The Audiophoolery Thread.

[stevehertz]

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers

It incorporates "audio-grade ABS resin" IOW ABS, moulded for the base unit. And "NCF nylon resin to eliminate static charge". NCF stands for Nylon Carbon Filled, a perfectly standard technology. Stainless steel machined top and non slip feet.

For £310 a pop. They are clearly having a laugh.

For excellent damping I run my speaker cables over the carpet. Job done.

Craig

They would be having a laugh if they were thruppence.

[terrybull]

I can supply pure natural molecular alined rubber bands it fit to these clamps for an even better experience. Price on application.

[Refugee]

I always smile when I see those cable lifters and wonder what they are going to tell everyone to buy to get round the problem of lifting the cables off the floor so that they are closer to mobile phone signals.

I run my proper 'speaker cables (Maplin own brand cheap stuff, the only real advantage was flexibility) UNDER a real pine shelf system, hand made by yours truly. Must be better than those silly floor block things.

Thinking about it I have enough mercury to make the speaker leads out of it (in 6mm tubes), can't get better damped than that.

[The General]

Originally Posted by Beobloke

Frankly I'm disappointed in you with this post.

Why on earth would you compromise the operation of your £16,500 mains cable by putting it on a cheap cable lifter like the one you've linked to? You're just being ridiculous and, if I may boldly suggest, not taking the whole subject seriously.

You need at least two of these at a very minimum:

https://www.futureshop.co.uk/furutec...yABEgIy6fD_BwE

I wonder if these would work on a Philips Disc Jockey? The one with the speaker in the lid which connects to the main unit with a long cable.
Asking for a friend....

[Herald1360]

Has anyone considered the "Trip Hazard" posed by these cable lifters? Perhaps they should be replaced by miniature versions of the device pictured below.

The cables could be threaded neatly through the handy hole at the top

[Radio Wrangler]

I feel safe in assuring you that they will be precisely as effective on your Philips record player as they will be on even the most esoteric stratospherically-high end system.

David

[stevehertz]

I can't quite (at all really) remember who it was, but quite a 'high ranking', well known, time served reviewer wrote how he had heard about the phenomenon and postulated how the speaker cables might pick up vibrations on the floor and such 'impulses' (my word there, but very fashionable in audiophool circles I'm sure you agree) may find there way back into the amplifier and muddle the signal somewhat. So, he did some experiments and yes, what'd ya know, he could indeed hear a slight difference! I reckon in lifting the cables he accidentally dragged the speaker an inch or so forwards. That'd do it.

But seriously, 'he' did say this. Does anyone recall who it was?

[knobtwiddler]

Originally Posted by emeritus

That British Rail patent was accepted under the pre-1977 act ( serial numbers below 2,000,000) where the applicant was in practice always given the benefit of doubt (this was explicitly stated in the act). The view was that, if it didn't work, then the public wouldn't be inconvenienced.

Pedric died at around the time I joined the Patent Office. I did once meet the examiner who had dealt with his applications, and was shown a 4 drawer filing cabinet containing numerous annotated books and documents he had submitted. Pedrick evidently suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and only used the patent system as a way of disseminating his ideas for the public good via a publishing medium that was disseminated around the world and would never go out of print. He never paid the sealing fee for any of his patents, so anyone could use them for free. Nowadays he could have used the internet. They weren't all daft: one that proposed reducing friction in ships by blowing small bubbles of air under the hull, seems to be used by some modern cruise liners.

Thank you for posting this. I'm a long-term admirer of APP's work. Became familiar with him about 20 years ago, when I got interested in filing my own applications. If I recall correctly, I think the Patent Office used some of his work as an example, for would-be patentees.


'"Photon Push-Pull Radiation Detector For Use in Chromatically Selective Cat Flap Control And 1000 Megaton Earth-Orbital Peace-Keeping Bomb".

Genius.

