OOAK Table Tennis Forum

This morning I decided to compare the "frequency" of the blades I have in the house. The way I did this was to hold the blade around the narrowest part of the head, between thumb and my two middle fingers, in a pincer-like grip, making sure the only part of my hands touching the edge of the blade were the pads of my fingers. I then knocked the handle of the blade against my head and listened to the note the knocking made.

I then used a frequency generator app on my phone (Sonic) and changed the frequency until it sounded the same. A morse code operator, this is a similar process to "zero beating", where you make sure your morse sending has the same tone as the receiving.

Here are my results:

- Donic Defplay Senso: 224 Hz
- Donic Li Ping Kitex: 415 and 425Hz
- My Yinhe J-Pen: 407Hz
- Yasaka Sweden Extra: 328 Hz
- Tuttle 5ply 259 and 271 Hz
- KTL Instinct 5 - 278 Hz
- Palio Beginner's Blade: 308 Hz

This does correlate with my experience of how "fast" the blades feel. It's interesting that the YSE is as high as it is, supporting the idea that it's on the off side of all round.

I'd be interested to gather more data. This is fairly repeatable - unless you are tone deaf, you can do the same as me .

Incidentally I haven't found that adding rubbers alters the note that is heard - the blade sounds more or less the same bare or with rubbers.

I wonder who has the highest frequency and who has the lowest frequency, and how they compare to forum "feel" of speed and manufacturer rating?

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Yasaka Sweden Classic | 802 OX | C8 OX
Check out my blog - LordCope's Latest Learning Log - 10+ years of accumulate mistakes!

You might wish to refer to this thread I started several years ago. viewtopic.php?f=43&t=31831

Edit: I can see you actually contributed to that thread.

I've found that although not absolute, its a very good guide and that frequency does generally translate to speed.

Any chance you could use the same method here, then rank your blades in frequency order? That will give me a pretty good idea.

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Donic Waldner Senso V1,FH Baracuda Big Slam 2.0mm ,BH Victas Triple Regular 2.0mm

Ah yes I remember this - thanks for digging that out, and interesting comments too. I agree with Haggis and the others who said that one variable doesn't describe the entire experience, but I don't think I've found many cases where given two blades, the one with the lower frequency feels faster. Again, not scientific, but a good rule of thumb at least.

I think saying I "contributed" is a bit generous - I was rather grumpy with poor old Iskandar!

I'll see if I can download a frequency analysing app and try the same test - will be interesting to see if the correlate.

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Yasaka Sweden Classic | 802 OX | C8 OX
Check out my blog - LordCope's Latest Learning Log - 10+ years of accumulate mistakes!