Columns Retired Columns & Blogs |
Tweaks are in the mind of the listener. Simply put, they are bullshit.
Reader Doug Cline says this question came to him after watching <I>Ripley's Believe it or Not</I>: Have you ever tried an odd or out-there audio tweak that actually worked? What was it?
Well, it's not weird or out there, but I just did it yesterday. I had an electrician run a dedicated 20amp outlet for the audio gear. Previously, it shared a circuit with the video gear and other outlets. What a difference. I really wasn't going for a improvement in sound, just getting all the audio gear its own circuit. I cannot beleive how I must have been starving my amps! The definition and clearity on my first listen to old favorites, Roger Waters' Radio K.A.O.S. and David&David's Boomtown. Whoa, the improvement was astonishing and since it wasn't the goal, an extreme bonus! I am considering a separate circuit for each amp now. Best tweak I have done with the most noticable improvement. Highly recommended and available at about $125 from your local electrician.
It was J10 or one of those other knuckle-head reviewers that recomended placing coins; a combination of quarters, nickles and dimes arranged in various patterens on top of your loudspeakers. Can't hardley believe that "tweak" floated around the pages of -Stereophile- for a couple of months claiming it actually worked. Well hell go ring the bell, I actually followed the instruction carefully and could't hear any damn difference after about an hour of listening to familiar music. Maybe I wasen't drunk enough.
Oh, weird tweaks that REALLY worked. Hum, that narrows the field down considerably. I guess then it would have to be the putting marbles under the four corners of my Target rack's MDF shelves. Opened the sound up in a small, but significant way. And to show you how well they worked, they're still there.
After market power cords. The first time I bought a replacement power cord for an amp I was using and it immediately sounded if I replaced the amp with a larger,power, and more detailed amplifier. This was so significant a change that it left me baffled and more convinced that we must be willing to listen and not out of hand say things cannot work.
My first high end turntable was the Kenwood KD500 with a Grace 714 tone arm. The arm is in the attic but the table has long since been replaced. After a few week of listening I would hear the telephone ring in the kitchen but I always missed the call. One day In some mag I read about damping the platter of this table with peanut butter. Well I had already replaced the the table pad so for a lark I tried peanut butter. The result was much more that I ever thought it could be; but the long term of peanut butter solution was not without its problems vistors of the flying kind. By the way I stopped missing telephone call.
Let's see, plastic bags full of play sand on top of my CD player and all around it on its shelf, using a bulk tape eraser to "demagnify" my CDs, trying home-made footers made with everything from raquet balls to granite floor tiles
The question is loaded, since what the "weirdest" means depends on your outlook. Some people would say changing cable is weird, others might think waving a fish over your speakers before-hand is weird, whilst others might not. Remember Audiophilia is a Religion, a case of I'll see it when I believe it. As for me, it wasn't weird at all; I auditioned many cables at home, even borrowed a second amp to try bi-amping and the result I ended up with was that biwiring with great cables was better than biamping with good cables, for my particular amp, speakers and tastes, that is.
George Cardas has a formula for speaker placement that I believe is on his website (I learned about it from _Stereophile_). In my previous listening room, which was shoebox-shaped, I placed the speakers according to this advice, down the the quarter inch, and I was amazed at how much better focused the stereo sounded. I can't set up my speakers this way in my present room, or I certainly would.
Don't really have one but I did try this bizarro one I read in some stereo magazine about putting nickels and dimes on top of my speaker cabinets. I never completed the test of this tweak because the other half of my brain kicked in. Fool me once, etc.
Try this: Cup your hands and place one over each ear directing the sound straight into your ear like a bat collecting sound waves. The sound takes on a whole new dimension. Big Sound Stage and increased Volume. One Snag though, everytime you reach for your beer, it's a disaster.
I apologize to those who have heard this before . . . uhum. When I lived in an apartment in La Jolla, CA in the early 1990s I was obsessed with receiving a Los Angeles FM station on my Magnum Dynalab Etude FM tuner and Signal Sleuth booster. I drove my landlord nuts building various antennas on the (flat) roof of our building (at night). I finally settled on two horizontally stacked Winegard 6065 antennas attached to a 2x4 and mounted on a rotor. I bought a $50 zero phase combiner to combine the signals from the two antennas. The setup worked pretty well and on a good day, I even got a listenable signal from a 1 KW UC Santa Barbara college FM station. I got the best signal from a local station by pointing the antenna at a large building about a mile away and obtaining the reflected signal off of it. When I later moved into a house in San Marcos, CA I assembled four Channel Master antennas on top of a foothill near our house into a quad stack using three (less expensive) Winegard combiners. I pointed the stack at LA (no rotor on this one) and fed the output into a Winegard signal amplifier. I then ran 1300 feet (count em!) of Belden RG-6 Quad Shield cable down the side of the hill to my backyard and into the house. I borrowed my neighbor's tall boots to walk through the brush. (He later told me the area I walked through was infested with rattle snakes
Bubble wrapping the cables! I listen with the volume up around 6 or 7, so things get to vibrate in my music room; seems like the best tweaks in my system are those that cut down on that vibration. Cleaning things up with Caig Progold worked wonders too!