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Old 2nd Apr 2021, 11:22 pm   #2281
turretslug
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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Originally Posted by GrimJosef View Post
I wondered about the 1,000,000 volt quantum treatment.
I did too- my increasingly jaded but still mischievous mind wondered if they simply wandered across the synthetic office carpet with them. And what's with every charlatan's obsession with the word "quantum"? I fear that it demeans real science that genunely involves its effects.
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Old 2nd Apr 2021, 11:30 pm   #2282
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

I don't know if I've ever met anyone cynical enough to write that kind of spiel without believing it. Since someone had to have the idea and make that sh*t up - and design it, in the sense of what shape and size is it, materials, connectors or whatever - I just don't understand where they started, since there were no design criteria. I thought I was pessimisitic about human nature - maybe it's the collision between a world (engineering) which is normally pretty solid (based in maths), and this fantasy, that's freaking me out. I guess if it was advertising for a gambling website, the cognitive dissonance wouldn't be quite so strong!

Hmm, cognitive dissonance. That sounds a bit 'audio' - I wonder if a gizmo could be marketed which reduces it, in order to improve the clarity of hi-fi reproduction!
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Old 2nd Apr 2021, 11:47 pm   #2283
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Before we all work ourselves into a lather and suffer from apoplexy.

This Sh*t really really REALLY only affects a very small fraction of the general population.

Right now I have real life threatening issues to deal with as do all of us.

And if you want an illustration of how thick the human race can be, ponder on this:

Whole nations have paused a proven life saving vaccine because a handful of people have suffered a side effect that is roughly 1000x less likely than death from the ailment the vaccine protects against.

I despair of the "civilised" Human race.

Sorry mods please feel free to do what you will.

Andy.
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Old 2nd Apr 2021, 11:47 pm   #2284
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Re #2280, I had the same thoughts when attending my first concert at the Royal Festival Hall, no doubt a consequence of having previously only listened to classical works on friends' stereos with the bass and treble turned up to max.
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 12:02 am   #2285
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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Originally Posted by bikerhifinut View Post
Before we all work ourselves into a lather and suffer from apoplexy.

This Sh*t really really REALLY only affects a very small fraction of the general population.

Right now I have real life threatening issues to deal with as do all of us.

And if you want an illustration of how thick the human race can be, ponder on this:

Whole nations have paused a proven life saving vaccine because a handful of people have suffered a side effect that is roughly 1000x less likely than death from the ailment the vaccine protects against.

I despair of the "civilised" Human race.

Sorry mods please feel free to do what you will.

Andy.
Spot on Andy, absolutely spot on

Steve.
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 12:05 am   #2286
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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Originally Posted by emeritus View Post
Re #2280, I had the same thoughts when attending my first concert at the Royal Festival Hall, no doubt a consequence of having previously only listened to classical works on friends' stereos with the bass and treble turned up to max.
you're bang on.

I loved live classical concerts when I was able to access them.
The music was the thing. Strangely i wondered why the bass was always better at a live venue.

My best experience was Beethovens 9th at Carlisle sands centre. Naime Jarve conducting the Glasgow symphony if i remember rightly. Lousy acoustics in a place that was mostly a gymnasium 5 days a week. But magical and the bass.............................................. ..............

Andy
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 2:57 am   #2287
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

For that price, do you get to choose someone for them to apply their 1,000,000 volt quantum treatment to? It could be a front for the mafia. Seems a shame to waste all that effort on a little lump of metal.
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 11:16 am   #2288
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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Originally Posted by bikerhifinut View Post

I loved live classical concerts when I was able to access them.
The music was the thing. Strangely i wondered why the bass was always better at a live venue.

My best experience was Beethovens 9th at Carlisle sands centre. Naime Jarve conducting the Glasgow symphony if i remember rightly. Lousy acoustics in a place that was mostly a gymnasium 5 days a week. But magical and the bass.............................................. ..............

Andy
The conductor is Neeme Jarvi and the orchestra would have been the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The Glasgow Symphony Orchestra is a group of amateur music-makers.
I think the reason classical music concerts can sound vague as compared with listening to the hi-fi at home is down to lousy acoustics. My experience, in London at least, is that all the famous halls like those on the South Bank, the Royal Albert Hall, the Barbican Centre all had bad sound. The best sound was at the Wigmore Hall but it wasn't really suitable for large orchestras.
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 11:40 am   #2289
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

With a source as large as a symphony orchestra, arranging the acoustics to be universally 'good' in any seat must be a nightmare, let alone every seat. Perhaps the best I heard was Messiah in the Konzerthaus in Vienna (quite a small band, but a large chorus).

