Why does an amp make a 60hz sound when I touch the input cable?

[stormbringer]

I have a Faraday cage, so I will try it in there.

First I must buy some shielded underwear and a shielded balaclava: EMF Safety Garments, Bedding, & Grounding Devices

[Enzo]

Or at least some shielded baklava.

[tubeswell]

Makes one wonder what effect the 60hz frequency really has on us since we are bombarded constantly with it even from the time we are in the womb.

The remedy for 60Hz bombardment?

frequency 528 Hz (DNA repair frequency ?) : NO MUSIC single tone - YouTube

(I came across this the other day when I was looking for some facts to fit the numbers)

So maybe download some 528Hz to your iPod - then when you feel too bombarded by 60Hz you can playback some soothing 528Hz! ;-)

[Austin]

Robert Fulghum (author of the book Evrything I Ever Needed To Know I Learned in Kindergarden) wrote a book called "Uh-Oh" that gets into how 60 hertz has affected the size of our skulls, the pitch of the average voice and all sorts of stuff even in the relatively small amount of time 60hz ac electricity has been around. I read this book years ago and think it really is a good book, not just more total b.s. hippy tripe.

[J M Fahey]

Don't know about 60 or 528Hz, but it's well proven that Mother's heartbeat calms babies instantly.
What nobody tested (yet) and should be interesting is to listen to Mom's heartbeat as adults and check whether any "engraved" memory of it remains.

[Tom Phillips]

...how 60 hertz has affected the size of our skulls, the pitch of the average voice and all sorts of stuff even in the relatively small amount of time 60hz ac electricity has been around...

I wonder how the author determined that the sole presence of 60 Hz caused the skull size increase. Humans have been exposed to a multitude of new things and lifestyle changes in the same time period since 60 Hz has been around. I'm not trying to start a debate. Just thinking out loud about the author's reasoning

[Austin]

Don't know about 60 or 528Hz, but it's well proven that Mother's heartbeat calms babies instantly.
What nobody tested (yet) and should be interesting is to listen to Mom's heartbeat as adults and check whether any "engraved" memory of it remains.

What I do know for sure is I will be very sad one day when my mothers heart stops beating should I out live her. Not calm at all. So her beating heart is indeed a comfort to me.

I wonder how the author determined that the sole presence of 60 Hz caused the skull size increase. Humans have been exposed to a multitude of new things and lifestyle changes in the same time period since 60 Hz has been around. I'm not trying to start a debate. Just thinking out loud about the author's reasoning

Actually I read the skull size has actually decreased some in the last 100,000 years or so.

Human Nature, Technology & the Environment

I find stuff like this pretty interesting for a google search, there have been many skulls found of prehistoric humans with larger brain sizes it appears.

[Enzo]

One concept that is drummed into science is this: Correlation is not causality.

Many things have changed in our living environment since 60Hz showed up. The industrial revolution has mightily chaged the available nutrition, the available health care, the available resources for most eveything.

Yes, since the Neanderthals, our skull size is slightly smaller, they had slightly larger brains. Fat lot of good it did them. Of course if they had 60Hz around then... Certainly in the last 100 years we have not had time to evolve smaller skulls

[tubeswell]

Don't know about 60 or 528Hz, but it's well proven that Mother's heartbeat calms babies instantly.
What nobody tested (yet) and should be interesting is to listen to Mom's heartbeat as adults and check whether any "engraved" memory of it remains.

The whole 528Hz thing sure is funny in'it?

[Austin]

One concept that is drummed into science is this: Correlation is not causality.

Many things have changed in our living environment since 60Hz showed up. The industrial revolution has mightily chaged the available nutrition, the available health care, the available resources for most eveything.

Yes, since the Neanderthals, our skull size is slightly smaller, they had slightly larger brains. Fat lot of good it did them. Of course if they had 60Hz around then... Certainly in the last 100 years we have not had time to evolve smaller skulls

I was riding past a billboard yesterday that said "Remarkable women deserve remarkable healthcare" or the like, that got me thinking about the way words can have two meanings.. Remarkable... Could be health care that causes you to make positive remarks or snide remarks who knows? Here is another one, one of my favorite teas, "Constant Comment Tea". Are people constantly making positive comments or constantly making little smart-alec comments about the tea? hmm?
I am only attempting to be funny, your comment or remark of "Many things have changed in our living environment since 60Hz showed up" and "The industrial revolution has mightily chaged the available nutrition, the available health care, the available resources for most eveything" reminded me of this thought train I had yesterday.. You are of course correct, it has changed. Especially so in the last 20 or so years with all sorts of new things... Good or not I dunno, compared to what? I say we had it pretty great in the 1950s and '60s and imo we maybe have gone downhill a bit however there were far less people on earth then. Tube amps were pretty much the only game in town, and that is imo pretty cool. So there is that.. Well the cars were cool looking too I spose. Smoking cigs was good for you back then too I heard.

