Lately I've been receiving more and more invitations to come and eat, listen, or otherwise take part in small and large gatherings in cafés, restaurants and function rooms ..... as long as I bring my AIKSAS along.
My AIKSAS, or AIK for short, is an acronym for Acoustic Intelligent Kinetic Sound Absorbing Shield, and happens to also be an anagram of my wife Saskia's name.
As a true boomer getting on in years, visits to cafés and restaurants and other gatherings centred on dialogue and connection — however valuable I find them in themselves — increasingly started to put me off. Enormous quantities of decibels increasingly assaulted my ears, and not just my ears, as a brief survey among my fellow boomers taught me. I discovered three effects described by acoustic engineers that play the leading role here: the Lombard effect, the Cocktail Party effect, and the Cognitive Bias effect.
The Lombard effect is the phenomenon whereby everyone who wants to make themselves understood on the above occasions consciously and/or unconsciously raises their voice, cumulatively producing an ever-greater volume of decibels. The amount of sound experienced as bothersome increases exponentially with the number of people in a given space. Many venues are, acoustically speaking, not designed for the number of people trying to converse with each other in them.
The Cocktail Party effect is the phenomenon whereby, depending on the amount of ambient noise and the distance between speaker and listener, our ability is called upon to have our brains place the speaker's voice in the foreground and push other people's voices back into the background of the ambient noise. Our brains run at full speed to isolate the sound of our conversation partners from the background noise — until these brains, depending on our age and physical hearing ability, throw in the towel, utterly exhausted.
The Cognitive Bias effect: sometimes you only catch a few words of the sentences your conversation partners speak, and then your brain again works at high speed to turn fragmented information back into a coherent whole — Cognitive Bias. You know the feeling: you drive home and are completely worn out, without having taken a single step.
Anyone who is young and vital probably has no idea how much effort this costs us boomers getting on in years. But I suspect that they too, perhaps without realising it, pay a considerable price for all those "convivial" gatherings that modern nightlife offers us, day in, day out.
The device: AIKSAS
How welcome, then, was the discovery of my AIK, a device dreamed up by quantum physicist and sound engineer Heiko Albat in Germany.
The device consists of the Roswell Plug, developed by Heiko Albat, for a nearby power outlet, and the Sound Suitcase.
For boomers like me who like to remain active participants in nightlife and socialising with friends and contacts in all kinds of venues, the investmentAll-in price: €938 for this device is well worth it. But I see a truly valuable application for hospitality entrepreneurs and owners of meeting venues (think also of churches and exhibition spaces) who value treating their guests and staff to a — acoustically speaking too — comfortable space. Guests come and go and remain subject to acoustic violence only for the duration of their stay — though the experience itself may unconsciously discourage them from regular repeat visits — but staff who have to work all day and evening in an acoustically aggressive space deserve not to fall asleep exhausted every night. The cost-benefit calculation then quickly tips in favour of this simple investment — without any demolition work or other structural inconvenience.
And here comes the bonus for the music lovers among us
Now it gets really interesting. I'm a passionate music lover myself — and the AIKSAS device has changed my living room, where I listen to music, in a way I never thought possible. Hundreds of enthusiasts worldwide came before me:
"I had already thought that the sound level was so high that only nuances were left to optimise. But what you have delivered is an almost unbelievable leap in naturalness, vivid presence and immediacy!"
— Holger R., on the Roswell Plug combination
"What the Roswell Plug Tuning does to my hifi system can't really be true. And yet I hear the result unmistakably. What an enormous boost in naturalness, space and fine detail!"
— Volker H.
"The sound simply explodes! I could write so much more. But that the sound explodes — in a positive sense — really says it all."
— Olaf K., on Albat's Sonic Halos
"The overall sound bursts with energy and now has a clarity that catapults me, time and again, to the front row of a concert. Right in the middle, instead of just watching."
— Johannes K.
"I have difficulty understanding your quantum technology — but I sure do understand the changes they make in my sound system!"
— Gil L., Canada
What strikes me most
Almost everyone who experiences AIKSAS's effectiveness wrestles with this. Surely it can't be this simple? And yet I hear and experience it. That tension between disbelief and experience — I know it all too well. And after all: quantum mechanics remains inscrutable. "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics," Nobel laureate Richard Feynman already wrote back in 1964. My entire working life I've worked with people who are only convinced once they feel something from the inside, not when it's imposed on them from the outside.
AIKSAS is such a product. You don't need to understand it to feel it.
And for hospitality business owners
Are you the owner of a restaurant, hotel or event space? Then AIKSAS matters to you not just aesthetically but certainly economically and ergonomically too: staff and guests who stay longer. Staff who go home less exhausted. And reviews that speak of a surprisingly pleasant and calm atmosphere. Contact Simon Schijf (+31 6 50 52 13 31), the importer of AIKSAS, for a demonstration at your location.