The Audiophoolery Thread.

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by emeritus

The reference to free eletrons reminds me that a few decades ago, ionisers were all the rage on account of the allegedly health-promoting properties of the ions they produced.

But are the ions and electrons audio grade? If not they might degrade your listening pleasure.

Alas the wonderful Peter Belt is no longer on planet earth (if he ever was) but is using morphic rainbow film in the great audio hokum in the sky. Who but PB could market this wonderful selection of stuff, with cryptic instructions on how to use each:

http://www.pwbelectronics.co.uk/product-information

Alas there is no linked information for the strangely beautifully named “Friendly” Four legged stance device.

Craig

[Radio Wrangler]

PB? Was he related to David Icke? Though the last time I flew over it, Arran was still there.

I like friendly four-legged stance devices. I call them horses for short. They make great friends.

Like scrabble we could assign point scores to words acceptable to people on the esoteric fringe.

Quantum is a bit passe. Morphic ought to score higher. Transfinite might be worth a lot, they haven't latched onto that one yet. In this way we could grade marketing output to see who's ahead of the game. It's almost all tripe, but those claims translate into sales and the money is real enough

David

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers

Alas the wonderful Peter Belt is no longer on planet earth (if he ever was) but is using morphic rainbow film in the great audio hokum in the sky.

Whatever happened to Belt? He first came to my notice as the maker of rather good headphones - electrostatic and dynamic, and a few years later he turned up purveying all this...stuff. Perhaps the dark side paid better.

[Malcolm G6ANZ]

The 'free improving techniques' are beyond sanity. How can anyone fall for this.
http://www.pwbelectronics.co.uk/free-sound-improving-techniques

[chriswood1900]

Originally Posted by Malcolm G6ANZ

The 'free improving techniques' are beyond sanity. How can anyone fall for this.
http://www.pwbelectronics.co.uk/free-sound-improving-techniques

That has got to have been posted on 1st April surely...............

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

Whatever happened to Belt? He first came to my notice as the maker of rather good headphones - electrostatic and dynamic, and a few years later he turned up purveying all this...stuff. Perhaps the dark side paid better.

Alas he shuffled off this mortal coil in 2015.

Craig

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by Malcolm G6ANZ

The 'free improving techniques' are beyond sanity. How can anyone fall for this.
http://www.pwbelectronics.co.uk/free-sound-improving-techniques

Well yes most of them are decidedly daft. But, although I have not tried it myself the idea of putting CD's in the freezer has some legs. Any component with inbuilt mechanical stress can be stress relieved at low temperature.

20-odd years ago I used to run Engineering at Oxford Instrument. Large split pair superconducting magnets used to have a real problem in getting to design field. Took a while to find that the main machined stainless steel structure was (at least for the application) like a donkey's hind leg. Often 100 microns out of flat, which is more than enough.

The solution was to rough machine, and then dunk the 100-200kg lump in a bucket cryostat of liquid nitrogen. Pull it out and let it get back to room temperature, and then final machine it to dimension. Problem solved.

Now although CD's have inbuilt stress from the injection moulding process, it is far from clear whether freezing to -20C has a similar effect, and whether it is important for sound quality. All I'm saying is - maybe. I've got an open mind on this one.

But the best ever kitkat bar is one frozen in liquid nitrogen and eaten cold! And that is a fact.

It always amuses me when you see chefs on TV doing some culinary process using liquid nitrogen, with goggles and gauntlets. Because of the boiling of liquid nitrogen, and the low heat capacity of the vapour, you can cheerfully dunk your hand in a bucket of LN2 for a number of seconds without harm. The nitrogen boils around your hand and forms an insulating sheath.

Liquid helium is another thing entirely - the vast majority of the cooling power is in the boil-off vapour at 4.2K. If you get any part of your body in the way of a significant amount of LHe boil off you are in serious trouble. Less than a second will damage tissue and subcutaneous nerves. Surprisingly dangerous stuff is liquid helium.

Craig

[GrimJosef]

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers

... It always amuses me when you see chefs on TV doing some culinary process using liquid nitrogen, with goggles and gauntlets ...