[Tom Phillips]

About a year ago a professor type newbie showed up on the forum. He asked a lot of questions and argued in an annoying manner about the responses he received. In fairly short order he announced that he had surpassed the old time forum members in regard to his knowledge about musical instrument amps. Correlating these facts we can conclude that participating in this forum gives you a big head. Even though we are a small subset of the word population our big heads statistically increase the average skull size of the human population. So there…that’s the real reason. Not 60 Hz.

[Enzo]

One correlative factor in SAT scores is heigth. Taller students got much better scores. yes, the three foot tall first graders did substantially less well than the five foot tall high schoolers.

I noted early in July that one warm evening the fireflies were out in large numbers. It was also coming up on the 4th of July so there were a lot of fireworks being set off. Therefore, I must conclude that loud fireworks cause fireflies.


I grew up in the 1950s, and one VERY frightening thing then was polio. Polio was a debilitating disease, and kids wound up having to live in "iron lungs". It was like a pressure chamber you lay in with your head sticking out one end. Pumps caused the pressure inside it to rise and fall, and that forced your chest to breath in and out - something the polio victim's body could not do on its own. In 1955, Dr Jonas Salk created the "Salk Vaccine" and a mass innoculation program was instituted. In school we all lined up in the auditorium and walked in line past a team of doctors and nurses who injected vaccine into our arms. A lot of scared kids looking at needles. IN 1962 the Sabin oral vaccine came out - the "sugar cube." The vaccine was literally absorbed into a ssugar cube, and they passed out the cubes for kids to eat. Much nicer than the needle. We got polio under control.

Polio has no non-human vectors, so if we wipe it out of humans it ceases to exist, it can't live in nature but for a very brief time. We beat back polio almost to extinction. But then in Nigeria and a couple other places, rumors flew that the whole vaccine program was a CIA plot of some sort, so people stopped immunizing their children. All of a sudden the incidence of polio in those areas soared. Now THAT is one correlation that IS legit.

We DID manage to eradicate smallpox, another deadly disease that ran rampant and killed millions. We called it extinct in 1979. There are two small samples of it kept for reseach at the CDC and in Russia. MAJOR problem in the 1950s.

Those are things the 1950s had that I can do without, thanks.

In the 1950s we had maybe three or four TV stations, at least in Washington DC. They were not on 24 hours a day, no cable channels. Music was on AM radio top 40 stations. FM existed, it played classical music. The first Elvis records came out on 78rpm records. They wore out easy, and shattered if you dropped them. DOn;t miss those things.

Today I can get fresh fruit every day of the year, 1950s? not so much.

The interstate highway system was still largely just plans in the 1950s. We drove from Washington to Missouri in the early 1950s, surface streets all the way. In the early 1960s we drove from Washington to Michigan for my college, and again, other than the Ohio Turnpike and Penna pike, much of it was surface roads.

In the early 1950s we wanted to call Missouri from Washington to arrange the visit. You called the phone operator and told her the call you wanted to make, then she'd arrange all the conections and ring you back to let you know the call had gone through, and "here is your party on the line." Nowdays cell phones are with you 24/7 and can reach anywhere in the world instantly.

1950s may look romantic from here, but it was no picnic.

[Austin]

Would it really even need to be earthed? I think of a guitar with wireless transmitter pack. As long as the guitar itself is shielded and has a shielded cable to the pack, no hum results, other than what would anyway. We don;t need to run a ground wire up to the guitar.

The Nuvistor

The metal shell on a nuvistor shoulld be grounded it says, otherwise it might be unstable.. Reminded me of this post. Maybe the van body should be earthed for best results.

[rjb]

...otherwise it might be unstable.. Reminded me of this post.

I've seen posts a lot more unstable than this one. Won't mention any names....

[Enzo]

The metal shell on a nuvistor shoulld be grounded it says, otherwise it might be unstable.. Reminded me of this post. Maybe the van body should be earthed for best results.

careful what we mean by groiunded. Earthed means connected to the earth ground. In the context of a radio receiver, ground can simply mean the circuit common or the device enclosure. Again, we need not earth a table radio for it to operate properly.

The nuvistor was a tiny tube designed for UHF and VHF tuners in TV sets. Stability was important in various ways. In a guitar amp stability to us means not breaking into oscillation. IN a TV tuner or other RF tuned circuit, stability can also mean STAYING in oscillation reliably, AND at a stable frequency.