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Old 11th Oct 2020, 2:04 pm   #1981
Radio Wrangler
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Concert halls full and empty are very different too, and that's completely free of any electronic effects.

Some halls now have seating designed to give comparable damping to an occupied seat when the seat is unoccupied and the squab has raised itself.

I went to Carnegie hall on Thursday..... what a location for a 'flu jab!

David
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Old 11th Oct 2020, 3:03 pm   #1982
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Sir, I see you are interested in our new range of audio devices 'le haut de gamme' for the discerning gentleman, you will be pleased to to know that for today only, you will be entitled to own our real leatherette bound copy of a dictionary with the word gullible removed, for only 10 guineas. (at our special rate of only 1gn to £350)
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Old 11th Oct 2020, 5:04 pm   #1983
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Carnegie hall, for a flu jab (lucky so and so), loads of room for social distancing. I am off to the local chemist for mine tomorrow. Back on topic (ish) the "Sonning Mill" theater near me doesn't have special seats to nullify the absence of a human. It doesn't matter as it is usually full! Or was, can't wait for the next time I can go to a play, 100% HiFi, no "Slam", "Presence" or "Air" just plain old real people doing a performance. Had a chat with Rosalind Blessed (daughter of Brian) the last time I went.
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Old 11th Oct 2020, 5:41 pm   #1984
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

That's it. Hifi far beyond the dreams of the megabuck 'high end': Reality, baby, reality.

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Old 11th Oct 2020, 9:49 pm   #1985
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

First time I visited Bert's Barn in South Ken (also first time at a live performance) in the early '70s I was late for admission and had to wait a few minutes outside the doors for a suitable break. My student mind's first thought was "Wow, that's some hifi system!"
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Old 11th Oct 2020, 10:09 pm   #1986
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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You can have fun at hifi demos at shows, but only on the pretentious stands. Listen very intently for several minutes. Move around a little. Rotate head a bit. When someone comes over say that there is something.... you're not sure but you think they have one of their speaker cables the wrong way round, the amp end to the speaker and the speaker end to the amp, but you can't quite hear just which one It's affecting the phasing, the two directions have different velocity factors, you know..... or make up some equal twaddle. This should sow seeds of doubt quite well. If it's all bi-wired, it'll take them even longer playing around to decide where the problem lies.

Then slope off to the Quad stand and tell them what you've done.

Who? Me? Evil? read the strapline!
Reminds me of a Bristol Hi-Fi Show a few years back when I was writing the show report for the magazine I wrote for at the time.

An enthusiastic distributor dragged me into his room to listen to something new and exciting and I knew straight away that something wasn’t quite right. Sitting in the hot spot I suddenly realised that one of the speakers was wired out of phase. He found the problem lead, corrected it and all was well.

The worrying thing was that this was around 2pm - the show had been open since 10am and I was the first to notice.

And, no, I’m not mentioning any names!!
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Old 12th Oct 2020, 4:07 pm   #1987
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

I'll just leave this here for you all to enjoy...

https://6moons.com/audioreview_articles/bop/

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Old 12th Oct 2020, 5:35 pm   #1988
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I'll just leave this here for you all to enjoy...
Even having enough room to put the 'speakers where they are shown will make a huge improvement. BTW there is no such thing a a quantum field, or is there one/zero? That is well serious bull manure, pity the milling of the parts was mediocre to say the least. I can do better on my sub £1000 Chinese milling machine, ah.......
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Old 12th Oct 2020, 6:46 pm   #1989
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Good grief

"The flow of electricity through cables causes magnetic fields. Those interfere with the flow as a direct counter-electromotive force. It's why demagnetizing CD tracks exists. Without such treatments at least once every six months, cables get magnetized. Their conductivity decreases, their impedance increases and sound quality declines gradually. Our Quantum Field opposes this magnetization effect and lowers the cable's own impedance; to reliably improve signal transmission. So our device prevents cable aging from magnetization;Even though our circuit designer dismissed it as a meaningless exercise, for fun I wanted to change the LED color. That's when I discovered that white had very good resolution, high speed, wide dynamic range and a neutral tonal balance. Red had higher density and saturation with a more relaxed softer sound stage. Green created richer harmonics and warmer tone. Blue was too aggressive and hard. Based on 'neutrality', white became our default color but the subtle changes of red and green are too interesting to discard so they're available by request."

I'm speechless. Quantum Field indeed.

To quote from a webpage that attempts to clarify Quantum Fields "quantum fields do not interact with matter. Quantum fields are matter. In a quantum field theory, what we perceive as particles are excitations of the quantum field itself"

Craig
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Old 12th Oct 2020, 7:21 pm   #1990
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

How do the copper cables become magnetized? Copper is non-magnetic
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Old 12th Oct 2020, 8:10 pm   #1991
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

I can see two fields of audiophilia coming together and not quite agreeing. The resistor people say it's important to get non-magnetic resistors with nice copper leads, none of yer cheap tinned steel. While the cable people seem to have discovered that even copper needs demagnetising. Aaaah!

But there are signals flowing through copper wire everywhere. Oh dear!