I was taught not to use gloves when heading down to the storage dewar to decant the day's polystyrene bucket of LN2. Apparently the worst that could happen was that some might splash into your glove where it actually could do some damage.

It does seem a bit anomalous that the traditional practice for annealing stress out of a material is to heat it up rather than cool it down. But maybe what really matters is that the temperature changes and it's that process which frees up the dislocations etc and allows the structural disorder to be reduced. I know with hot annealing that it makes a big difference whether you let the piece cool nice and slowly (tempering) or whether you plunge it into some coolant (quenching).

Cheers,

GJ

[TrevorG3VLF]

Iron has two crystal structures. A high temperature face centered, non magnetic structure and a low temperature body centered magnetic structure. Alloying will change the temperature change and make it more reluctant to change. Hence dropping the temperature will promote the low temperature phase. I have no idea whether CDs have a phase change but a lot of plastics have a ductile/ brittle transistion.

High temperatures are used to reduce stress. I went inside the first pressure vessel of the Hunterston nuclear reactor before it was heated to reduce welding stresses. Some laboratory experiments predicted that the vessel would sag by four inches - and it did.

A gentle fry of the CDs would reduce stresses and flatten all the little pips so eliminating background noise.

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by GrimJosef

I was taught not to use gloves when heading down to the storage dewar to decant the day's polystyrene bucket of LN2. Apparently the worst that could happen was that some might splash into your glove where it actually could do some damage.

It does seem a bit anomalous that the traditional practice for annealing stress out of a material is to heat it up rather than cool it down. But maybe what really matters is that the temperature changes and it's that process which frees up the dislocations etc and allows the structural disorder to be reduced. I know with hot annealing that it makes a big difference whether you let the piece cool nice and slowly (tempering) or whether you plunge it into some coolant (quenching).

Cheers,

GJ

Gloves are a bad idea with any cryogenic liquid for the reason you say. No-one at Oxford Instruments wore gloves, or only when dealing with HF acid. Or toe-tectors either - one person I saw made that mistake and ended up stuck on a superconducting magnet cryostat. The only way to get him off was to de-energise the magnet!

The crystal form of the final product is really determined by hot or cold annealing. But since we were dealing with structures reacting massive forces and held at 4.2K and lower, the low temperature annealing process was the way to go.

Craig

[Malcolm G6ANZ]

Freezing then may have some esoteric benefits. But paper under a corner or pinning back a curtain is beyond sanity

I did a bit of time at Arcam (twixt jobs) in the late 80's, their Delta 90 amplifier has two circles of copper track on the PCB (about 20mm diameter with 2mm track). Mr Belt did that, ridiculous!

The photo attached shows them.

[Radio Wrangler]

They fell for it?.... they believed him?

They let him in the door?

Oh dear.

David

[Craig Sawyers]

In the May 1989 edition of Hi-Fi Answers there was a little booklet called: A Decade of Tuning Tips (Part Two). I happen to have this wonderful document

In in the normally fairly sensible reviewer Jimmy Hughes acts as a conduit for Belt's ideas.

Apart from the usual nonsense of ensuring that every book in the listening room has to have an odd number of pages by adding a blank sheet to each, there are even stranger things,

"While on the subject of mains plugs, a very beneficial form of charge control can be achieved by scribing thin lines on the live, neutral and earth pins and on the plastic safety sheaths on the live and neutral pins. The illustration shows fairly deep lines for artistic effect, but in practice you only need a light scratch. You should treat every single plug in the house, not just those that feed your hifi system..."

He then goes on to describe how to do phono plugs and speaker plugs with the same method. An odd number of scratches of course.

And on, and on...

Craig

[turretslug]

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers

Or toe-tectors either - one person I saw made that mistake and ended up stuck on a superconducting magnet cryostat. The only way to get him off was to de-energise the magnet!

Sorry Craig, but I did smirk at what was possibly a serious and potentially even nasty incident, though it may have sounded more like a scene from Mr. Bean! We were warned that steel toe-tectors wouldn't be tolerated on site because of a couple of unpleasant incidents where folk had lost toes- one where someone had dropped a lorry battery on their foot with a guillotining consequence, another involving a motor-cycling crash where toe-tip friction on road had pushed upper foot against steel edge, effectively cutting it in half. Only polycarbonate toe-tecs were approved.

