You may not be aware of Peter Belt and PWB Electronics in Leeds, England. The subconscious mind and it’s influence on the sound we hear. Mind-matter interaction, the importance and influence of information fields on the mind, the mind as a transceiver. Sadly, audiophiles don’t want to hear anything about it, they really don’t. Audiophiles want to hear about components, that is the full extent of it, I’m afraid, what’s the best DAC, what solid state amp sounds most like a tube amp. Audiophiles want “pure science” and “pure engineering.” So, discussions usually cannot get too far from their preconceived notions of what science allows or demands. Science and reality are not the same thing, science being an attempt to explain reality.

“A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke

I looked at their website and read some articles. Whew, I'm glad I'm not sensitive enough to notice some of the things they notice degrading the sound, such as a pen torch in the room or pocket calculator being turned on. I do agree though that my mental state has a very large effect on my perception of sound quality. Also what I've been listening to previously can have a big effect, not just by being "better" or "worse" but just from being different and having acclimated myself to it. I recently watched the 2nd Sonic movie and there was a scene where the bad guy is stuck on a mushroom planet. He's trying desperately to come up with a coffee substitute made from mushrooms but has no luck and ends up spewing it all out every time. When he finally makes it back to earth he gets to have the real coffee he's been missing for a year. He comments it's very good indeed, but could use a little more mushroom.

As the only distributor for the Mind Lamp from Psyleron, the brain child of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research PEAR group investigating engineering anomalies, which evolved some years ago into the Global Consciousness group you alluded to, I think I can say without fear of retribution that the Mind Lamp demonstrates that the mind can definitely influence the outcome of mechanical/electronic objects. Mind over matter, as it were. The Mind Lamp contains an internal simple but extremely sensitive pseudo-random number generator that controls how the colors of the lamp change over time.

With nobody in the room the probability any one color will appear next is 1/8 since there are eight colors. The time a particular color is displayed is also random and controlled by the RNG. But when a person is in the room with the Mind Lamp probability changes. For example, if the person in the room is consciously thinking of the color RED the probability that the next color displayed increases from 1/8 to a higher number, for example 1/7. If two people in the room are both thinking of the same color the probability will be higher still, say 1/6. If no one in the room is thinking *consciously* of a color the probability can still change since subconscious thoughts per se can affect the probability. Does this mean you can knock over a bicycle just by thinking about it? No.

Since many of the (local and remote) factors affecting how one hears/perceives sound are *subconscious* you are not aware of the degree sound is degraded by those factors. Since you’ve been accustomed to hearing sound under these *degraded circumstances* all your life you accept that sound as “normal.” But the “better sound* - the really good sound” is in the room all the time, you just can’t hear it accurately or completely due to the factors I’m referring to.

I’m more skeptical, it appears. Zen and the Art of Debunkery introduction expresses my opinion regarding science and the scientific community, especially as it relates to high end audio.

“Like all systems of truth seeking, science, properly conducted, has a profoundly expansive, liberating impulse at its core. This "Zen" in the heart of science is revealed when the practitioner sets aside arbitrary beliefs and cultural preconceptions, and approaches the nature of things with "beginner's mind." When this is done, reality can speak freshly and freely, and can be heard more clearly. Appropriate testing and objective validation can--indeed, *must*--come later.

Seeing with humility, curiosity and fresh eyes was once the main point of science. But today it is often a different story. As the scientific enterprise has been bent toward exploitation, institutionalization, hyperspecialization and new orthodoxy, it has increasingly preoccupied itself with disconnected facts in a psychological, social and ecological vacuum. So disconnected has official science become from the greater scheme of things, that it tends to deny or disregard entire domains of reality and to satisfy itself with reducing all of life and consciousness to a dead physics.”

Things I consider controversial in the context of this discussion on metaphysics, the subconscious and spirituality include, but are not limited to, PWB Silver Rainbow Foil, Morphic Message Labels, the Red x Pen, the lightbulb tweak, the Clever Little Clock, Schumann frequency generator, Teleportation Tweak. Some other things may be difficult to explain but far somewhere between metaphysics and physics - The Intelligent Chip, WA Quantum Chips, Mpingo discs, directionality of wire and fuses, freezing CDs in the home freezer, coloring and demagnetizing CDs.

I do not consider cables per se controversial. But I do consider demagnetizing cables, neutralizing static electric charge on cables, and directionality of cables controversional in the classical physic sense, but not in the metaphysical sense.