They'll need new output transformers with each winding now a bifilar pair. One wire being the winding itself and the other one connected to one of these quantum field demagnetiser thingies.

David
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Old 12th Oct 2020, 9:14 pm   #1992
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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I can see two fields of audiophilia coming together and not quite agreeing. The resistor people say it's important to get non-magnetic resistors with nice copper leads, none of yer cheap tinned steel. While the cable people seem to have discovered that even copper needs demagnetising. Aaaah!

But there are signals flowing through copper wire everywhere. Oh dear!

They'll need new output transformers with each winding now a bifilar pair. One wire being the winding itself and the other one connected to one of these quantum field demagnetiser thingies.

David
'Ang on a minute David, surely if you neutralise the magnetism in an output transformer then it wont work...…….. silence. ahhhh maybe that's the dark background of utter silence the music rises from then?
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Old 12th Oct 2020, 9:54 pm   #1993
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

You've got it, a positively velvety black silence, and quite free of that nasty music which gets in the way of listening to the equipment.

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Old 12th Oct 2020, 10:57 pm   #1994
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

But they miss the point that the electrons in the cable shuffle back and forth by much less than the thickness of a human hair. The electrons themselves go nowhere on average with an AC current. Even with a DC current they move really slowly.

An amp is a coulomb of charge per second, or 6.25 x 10^18 electrons per second. Suppose that current flows in a copper wire of 1mm^2 cross section. Each atom of copper provides one conduction electron, and a gram molecular weight contains an Avagadro number of atoms. So 63.5g of copper contain 6 x 10^23 atoms, and hence that same number of free electrons. The density of copper is 9g/cc. So every cubic metre of copper contains 9/63.5 x 10^6 ~ 140,000 moles, or 140,000 x 6 x 10^23 = 8.5 x 10^28 free electrons.

So the electron drift velocity is 6.25 x 10^18/(8.5 x 10^28 x 10^-6) = 7.35 x 10^-5 m/s ~ 70um per second.

So with DC current of 1A flowing in 1mm^2 cable of say 10 metre length, electrons entering at one end will take 38 hours to get to the other end.

Another way of thinking of this is if an AC current of 1A rms is flowing, the peak value is root two the rms - so the electrons will shuffle back and forth by +/- 100um, or about the diameter of a human hair.

Scale the cable up to an audiophile 6mm^2 and the electrons move a sixth the distance or +/- 17um.

Consider now a signal cable supplying 2Vrms into 47k, a current of 42uA. Even for a chunky center core of 1mm^2 that is ~+/-3nm, or about the wavelength of X-rays in vacuum.

But sensible calculations are alas beyond snake oil merchants who invoke the magic word Quantum.

Craig
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Old 13th Oct 2020, 12:08 am   #1995
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

I think the key to understanding audiophiles is that they seem to take all movements of energy and information as being mechanical. They just haven't made the transition to electricity at all.

Speaker cables need to be made as if they were carrying literal vibrations to the cones.

It explains why even amplifiers with no moving parts have to be stood on individual stands with spiky feet, and those thingies for standing cables on, made of exotic woods.

Everything has to look right to them and their viewpoint is mechanical.

David
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Old 13th Oct 2020, 2:16 am   #1996
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Those little pylons that lift the cables up so that they are closer to mobile phone signals that make them make flactuation noises come out of the speakers.
I just snigger at the thought of what those pylons can do.
Little pylons are much cheaper from the landscaping department of a model railway shop.
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Old 13th Oct 2020, 4:15 am   #1997
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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...Everything has to look right to them and their viewpoint is mechanical.

David
This visual aspect tends to carry over to digital audio editing where now we can actually see very good visual representations of the sound vibrations. It's a great set of tools but many tend to over rely on the visuals and forget about the audio! So we can hear examples of edits made without actually listening to the sonic result. The waves are just edited visually, with the resultant quiet words or consonants chopped off because they didnt appear on the display!

I think audio is harder than video because in a way it's more complex. The more visually oriented person can struggle because they are out of their comfort zone. Even very capable musicians are not necessarily tuned into sound as sound, and when making judgements on just the sound fidelity, rather than the musical or emotional content, can flounder.
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Old 13th Oct 2020, 10:41 pm   #1998
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

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Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler View Post
I think the key to understanding audiophiles is that they seem to take all movements of energy and information as being mechanical. They just haven't made the transition to electricity at all.

Speaker cables need to be made as if they were carrying literal vibrations to the cones.

David
Maybe there is an audio market for hydraulic pumps and amplifiers. Then you could have an entirely mechanical system.

Or something like the attached...direct to brain audio

Craig
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Old 13th Oct 2020, 11:16 pm   #1999
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

But their ears are their most favourite organs! (Slight Woody Allen misquote, there)

You can't bypass those.

Where would they be?

David
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Old 14th Oct 2020, 1:43 am   #2000
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Default Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.

Hydraulic acoustics are real.
They do a few Hz to about 300Hz and are used for geological surveys.
The rams that act as voice coils are about 6 foot long and are mounted on an eight wheel drive truck.
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