On a smaller scale though there comes a point where a live venue can beat any hifi. A string quartet in the Holywell Music Room is literally 'there' in a way they really struggle to be in your living room.

Cheers,

GJ
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 11:51 am   #2290
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Hello,

Ah audiophile fuses.... no comment, however looking at the specification in post #2273 can't see any standards or approvals certificate/file information

This fuse works fine for me in audio kit, and as to how it sounds it has never once entered my mind ....... I've bashed out some audio kit in my time and these fuses have been fine and dandy
https://docs.rs-online.com/54cb/0900766b813d68c0.pdf

Terry
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 11:55 am   #2291
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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Originally Posted by mark_in_manc View Post
I don't know if I've ever met anyone cynical enough to write that kind of spiel without believing it. Since someone had to have the idea and make that sh*t up - and design it, in the sense of what shape and size is it, materials, connectors or whatever - I just don't understand where they started, since there were no design criteria. I thought I was pessimisitic about human nature - maybe it's the collision between a world (engineering) which is normally pretty solid (based in maths), and this fantasy, that's freaking me out. I guess if it was advertising for a gambling website, the cognitive dissonance wouldn't be quite so strong!
A friend became the head of product development/engineering at a rather famous audio company. Their products were quite well engineered, but the owner of the firm was appreciably larger than life and quite a showman. Still, despite these characteristics, it was the reviewers and pundits and customers who really created the cloud of bull around the brand. It must have been rather stressful at times for my friend to see what was written around what he knew to be honestly engineered products. The fairy dust got ladled on afterwards. The company marketeers took care not to disabuse their clientele of the barmy beliefs they'd built up around the products, but they made the best use of the self-hyping market.

It struck me as an unreal world ruled by the belief in unreal parameters and unfounded principles. The danger is that you can bring out a truly superb piece of equipment, but if one of the first pundits to see it thinks it best to take a dislike, then that's the end of it and all the money you invested in it. It's the U and non-U of the fashion world, but revved up more. With its lack of rationality it isn't a world where you can design good products knowing they're good and expect it to be recognised. Sometimes complete crap gets the accolades.

It's a strange world in another respect. THere is a statistical law which says that smaller things tend to outnumber larger things, yet in the hifi world no-one ever seems to say any differences are small, there are no ties allowed in the competitive rankings.

I try to hide in a part of the universe where experiments and trials ought to be repeatable within statistically analytic bounds, where other people, even ones with different belief systems will obtain similar results.

David
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 12:37 pm   #2292
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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The danger is that you can bring out a truly superb piece of equipment, but if one of the first pundits to see it thinks it best to take a dislike, then that's the end of it and all the money you invested in it./
Frighteningly accurate. And very few, if any, of these pundits have ever set foot in a recording studio. They'd probably be horrified to know that the average mixing console contains a few thousand NE5532s, and most monitors are wired with cooker cable from the local DIY store.

I've been using the recent lockdown to get into digitising various tapes that I have, which are mainly on cassette. The machines that made the tapes were less than 5 or 10 years old at the time, whereas they're 30 or 40 years old now. The tapes themselves are in perfect condition - which is a lot more than can be said for the (several) machines that I own. Getting said machines to the performance level they were at when they made the tapes has required a lot of research (ongoing), which has involved researching the online tape groups for parts info etc. If you had a perfect cassette machine in 1990, you might nudge an SNR of 60dB (NR off). Various members at the groups seem to think that, despite the 60dB SNR (a perfect machine on metal tape), you can still hear capacitor brands...and you can also hear the difference between a discrete circuit and opamp...(when said record went through a hundred ICs). All I can say is that if you can hear artefact from any circuit that's above the 60dB SNR 'blanket' of noise, then the circuit, IC or discrete, must have something pretty wrong with it.

Something this thread doesn't appear to touch on much is the shunning of NFB in so many items of high-end hifi. Some of the amps that supposedly eschew global NFB (we won't talk about local feedback at component level...) have 5-figure prices, but with paper specs that are similar to a bargain 1990s Japanese amp. I actually know several designers with qualifications who are intelligent people, who denounce feedback at every opportunity.

I'm of an opinion that, in transistor amps (valve amps are a different beast altogether, where distortion is part of the attraction), there is little in the way of 'good distortion'. If an amp that's affordable can give you 0.000* THD+N at a reasonable price, and supposed 'zero feedback' design that costs several times more gives you 0.0* THD+N, just what is it about that extra distortion that comes from less feedback that makes the amp better? In the SS world, these low or zero-FB designs have THD that's low enough not to be a audible, but high enough to look unimpressive on paper. I fail to see the point.

