I suspect that the time is a function of surface area. If instead of wood chips they used shavings, I'd bet that they could take the time down even further.
I use small spice jars for making my batches, and woody things last longer than squishy ones. i.e. orange rind dried is lasts longer than orange rind fresh. However, fresh orange rind gives a different taste and is cool if you're doing a cocktail night, or something. You can do things that you can't do any other way like this.
Cloves, Sassafras root, ginger, juniper berries, rosemary, lavender, sage. All have great effect.
Also, Ultrasonic makes EXCELLENT sangria. This is the only way to do sangria, IMO.
You can either use bitters to add to sangria, or just put wine and other things directly into the ultrasonic and infuse that way. It works great with herbs. For fruits, you should really just use the juice or crush them with a mortar and pestle. Any fruit soaking in the sangria is purely for show. IMO, all sangria should have sage in it. Sassafras in small quantities makes cheap red wine taste about 2 shelves better. YMMV.
Ultrasonic boths -- as the OP mentioned -- is also another way of extracting more flavour from liquids. Both concepts are talked about in "Modernist Cuisine" by Myhrvold & co.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/technology/05tonerite.html https://www.tonerite.com
I've heard from several musicians that say that it genuinely works. I've also witnessed first hand the "breaking in" process with an instrument that results in a better sound after being played a lot. Note that an old instrument doesn't break in - it is the playing.
I've also heard, from Ed Maday - http://www.edmaday.com - that the vibrations are why he says away from power machinery in his craft - he believes that the use of that machinery might damage the potential tone of the wood. I am skeptical, but if there is a mechanical process involved, then maybe he's not wrong.
By comparison, I had a guitar teacher who would play his G&L Strat 5 days a week for lessons, and you could just see how he was working the fretboard and neck into the sweetest playing, conditioned piece of gear. He always had a line of people waiting to buy his guitar whenever he felt like he wanted a change. I can understand wanting a guitar that "broken in" but by comparison getting something artificially relic'd or aged doesn't seem appealing.
What is the nature of this "aged" quality that is desirable?
With a wooden beer cask I had (4.5gal) you could taste the vanilla from the wood, which I believe was so prominent because of the small cask size, because of more wood touching the beer.
I'm wondering if the cask size also effects the amount of angels share too.
So what? He was talking about guitars made of wood, not speaker cables.
I would link to a source, but they are all pretty much just advertisements. Your favorite search engine could find them.
Disclaimer: I've purchased some of their Navy Strength rum, and it was incredible. Aging liquor may become a thing of the past.
Edit: It does mention about acetic acid increasing though interestingly.
According to wikipedia "Ethanol can be oxidized to acetaldehyde and further oxidized to acetic acid", so I'd be interested to know more about how it is formed in this case.
It does seem like there are lots of other by-products of oxidation though:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23143031_Isolation_...
[0] http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/21/technology/ultrasonic-dryer/
Regular "food" and "drinks" tend to be pretty complex chemical cocktails, so no wonder they have strange reactions with anything even remotely inclined to react chemically.
Now I wonder if the taste of the original Turkish coffee is related in small part to the usage of tiny copper pots for making it.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-wa...
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5877587/the-first-artificial-sweetene...
The technique reported in the NPR article uses ultrasound, apparently at ordinary pressure. The original journal article (pdf) is open sourced at [2].
[1] https://www.thrillist.com/drink/nation/the-pressure-aged-cle...
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1350417716...
I've had it, and it's very convincing. I'm not an expert by any means, but I doubt I would be able to tell it apart from truly aged whiskey.
At least according to the show, the two "inventors" had a patent on their method. They were allegedly getting two years of aging in two days.
http://www.wineandcheesemap.com/
News articles about it:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/wine-cheese-pairing-ap...
Oh, wait. This is just based on subjective taste? Well, everyone knows that people, in general, don't have any...
Diamonds are higher rated the clearer they are, except for when they are man-made, too.
Ironically, we could say the same about your post ;-)
The following is only a link away:
"[..] This way, the results show that higher powers of ultrasound, of nearly 40 W/L, in addition with the movement of the spirit, improve the extraction of phenolic compounds in a 33.94%, after seven days of ageing. Then, applying Youden and Steiner’s experimental design, eight experiments of ageing were performed, and the samples obtained by this new method were analysed to obtain information related to their physicochemical and oenological characterisation in order to determine the experimental conditions that produce the best ageing results.[..]"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1350417716...
http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1350417716304187/1-s2.0-S135041771630...
There's an ISO standard for conducting these kinds of tests, and they apparently followed it. It's easy to think of perceptual tests that mitigate your concerns: for instance, you can triangle test.