[The General]

I've really enjoyed this thread, it's given me a few good laughs & Mrs. General said a very bad word when I showed her the £16,500 kettle lead (I asked her to guess the price - she didn't get anywhere close).
So at this point I'll put my serious hat on & come clean. In my day job I'm an engineer in the electrical test section of a major motor manufacturer's R&D centre. One of my responsibilities is for audio sound quality, a difficult job in the less than ideal environment of a car. We use outside companies to tune the sound, they do it by tweaking the frequency response (natch) & by putting frequency dependant delays in each channel to move the staging (& even the height) to where it needs to be. With this in mind the sound could be considered 'fake' as it is highly processed, however the results can be exceptionally good. We have a panel of approved listeners - I am one - who evaluate the sound during the tuning activity. So you might call me a professional listener.
Everyone likes different styles of music but we get pretty consistent results between all of us. We do this by following standardised methods, the Dave Clark Listening Technology & the Richard Stroud Skilled Listening methods. These use sound clips from various music types from Bach to Bachman Turner Overdrive & each track has the potential to show up a different deficiency in the system. So you're really listening to the sound & not to the music. I have a slight preference for the Richard Stroud method but this may be bias as I've met him & attended his training course.
The important thing is that we all get consistent results.
I do my evaluations pretty loud - actually it gives me a perverse pleasure to belt out ZZ top's 'Sharp Dressed Man' (check for staging, edginess on the guitars) in the middle of the workshop.
So when I see references to £16,500 power cables & little pylons to lift your speaker cables off the carpet I get that kind of horrified 'No. That can't be real, surely' feeling.
Actually, I wonder if the carpet pile or even the pattern makes a difference.... Now there's a thought.

[Radio Wrangler]

I'm afraid it is real. There are people out there who believe that there is no limitation on the discernment of their hearing and therefore anything whatsoever which could affect the sound is therefore important. Ley lines, continental drift, rate of crime, you name it. What's missing is any sense of scale of the effects or even of relative proportions.

Magazines and websites catering to these people carry reviews, and to my surprise there are NO dead heats, there are no small differences, there are no cases of saying 'there are differences but I'm damned if I can decide which is better'. All differences are described as huge, revelatory. Me? I'm cynical. I think there was more investment in choosing the product's name than in developing the product itself. It's as if the Jeremy Clarkson mindset of shock-jock reviews has taken over the whole field. It gets much worse when they trot out some pseudoscience to try to justify their beliefs. The whole thing seems to be a self supporting artificial construct with no actual foundations in objectively verifiable reality.

I have a fairly reasonable setup at home. None of it is a recognisable brand or model, there are no badges. It's fun on the rare occasions when an audio aficionado meets it. They don't know what it is, so they don't know what they're supposed to say about the sound. They really are lost without map or compass. The concept of opening their ears and saying what they themselves hear scares them. I think they're afraid of accidentally saying something unacceptable to their peers and gods. Emperors must be rather chilly people. Might explain their track record of killing people.

David

[The General]

Oh, I'm well aware it's real & that people make a living selling snake oil. I guess it started with gold plated mains plugs & shows no sign of ending. The point I was making is that it is possible to get objective results from a subjective activity, & be able to objectify good & bad features in various sound sytems.
I'm always learning though, colleagues point out artifacts to me & I've pointed out things to them.
There is of course - unlike a magazine reviewer - no peer pressure. There's no incentive to give a system a good or bad rating just because a particular manufacturer's name is on the box.
I don't read hifi mags any more but I can imagine there is a huge bias towards or away from certain manufacturers in the same way as car magazines, where you can predict how the more pretentious of them are going to rate a certain model without even reading the article.
Just for interest, I evaluated Mrs General's Dodge Nitro which has the Infinity sound system. Apart from a perceived slight boxiness in the midrange on some tracks, it rated very highly. 'Nice to know' she said. But she doesn't often even turn it on.....
Mark

[Craig Sawyers]

This is a general good read from a guy who has been around the block a time or two - Richard "Dick" Burwen http://www.burwenaudio.com/Biography.html . Worth looking at the list of things he has done in his long life towards the bottom.