With some opamps and circuits, very high FB can create instability. But that's about the only drawback I can attribute to it. The anti-FB movement reeks of religion to me.
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 1:01 pm   #2293
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

The anti-feedback brigade are only against overt, global, feedback where there is a clearly obvious feedback path on the circuit diagram. They are not at all against local degeneration applying local feedback because they simply don't know its there and that it is feedback.

What they don't know doesn't worry them.

Can you imagine the effort it would take to get one of these people up the learning curve on Laplace transforms, Bode plots and Nyquist's stability criterion in order to be able to actually understand what's going on? Black's feedback equation barely scratches the surface. The people who don't understand these things can shout just as loudly as those who do, and are probably more psychologically oriented to shouting.

Who in their right mind would let a Jeremy Clarkson type advise their purchasing? Their whole basis is in being loud and opinionated. There is no importance attached to the accuracy of the opinions. Expensive stuff that looks very expensive (and makes smoke) is in demand.

David
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 1:34 pm   #2294
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

But why are they so anti-FB in the first place? What is the scientific / pseudo-scientific basis? None of them has ever explained this to me... They seem to take it as a given that I also believe global FB to be the devil.

Where did this phobia come from? What was the germ of truth / mistruth that began the movement? I've witnessed FB phobia most in those who depend on qualities that cannot be quantified to sell their products. But I guess that goes without saying...
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 1:38 pm   #2295
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers View Post
I have tried the game at orchestral concerts of closing my eyes and listening as if it was a audio system.

Invariably I find myself thinking "Sounds muffled. And the imaging is lousy". But that is the way it actually is.
This comparison has actually happened. I can't remember the details, but it involved one of the hifi world's extremely rare blind comparisons in the 1980s. The comparison happened behind acoustically transparent fabric in a large room. The same violin sonata was played by several high end amp and speaker combinations (valve and transistor) and an actual live violinist. The audience was asked to rank the various performances by sound quality without knowing which was which. Guess which was consistently rated lowest?
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 1:43 pm   #2296
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Ah, I had it explained to me by an anti-feedbacker.

THe problem lies in that the difference signal, which the forwards gain amplifies, the difference between the scaled-down output and the applied input is called the error signal.

Now these people don't like any errors in their audio, and all feedback amplifiers give you nothing except amplified errors!

What they haven't comprehended is that you could put feedback around a perfectly non-distorting amplifier of finite gain and that the 'error' signal will be linear and proportional. THey won't get quite the gain that the feedback proportioning would suggest, but they do't get any distortion, either.

So their comprehension is up to the reading of the name on a node and running away in panic, but they're not up to understanding what's going on and the algebra.

Oooh! feedback? That's got errors in it. I'm not having any of that!

David
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 1:48 pm   #2297
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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But why are they so anti-FB in the first place? What is the scientific / pseudo-scientific basis? ...
If it's done badly then feedback can introduce distortion as well as removing it. There were one or two unfortunate cases in very early commercial transistor amps where it was subsequently shown not to be working as advertised. The subjectivists normally rate measurements as next-to-worthless, but when it suits them then all of a sudden the figures are pulled out and used to beat designers with. This despite the examples of bad behaviour being nearly 60 years old now.

Cheers,

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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 2:29 pm   #2298
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Guess which was consistently rated lowest?
Come on Paul, which one?
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 4:17 pm   #2299
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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Originally Posted by GrimJosef View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler View Post
... if you needed a £120 fuse ... someone would soon develop one for you ...
They already have

https://www.futureshop.co.uk/synergi...nd-uk-13a-fuse

Specification

Fuse Size: 25.4mm
Fuse Rating: 13A
Ceramic Body
Silica Filled
Brass Nickel Plated Contacts
1,000,000 volt Quantum Treatment
2nd Stage Rev. 2.0 Molecular realignment process
Directional
UEF Treatment 2.0
Graphene
Recommended use with UK Mains Plugs
Warranty: 12 Months


The 12 month warranty is pure genius.

Cheers,

GJ

If I had a glass of wine or two, I could be taken in by some of the specifications, what I would struggle with is the 'Directional' line.


Would it make a difference if the fuse was in the Neutral line?


Ian
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Old 3rd Apr 2021, 4:21 pm   #2300
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

It would if the fault was a Live-to-Earth short. The fuse wouldn't blow. In a well-maintained property a circuit breaker or fuse in the consumer unit might well operate then instead. Given the cost of the audiophile fuse perhaps its owner would prefer that ?

Cheers,

GJ
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