Everything Matters: Down the Rabbit Hole with Tweaks

By -
As he placed the trade paperback sized piece of metallic graphite on top of the amplifier, and stepped back ... the bass improved, and the clarity took a jump up.  He then muttered something like a curse word and removed it and stepped back.  Yep.  A bit muddy.  Back it went.  Clarity and defined bass.  He sighed and returned to his listening chair looking somewhat defeated, but not daring to remove the thin brick from the top of the amp.  The subtle improvement proved far too significant to ignore.



Debunkers?

Welcome to my world.

Cognitive dissonance.  Insanity.  It goes by many names, but for a technically minded audiophile, there is a point once where it dawns on you that everything matters, and some things that seem to have an effect on the quality of sound simply makes no sense.  I think a lot of audiophiles can develop coping mechanisms when faced with this.  The simplest thing is to deny the evidence of your senses.  Which is likely cheapest and best path for this kind of thing, you can read a host of literature to reenforce this stance when it becomes difficult, and, of course, there are loads of studies carefully carried out saying everything except speakers do not make a lick of difference.  If you can gain satisfaction from reading something, and if the power of suggestion is as powerful as those studies claim, clearly you can suggest it all away.  My powers of mental suggestion and faith are not so powerful as that, when the evidence of your senses says something different than a ream of papers, I cannot help thinking that the studies could simply be wrong.  Or something in them is missing something, or some other factor.  Doubt and trust in onesself is the key to a good life, but it doesn't make it an easy one.
As you probably sense I am about to say a whole bunch of things make a difference, that the skeptics deny, and have lost my marbles you are correct.  About the skeptics.  If you feel I have actually lost my marbles, it's my problem, and nobody elses' ... unless you wish to engage in a lengthy debate trotting out pages and pages of calculations and studies, in which case, I'd gently suggest that you find a hobby other than debunking, and go and listen to some music, and not bother with the rest of the article.  And if you feel you have achieved sonic nirvana, it is truly a special gift only a few achieve - so go forth, and thank your lucky stars you have it, and go on to enjoy your music.  Because I will have nothing for you.

Ok, for the scoffers, and the deeply satisfied, you have had a paragraph to bail out, so I assume at this point the ones that are left will approach an article about something like this with an open mind and may find it useful.  Because after writing about how cables make a difference, we're about to go one deeper and talk about all manner of tweaks and our experience with them.

The Kit of "Pure Evil"

Our friend and one of our favorite salesguys from Forefront Audio had assembled a kit of tweaks - various EMI and vibration control devices, and cable elevators - and nonchalantly dropped it off for us "to try and see how well some of the stuff worked."  

We got a case of tweaks to try to see if they would make a difference.  Included was a set of cable elevators, a couple of Golden Sound "Magic Rings", 5 sets of cones (some metal, some ceramic, and some carbon fiber/plastic), two Shakti stones, and four on-cable Shakti stones.  My wife, upon seeing it, declared it a "kit of pure evil" given how the most innocuous thing can seem to make a large difference in making sound more realistic.  Since the items in the box mostly seemed to mean business.  Though she did experess some skepticism on the on-cable Shakti devices.

We will leave you as we're staring at the kit, and our stereo, wondering what to do next ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Thorens MM002 and MM008 meet the Crosley C10 (Part 2 of 2)

By -
Image
It used to be that every single receiver or preamp had a built in phonostage.  The way it used to work is that you would by a turntable, plug it in, and start spinning records.  For the audio enthusiast, there was always low output moving coil cartridges, and the resultant step-up-transformer you could use to present a signal to the phono input, but the built in was always used.  When the CD came to dominate, that the good 'ol built-in phono input went away.  A minor proliferation of external phono stages began as analog declined, but it left the mass market's consciousness as the silver disc rose in domination.  Given the people sticking to their vinyl through the near death of the medium were mostly performance oriented enthusiasts.  The state of the art playback for analog rose considerably (both in performance and price) during this dark time.  Now that vinyl is beginning to flirt with becoming mainstream again, brands are introducing their own tables and phono stages aime
Read more

Full Rez Streaming: Deezer Elite, Murfie and TIDAL on Sonos

By -
Image
We were looking over the end of year reports from the RIAA and others, and one thing is clear - the traditional CD album - is in decline, and streaming services are on the rise.  We have been on the tip of that wave - being longtime subscribers to Pandora, Spotify, and others - and are happy with them.  The one thing that has stopped them for being anything other than a casual/background listen is the compressed nature always fell short of spinning a CD, or even playing a FLAC file for musical enjoyment.  The holy grail, in our book, would be a high resolution streaming service (preferably something on the order of 24/96) that could give us a reliable, high quality sound that wouldn't sound like a compromise for convenience's sake. But streaming services c2013 weren't there.  Even at the highest offered rate of 320kbps, there was a small amount of lost ambience and detail compared to a silver disc spun in our CD player (not to even broach the subject of an LP which would
Read more

The Quad 2805 Review Part1: The Anticipation

By -
Image
In an earlier post, I went on and on and on (and on)  about the tremendous crush I have on the Quad ESL.  I droned on about the history of this hard-to-live-with but highly regarded speaker.  I even went so far as outlining all of its faults and foibles, and how I was able to look past them in my mental fantasy of them and still like the idea of the speaker. Quad c1960 ... note the lack of man-cave And I realized like a stormy relationship, it might never work.  And it might never be compatible with our idea that every family member should be part of the fun given it's narrow "sweet spot*" and fragility. I would love to take a test drive someday of the originals, but I think in my heart of hearts, the later version would be the easier one to live with ... *The so-called sweet spot is the small place, usually making an equilateral triangle with the speakers where you get the best sounding tonal balance and stereo effects.  In some speakers it is large, say the si
Read more