The paper-under-feet (of whatever colour) and curtain-corner capers sound like a case for an OCD consultation. Not joking.

Colin

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by turretslug

The paper-under-feet (of whatever colour) and curtain-corner capers sound like a case for an OCD consultation. Not joking.
Colin

Oh I completely agree. The thing is that Peter and May Belt were quite genuine in their belief in their products and ideas. However daft they all are.

A correction: Peter Belt died in 2017 not 2015, at the ripe old age of 87. He took St Peter some morphic cream and rainbow foil. The angels were allegedly singing more sweetly after application.

Craig

They fell for it?.... they believed him?

They let him in the door?

Yes, the units themselves where nothing special, well engineered and well built, the company had a thing about interconnects etc. cheap phono leads were supplied with kit and a comment as to "these are starter leads to get you going, we recommend about 20% of the cost of your system should be the interconnects" (or words to that effect). They also sold ridiculous 'speaker cable too (expensive as well).

[Craig Sawyers]

Beltism things your stick onto your equipment are alive and well https://telos-audio.com.tw/sticker/ but using the word Quantum.

Oooh yeah - graphene too!

Turns out they at least did their research on their company name Telos. Apparently (thanks Google) it is a term used by Aristotle to mean "the supreme end of man's endeavour"

None of it cheap https://www.thecableco.com/telos_audio_design.html

In particular the $80k cable run-in machine, internal photos on Telos's website https://telos-audio.com.tw/qbt-cable-run-in-machine/ .

[stevehertz]

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers

Well yes most of them are decidedly daft. But, although I have not tried it myself the idea of putting CD's in the freezer has some legs. Any component with inbuilt mechanical stress can be stress relieved at low temperature.

20-odd years ago I used to run Engineering at Oxford Instrument. Large split pair superconducting magnets used to have a real problem in getting to design field. Took a while to find that the main machined stainless steel structure was (at least for the application) like a donkey's hind leg. Often 100 microns out of flat, which is more than enough.

The solution was to rough machine, and then dunk the 100-200kg lump in a bucket cryostat of liquid nitrogen. Pull it out and let it get back to room temperature, and then final machine it to dimension. Problem solved.

Now although CD's have inbuilt stress from the injection moulding process, it is far from clear whether freezing to -20C has a similar effect, and whether it is important for sound quality. All I'm saying is - maybe. I've got an open mind on this one.

But the best ever kitkat bar is one frozen in liquid nitrogen and eaten cold! And that is a fact.

It always amuses me when you see chefs on TV doing some culinary process using liquid nitrogen, with goggles and gauntlets. Because of the boiling of liquid nitrogen, and the low heat capacity of the vapour, you can cheerfully dunk your hand in a bucket of LN2 for a number of seconds without harm. The nitrogen boils around your hand and forms an insulating sheath.

Liquid helium is another thing entirely - the vast majority of the cooling power is in the boil-off vapour at 4.2K. If you get any part of your body in the way of a significant amount of LHe boil off you are in serious trouble. Less than a second will damage tissue and subcutaneous nerves. Surprisingly dangerous stuff is liquid helium.

Craig

I sometimes (well, often actually) think we look too much into the science of 'effects' and much less to whether or not such possible nano effects are actually audible. Always keep in mind the relatively massive distortion levels of transducers such as microphones and loudspeakers. One of the basic mistakes of audiophoolery; drilling thousands of miles down for oil that isn't there apart from maybe a spoonful or two.

[Ted Kendall]

Originally Posted by stevehertz

I sometimes (well, often actually) think we look too much into the science of 'effects' and much less to whether or not such possible nano effects are actually audible. Always keep in mind the relatively massive distortion levels of transducers such as microphones and loudspeakers. One of the basic mistakes of audiophoolery; drilling thousands of miles down for oil that isn't there apart from maybe a spoonful or two.

Doug Self goes into this in the introduction to Power Amplifiers, a tome guranteed to break the instep of the careless reader. It also contains a comprehensive filleting of what he calls Subjectivism and we tend to call Audiophoolery.

One of the other nuggets to be found in said book is the fact that the actual efficiency of a Class A power amplifier on programme material is of the order of 1%...