Your ad hom attacks aside, nothing you say is persuasive for me. I own a King double socket tenor, and it has the same amount of tenon contacting the same amount of socket; the only real difference being that the clamp is part of the neck and not the body. Plus there is the extra mass of the inside sleeve. More mass equals less vibration, no? Please enlighten me here.
Sorry if you take my reference to chest thumping as an ad hominem attack, but that's my honest opinion of how you tend to approach these discussions. You showed the same tendency in a discussion of the role of the vocal tract in voicing (although, to your credit, you did eventually acknowledge being corrected). I must say that I find it kind of rich that you make that complaint in the same post where you imply that someone who disagrees with your understanding of saxophone acoustics believes in "magic." Take a look in the mirror before you complain.
The early 6M neck differs from the Super 20 neck in that the neck tenon is recessed away from area of the clamp pinched by the clamp screw. Whatever strain is imparted to the body tube by the clamp is not imparted to the neck tenon, quite unlike the conventional clamp design. Unfortunately, the recessed neck tenon makes it impossible to get a good photographic representation of the gap between the clamp and the neck tenon. But a
1965 10M with the neck tenon flush with the clamp gives us an opportunity to see how large the gap is between the clamp and the neck tenon. That would have to be on hell of a thick body tube wall to fill that gap. It's pretty obvious that the clamp pinches down to contact the body tube in a ring at the base of the joint.
I really, truly am interested in getting past the hype on this question. What you perceive as chest thumping is my recitation of the relevant literature. You clearly find this inadequate, and seem to imply that the researchers in question are incompetent, deluded or worse, but for all that criticism you do not seem able to point to any controlled studies that contradict them.
Hype? We have a difference of opinion as to which bodies of experience shed light on the issues surrounding of body vibration and the sound of a saxophone. It's only been addressed in the most tangential way in the academic literature, and there is a tendency to generalize way too much from it in search of Ultimate Authority. The discussion in Fletcher and Rossing is a good one, and they don't draw any hard and fast conclusions. Sorry if you see critical evaluation of scientific literature as some kind of assault on competence, sanity, and character, but anyone who needs to glean useful information from academic literature for applied science can't regard anything as gospel. In engineering, misconstruing a scope of applicability can get you cited for incompetence.
What evidence you cite--all anecdotal--I would put in the same category as Cannonball claiming major differences based on whether their key touches are made of peridot or turquoise.
Very telling statement. You're looking for excuses to be dismissive of results on the applied end. Conn had an extensive R&D effort going in the 20s and 30s. When high end neck manufacturers (at least two in the modern era, other than Cannonball) stake their professional reputations on ugly looking innovations involving neck mass distribution to improve sound, it warrants serious consideration. And you've proven yourself more than willing to cite evidence you would otherwise call "anecdotal" when it suits your purposes.
In order to bring this discussion down to earth, we need to get past magic and discuss possible physical mechanisms whereby body vibrations might affect sound. Give me more than a "hint" that it does not have to do with effective enlargement of the bore.
I don't recall ever invoking the supernatural. Did you misplace your copy of Fletcher and Rossing? In a nutshell, anisotropic elements of the body and neck result in anisotropic strain response of the body to the stress input from sound waves, and the stored elastic strain propagates shear waves displacing the inner and outer surfaces of the body, which in turn generates compression/rarefaction in air. In the opinion of some, those shear waves lack the amplitude to have an audible result, but that opinion is based on fallacious reasoning.
Likewise, just what do wall losses have to do with anything?
Jeez......EVERYTHING! The thermal losses are the end result of mechanical energy imparted to the horn body. Pretty basic physics. The more elastic the behavior, the slower the conversion of mechanical to thermal energy. The more viscous the behavior, the more rapid the conversion of mechanical to thermal energy. Joule's mechanical equivalent of heat was derived by stirring water (purely viscous), measuring the mechanical input, and measuring the increase in water temperature.
The true figure appears to be more like 99%.
As I recall from Fletcher and Rossing, that 99% loss figure includes the 90% of the player's energy that doesn't make it past the reed. That's equally as mind-boggling as the 90% of the energy within the horn performing mechanical work on the horn body (and eventual thermal loss), but not as germane to the discussion.
Those losses are thermal and viscous, and are indeed somewhat frequency dependent, I have read. You seem to be proposing another mechanism by which vibrations affect wall losses. What is it? If it exists it must be testable. Enlighten us, please.
The conversion of mechanical energy to thermal energy has been discussed above. You are hereby enlightened....well, that is if you're willing to accept it.
And it now appears that you have narrowed down the improvement of timbre from the double-socket neck to the G-A interval. Based on a different pattern of vibration? Why would that affect only one interval? Or is the vibration changed only in that particular spot?
You had surmised in your earlier post that there would be an effect on specific notes, and I essentially told you that you were correct. Is there a problem?
I would suggest a much more mundane, Occam's razor, explanation: Conn changed the dimensions of the tenon in the double-socket design. Or the upper pip. Or both.
You can scramble for such an explanation if you feel that it MUST be about something other than how the neck vibrates, but changes to the mass impinging on the neck tenon is consistent with other experience concerning the sonic effects of neck vibration. And when you look at the recessed neck tenon of the early 6M, it is separated from the grip of the clamp.
And regarding this information about Conn's move to the double socket and its effects: where does that info come from? Is it available in the original?
It was either a forum post or an article that gave me a "huh, that's kind of interesting" moment a couple of months or so ago. My searches so far have come up empty.