He has a splendid article about what we call audiophoolery, expectation bias and so forth here http://burwenbobcat.com/wordpress/wp...D-OR-FRAUD.pdf .

Craig

[Beobloke]

Originally Posted by The General

Mrs. General said a very bad word when I showed her the £16,500 kettle lead

Mutter, mumble......not a “kettle” lead.....

[stuarth]

So I live quite close to the Heysham power station. If I won the lottery (several times) I could buy enough of those £16,500 kettle leads to have a power connection which was all in decent cable, rather than only the last few feet. Or do the thousands of feet of non-audio grade cable back to my consumer unit and on to the grid not count for some reason?

Perhaps plasterboard improves the performance of cheap twin & earth cable to the point where its effects on sound quality are trivial compared to the last few feet in air from the wall socket to the amplifier? If so, wouldn’t the same apply to speaker cables, and the people selling little blocks to hold them off the floor are having us on, we should be burying our speaker cables in the wall?

Thinks.....would some people buy audio grade plasterboard?

Stuart

[Radio Wrangler]

The answers can be found across the advertisements and reviews of a variety of wondercables.

They explain that the cables have calming influence on unruly electrons coming in from the outside world. Energy flows are smoothed. I'm not sure what that means in terms of Volts and Amps and Hertz and Fouriers, but so many reviewers just can't be wrong.

What's more those electrons in their calmed state are schooled, it is trained into them that when they later get used in the amplifier proper, they must work their little hearts out to find something called soundstaging and to stretch it. Any bass they find must be given more pace and rhythm. The little devils are re-writing your music.

This means that once you fit a miracle-working mains cable to your power amp, the quality of your record deck, preamp and even their cables becomes irrelevant. The beautifully powered power amp will sort it all out.

£16,500? Cheap at twice the price.

David

[GrimJosef]

Originally Posted by stuarth

So I live quite close to the Heysham power station. If I won the lottery (several times) I could buy enough of those £16,500 kettle leads to have a power connection which was all in decent cable, rather than only the last few feet. Or do the thousands of feet of non-audio grade cable back to my consumer unit and on to the grid not count for some reason? ...

Think of the thing like a filter. It's precisely because all the conductors between you and the rotating machine, not to mention the machine itself, are only 'value' quality that you need to spend so much on tidying the electrons up before you use them. Or not.

Cheers,

GJ

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers

This is a general good read from a guy who has been around the block a time or two - Richard "Dick" Burwen http://www.burwenaudio.com/Biography.html . Worth looking at the list of things he has done in his long life towards the bottom.

He has a splendid article about what we call audiophoolery, expectation bias and so forth here http://burwenbobcat.com/wordpress/wp...D-OR-FRAUD.pdf .

Craig

His one miss was the Burwen noise reduction system, which came and went in short order, but he's not alone there. I've a couple of his 1220 preamplifiers in the round tuit pile...

Thinks.....would some people buy audio grade plasterboard?

You can get foil backed plasterboard.

in terms of Volts and Amps and Hertz and Fouriers

Is a Fourier a unit, after all we are trying to be scientific/engineering here!!!

Currently listening to the radio, I must make a vacuum tunnel twix the transmitter and my aerial.

[stevehertz]

Every self styled audiophile that I've ever visited is using dreadful sounding speakers. Usually some esoteric, exotic veneered, multi drive unit, tall, odd shaped, highly polished speakers made by an audio doctor expert guru with umpteen years experience who lives alone in the middle of the Mojove desert and makes one pair a year. I'm serious. Audiophools seem unable to recognise that their speakers will always be the weakest link in the chain. Titivating peripherals at astronomical expense is their main motivation and drive to achieve aural nirvana. If they spent all the money that they spent on these snake oil, smoke and mirrors, and voodoo products on some decent, professionally designed speakers, then aural nirvana would become much closer than those cables sitting an inch above the floor.