Analog Corner

When a magician pulls a quarter from someone's ear or saws a woman in half, I believe in magic. I know it's an illusion—not real—but that doesn't mean that magic isn't real.

What's real is that the magician's illusion is believable because your eyes see it and, until sometime later—even if only a fraction of a second—your brain doesn't argue. The best your brain can do is tell you, "Yes, you saw that, but you know it didn't happen."

Funny, then, how anti-audiophiles always claim that the ear is more easy to fool than the eye. Yet books have been devoted to cataloguing optical illusions. Do you believe that a railroad track's two rails meet at the horizon? Sure looks like it! The brain and ear are easily fooled, yet our very survival depends on their reliability. And the survival of an audio reviewer's credibility depends on his ability to be fooled as rarely as possible.

I'm always open to listen, which is why I've had here a variety of devices from IPC, a company that makes products it claims "generate a prescribed and stable PVA field (Proton Vibration Alignment Field). . . . The PVA Field created by EUPHORIA TECHOLOGY™ aligns the vibration and movement of protons and electrons in all matter so that their physical properties are fundamentally enhanced."

"Align the protons in a CD or record and they'll sound better," I was told. Array five proton-alignment towers around your system's perimeter and it will sound better. But why stop there? IPC claims that food grown in a PVA field tastes better, cars get better gas mileage and more horsepower in proximity to a PVA field, or even in proximity to an object that has been in one. You'll feel healthier and stronger, and sing and play an instrument better too.

Asked to stand with my feet close together on a pair of shoe inserts that had spent time in a PVA field, I was shown that I could not be pushed over. Back on neutral territory, I was a pushover. Guess why?

How does the Euphoria Technology "align" protons, and why does the resulting PVA "field" produce these benefits? No one would say. Did any of the blue-LED magic make a sonic difference? Not that I could hear, but those products sure were expensive. According to IPC's 2011 price list, the LP energizer costs $2800 (footnote 1).

Rayleigh Waves
About 15 years ago, a man and woman from Japan—an exotic-looking, ponytailed fellow and his assistant (I don't remember their names)—visited my former listening room to map out and equalize that space's Rayleigh wave transmission. According to a Wikipedia entry, Rayleigh waves "are a type of surface acoustic wave that travel on solids. They can be produced in materials in many ways, such as by a localized impact or by piezo-electric transduction" (footnote 2). Before beginning his work, the ponytailed guy handed me a file folder containing endorsements of his process from musicians who had auditioned violins in the Carnegie Hall instrument store. They hadn't been told about any change in the room's acoustics or about his work, but all had said they noticed, and reported to the store's management, a dramatic sonic improvement. While they heard a difference, what they didn't see were the tiny holes that had been poked into the perimeter of the wooden floor and other locations.

While I watched, the man began scratching a fingernail on a hard piece of some unidentified material; as he did so, he moved it closer to and then away from his ear. He then moved a few feet, and repeated his scratching routine, muttering to his assistant in Japanese.

For the next hour or so, they walked around the room. He scratched, she wrote. When they'd finished, he opened his leather bag and took out an ice pick. Normally, he said, he pokes holes in the floor, but since mine was carpet over concrete, that wasn't practical. He requested that I walk around the room, speak, and note how the sound changed. I did, hearing big differences throughout the room, with pockets of compressed, bottled-up, "hooty" sound in some locations (particularly in and near corners), and more open sound in others.

He poked a lot of holes in the wooden molding where the walls met the floor, and into the dropped ceiling's acoustical tiles, which already had prefabricated holes. He then asked me to walk around again. The sound throughout the room was far more uniform and far better dispersed, with fewer pockets of clogged sound—though I'm not claiming the corners no longer sounded like corners.

Overall, there was less "room" in the room—of that I was certain. Of course, once the holes were punched, there was no way to do the mandatory A/B/X test, so some of you may snigger.

My room had already been treated with Kazuo Kiuchi's Harmonix RFA-78i tuning dots, from Combak Corporation. These silver-dollar–sized discs appear to be made of brass or some other metal, covered on one side with a fuzzy material. No doubt they're resonating "tuning" devices, not room "dampers." No one, even in their wrong mind, would suggest that these little wafers can produce a damping or diffusing effect, but however they did it, they very effectively helped take the room out of the room.

I carefully tried to remove the Harmonix dots when I moved, but the paint and drywall that stuck to them proved permanently attached—15 years later, the dots remain in a box. When I set up my new room I went a more traditional route: ASC Tube Traps from the old room, along with judicious use of studio-proven Diffusors and Absorbors from RPG Diffusor Systems. More recently, I added a pair of RPG's Skyline Diffusor panels to the center wall behind the speakers.

Synergistic Research HFT
For the past few years, Synergistic Research and audio retailer Scott Walker Audio have teamed up in a particularly awful-sounding square room at T.H.E. Show Newport to demonstrate the efficacy of Synergistic's wide range of tuning products. Nothing can make this room sound good, but as anyone who's sat through the demos will attest, the before/after differences are not at all subtle. Poor John Atkinson has reported on this dem, noting what he's repeatedly heard, which sets off skeptical readers (who have not attended the demos) who attack him and Synergistic's Ted Denney (above; footnote 3).

My editor is not an easy target. Denney is. He's slick, with a whiff of used-car salesman, doesn't appear to have an education grounded in science, and he's prolific as hell. (But up close and personal, I found Denney as sincere as he seems otherwise in his demo sales pitches.) New Synergistic products seem to be launched weekly, some with acronymic names, some with more fanciful names and even more fanciful claims. Denney backs them up with money-back guarantees and, more important, puts on these demos.

I hear you: we've all seen a magician saw a woman in half. But after three consecutive years of convincing Synergistic demos at the Newport show, I wanted to hear some of this stuff in my own space. A few months ago, Denny and Scott Walker arrived with some products that fall under the umbrella of Synergistic's Uniform Energy Field (UEF) Technology. These include High Frequency Transducers (HFTs), Electronic Circuit Transducers (ECTs), Frequency Equalizers (FEQs), and Phono Transducers (PHTs). And now you're saying WTF.

An HFT looks like a tiny flared horn; it costs $75, or $299 in a pack of five, and comes with an unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee. After assessing and listening to my well-treated room, Denny and Walker began using a Blu-Tack–like putty to affix HFTs to all the walls of my room—five at a time, as shown in an instructional video (footnote 4). They put them where you'd expect most room-treatment devices to go: at the first-reflection points on sidewalls and ceiling. In fact, the HFTs ended up in the same places another brand's room-tuning devices had been installed, which had produced results I hadn't liked. (I won't name names; results can vary from room to room.) Other HFTs ended up elsewhere—some I didn't discover till days later.

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Footnote 1: IPC Global Corp. 1062 Cephas Drive, Weaver Park, Clearwater, FL 33765. Tel: (727) 470-2134. Web: www.protonalignment.com

Footnote 2: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_wave.

Footnote 3: Synergistic Research, 17401 Armstrong Avenue, Suite 102, Irvine, CA 92614. Tel: (949) 476-0000. Web: www.synergisticresearch.com

Footnote 4: See www.synergisticresearch.com/featured/video-how-to-place-hfts-feq/.