ago when our disc first hit the market in Hong Kong, within a few hours it was dissected by some copy-cat who tried to make some discs of their own, but of course they were never successful. A simple test by yourself or your clients is to hold the disc with the Chinese logo up or down in one’s palm and feel the weight. Flip the disc over and weigh it the other way, you will feel the logo side down is heavier then the other way. Why? This is crazy, nothing is added, same disc. There is an energy flowing through the disc to your palm that is enhanced within the ebony. The energy from your palm is the aura of your body that is reacting to the disc energy. For a male human the aura flows out of your left hand and flow towards your right hand, while for a female its the other way around.
The disc is not as simple as it looks and there is a complex process involved in the making of it. We also make other tuning devices such as the diamond tipped resonators, LP record clamp, dowsing pendulums, vacuum tube resonators etc. All of them can give you real improvement in sound in your hi fi system. Over the past five years we have been involved in applying our technique in concert hall design and tuning. To this day three major concert halls in South Korea have applied our Shun Mook devices to enhance the acoustics.