“Made the scene, week to week, day to day, hour to hour, break on through to the other side!”

“A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“If I could explain it to the average person they wouldn’t have given me the Nobel prize.”

Some free “spiritual tweaks”

1. Take all batteries in the house, including unused new batteries, and place them in the freezer for two days.
2. Take any red pen and draw a line through all bar codes on CDs, DVDs, Blu Ray, books, cosmetics, food, cleaning supplies, etc.
3. Thrown away all old newspapers, magazines and similar “trash.”
4. Ensure all CDs, LPs, books are stored in the vertical position.
5. Remove all unused audio equipment and cables, speakers from the listening room, put them in the garage or another room.
6. If you have books in your listening room take them all to another room.

There would be much less debate if everyone agreed what the “audio signal” is in cables. So far, everyone is shooting blanks in the dark.

Experiments can be done in the “spiritual domain.” But I don’t see anybody rushing to do them. I don’t see anybody rushing in to even try to understand what I mean by the “spiritual domain.” Besides, what would you measure? Surely not R, C and L. Surely not electrical noise and distortion on an oscilloscope. Surely not acoustic waves. A brain scan? A polygraph test? Then what?

“People would be much better off if they believed in too much rather than too little.”

In my world treating an LP with a demagnetizer, anti-static device, cryogenics are not really examples of spiritual type tweaks.

Some examples of “spiritual tweaks” for LPs are,

1. Keeping LPs stacked vertically not horizontally.
2. Marking the outer edge of the LP with a violet permanent marker.
3. Freezing the LP in the home freezer for 48 hours.
4. Marking through the barcodes on all LPs with a fine point permanent ink pen.

In other words I’m defining “spiritual tweaks” as being NOT directly or indirectly related to anything in the audio chain, not components, not physical media, not cables, not acoustic waves, not house wiring. You could say they act on the person not the system.

What I’m referring to, the *subconscious* influence of certain factors on our hearing ability, I.e., our perception of sound, is quite different from psychic or remote viewing phenomenon. Here is an excerpt from my explanation for the Clever Little Clock that illustrates how the *subconscious* mind is affected by external factors. This is only an example of the general concept of the influence of the subconscious mind by local factors. I’m not disputing that some psychic phenomenon is real but that it’s somewhat irrelevant to this discussion. I worked with SRI back in the 90s for a while but on more mundane projects.

Time is Relative
The Clever Little Clock addresses an esoteric but fundamental problem that occurs when playing an LP, CD, DVD or any other audio or video media. This problem also occurs when watching taped programs on television or listening to recorded programming on the radio in your car or at home. In all of those cases the observer is confronted - subconsciously - by time coordinates that are different from the Present Time coordinates he's been using his entire life to time-stamp sensory information. What are these interfering time coordinates, where do they come from and why are they a problem?

The alien time coordinates are contained in the recording (or videotape). The time coordinates (of what was then Present Time) of the recorded performance, millisecond by millisecond, are captured inadvertently along with the acoustic information. When a recording is played, the time coordinates from the recording session (which are now Past Time coordinates) are reproduced by the speakers along with the acoustic signals of the recorded event. Those Past Time signals become entangled, integrated in the listener's mind with Present Time signals. Because the listener is accustomed to using Present Time signals to synchronize his chronological memory, he subconsciously perceives the confusing, interloping Past Time signals as a threat. This perceived threat produces the fight-or-flight response, which in turn degrades his sensory capabilities. The reason that live television broadcasts, like the Superbowl and the 2010 Olympics, are generally observed to have superior audio and video compared to taped broadcasts is that they don't contain Past Time signals, only Present Time ones.

The time coordinates on the recording are associated with the 4-dimensional spacetime coordinate system (x, y, z, t), where t ranges between the start time and end time of the recording session. While you could say that t0 of the spacetime coordinate system marks the first instant of the Big Bang, it's the relative difference between Past Time and Present Time that's important, not the difference between t0 and Past Time or Present Time.

OK, let’s get more specific about what I’m referring to when I say objects and materials in the local area affect our perception of sound (also vision). Here’s a short list of things that negatively affect our hearing,

1. Steel
2. Copper
3. Wood
4. Glass
5. Unused cables and electronics
6. All types of media - CDs, DVDs, books
7. Positive static electric charges
8. Cell phones, even when turned off
9. Clocks