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Audio Mysticism

As an agnostic, I have no more patience with those who see sound reproduction as an amalgam of auras and astral planes than I do with those who walk in front of trailer trucks assuming that, if they get splayed out like a throw rug, it was God's will.

This category includes little black boxes

polycarbonate is malleable, decently tough, and has quite decent transmissive characteristics. This means that the scattered laser light is not dropping off much as it passes through the polycarbonate and it holds it's level, or strength/intensity. Now we get to the angular reflectivity at the barrier or termination of the plastic edge. Now it gets interesting. We also have scatter at the initial surface, 90 degrees, this is how the laser sits.

If anyone knows much about diffraction coatings and anti-glare coatings, etc, it should be clear why destaticizing will lead to a lower error count. Or that the whole magnetism thing works. We covered that already quite clearly, I felt.

As for little black boxes that mess with ground levels, one has to know, possibly for the first time, even, that the polarity of signal is done according to standards created by Benjamin Franklin in his experiments with electricity.

He could have gone either way, but he said this is 'negative' and this is 'positive'.

50-50 chance.

He got it wrong.

In standard electrical analysis, the ground is actually the SOURCE of energy, when it comes to actual atomic/quantum energy flow...and the positive is actually a sink, with respects to direction. Yes, the positive terminal on your battery in your car is actually a HOLE of negativity that energy is pulled INTO and the energy flows from the NEGATIVE terminal.

Got it?

This is why in many electrical courses (when I took them there was, at least), there are two versions of the primary electrical texts. The 'STANDARD' version(the one most people know), and the 'ELECTRON FLOW' version.(opposite flow to what you are used to)

The ground plane, the ground layout and the ground system is the most critical connection in any piece of audio gear but for a frighteningly large number of designers, it is an afterthought.

I guess they didn't get the memo.

So little black boxes that mess with the ground can actually do wonders, if properly applied.

A audio circuit is a complex dynamic fluctuating resonant system trapped between two points that should be identically dynamically capable like a set of mirrored bookends..these two bookends are the ground..and the source (source in this case meaning: applied power to the circuit).

To stabilize the dynamic fluctuations as much as is possible, the two bookends MUST be identical in physical design and layout as should the connectivity between the two.

Scott Frankland and Bruce Moore, for example, obviously know and act upon this in their designs. MFA gear was remarkable sounding (the hard wired stuff)and this is one of the reasons. This aspect was fully noted and taken care of in all of their hard wired executions.

So massive ground planes, big buss bars, etc..may seem impressive, but at the fundamental level, they merely introduce distortion via the resonant circuit between these bookends then encountering this...and enacting an asymmetrical distortion as it electromagnetically bounces against/off the two points.

and we also see what I considered his bigoted views (which he has stated in many articles) regarding the yardstick system performance should be measured against

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If you're not into Grand Opera, Mahler, or John Williams or Ralph Vaughan Williams, don't ask me what's the best amplifier or preamp or speakers or cartridge or turntable. Or tonearm. Buy a Fisher stereo.

And I also got the feeling when reading his opinions that not only was amplified music not worth much for assessing system performance but wasnt worth much at all.

A hallmark of Gordon

I think it's ironic that JGH was a proponent of the multi-channel AV stuff given his disdain for everything short of the classical genre.

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I think it's ironic that JGH was a proponent of the multi-channel AV stuff given his disdain for everything short of the classical genre.

Well, Kal is a very big proponent of multi-channel and is predominantly a fan of classical music.

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From Holt's article:

"This category includes little black boxes

100 hours strapped to a chair, forced to listen, on repeat, to your favorite album of all time...at the lowest bit MP3 encoding scheme ever designed.

All on a zoltrix sound card and PC speakers, with the final 25 hours...on $1 Sansui headphones from Walmart, right off the same Zoltrix sound card.

All while pumped on LSD.

That otta do it. Enough to drive any person mad.

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Well, Kal is a very big proponent of multi-channel and is predominantly a fan of classical music.

Well, as some of us have actually demonstrated, there's nothing like the right kind of multichannel capture to create a real sense of the actual performance venue.

So, why would you think multichannel would be bad for classical?

http://www.onhifi.com/features/20010615.htm

I read it. Then what happened?

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Well, as some of us have actually demonstrated, there's nothing like the right kind of multichannel capture to create a real sense of the actual performance venue.

So, why would you think multichannel would be bad for classical?

I don't think multi-channel is bad for any genre of music!

(well, provided it's done correctly: I have a few rock DVDs that put instruments behind me and it drives me to distraction).

Sorry if I was unclear: I was merely responding to Monty's post where he said:

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I think it's ironic that JGH was a proponent of the multi-channel AV stuff given his disdain for everything short of the classical genre.

In other words, I don't find that ironic or surprising at all and was using Kal as an example.