Every clod has a silver lining

[chevalij]

Actually, sonic sensors can be fooled with a blanket. No lie, it was on an episode of Mythbusters. The laser ones are also not used. Visible light is too easy to recreate. They use infrared.

How about you just let a homeless guy sleep in the room and he yells if somebody comes in? Cheap, effective and morally uplifting

[Steve Conner]

Lol!

By the way, the silver wire transformer guys are Audio Note. I think there are others but these are the only ones I remember.
http://www.audionote.co.uk/comp/tran...2_output.shtml

They have OPTs costing up to 7 grand each! And that's in British pounds, so it's like $10k.

They also talk a brand of crap that makes you guys, with your hand-picked pole screws, NOS vintage magnet wire and nose-oil-aged covers, look refreshingly sane:
http://www.audionote.co.uk/articles/...writings.shtml

Apparently transistors sound gritty because they're made of sand, and electrolytics sound mushy because they're made of... mush?

[David Schwab]

Actually, sonic sensors can be fooled with a blanket. No lie, it was on an episode of Mythbusters. The laser ones are also not used. Visible light is too easy to recreate. They use infrared.

Yeah, that's why I said "in the movies". Infrared sensors would have ruined that scene in Ocean's 12!

I also want to know why people always do so much typing on computers in movies! Where's the damn mouse already? I can't imagine everyone is using a CLI...

It makes sense that a blanket would work, just stop the sound waves from reflecting.

[salvarsan]

Lol!

By the way, the silver wire transformer guys are Audio Note. I think there are others but these are the only ones I remember.
http://www.audionote.co.uk/comp/tran...2_output.shtml

They have OPTs costing up to 7 grand each! And that's in British pounds, so it's like $10k.

Silver + Hi-mu alloys make great sense for moving coil phono
transformers (input signal ~100 microvolts) but are a mindless extravagance
in output transformers.

The High-mu core laminations seem reasonable until you get above
10 watts since they saturate at relatively low field strength.

They also talk a brand of crap that makes you guys, with your hand-picked pole screws, NOS vintage magnet wire and nose-oil-aged covers, look refreshingly sane:
http://www.audionote.co.uk/articles/...writings.shtml

Apparently transistors sound gritty because they're made of sand, and electrolytics sound mushy because they're made of... mush?

There are two major differences.

Folks here MAKE things for making music.
Audiophlakes BUY things to play back music.

Folks here sell to a type of person known neither for intelligence nor money.
Audiophlakes are primarily known for self-delusion irrespective of intelligence
and for having the money to indulge their mental infirmity.

-drh

[David Schwab]

They also talk a brand of crap that makes you guys, with your hand-picked pole screws, NOS vintage magnet wire and nose-oil-aged covers, look refreshingly sane:
http://www.audionote.co.uk/articles/...writings.shtml

I don't use pole screws, but I do use at least three different types of steel, and they really do sound different.

Apparently transistors sound gritty because they're made of sand, and electrolytics sound mushy because they're made of...

Oil, paper, mylar, foil... Maybe it's the charge cycle on electrolytics that you hear? It cracks me up when they remove the shrink wrap from the aluminum can caps and claim it improves the sound. (after the prerequisite "burn in" time, which equates to: "gee, I can't remember what it used to sound like last week... so it must be better than it was!")

Why don't transistors sound smooth and glassy, since glass is made from sand? Gritty is the shape of the sand, not the composition.

Transformers sound good precisely because they mess with the signal at certain frequencies! Tubes sound smooth because they often round off the corners of the waveform when clipping. In either case it's not accurate reproduction. But it sounds pleasing to the ear.

These people always use faulty logic in these arguments. Pointed is the shape of their heads!

[salvarsan]

Oil, paper, mylar, foil... Maybe it's the charge cycle on electrolytics that you hear? It cracks me up when they remove the shrink wrap from the aluminum can caps and claim it improves the sound. (after the prerequisite "burn in" time, where equates to "gee, I can't remember what it used to sound like last week... so it must be better than it was!"

There's a physical basis to all of those mostly-stupid and subjectivist posturings,
but I won't waste time on them. Most of the effects are due to marginal and/or
stressed designs that exploit pathological behavior. A stressed component
in a crucial place can make a big difference.

For stressed capacitors, see:
http://www.salvarsan.org/misc/BlownAlesisXover.html

-drh

[David Schwab]

For stressed capacitors, see:
http://www.salvarsan.org/misc/BlownAlesisXover.html

Wow, that's a mess. One of our DVD players stopped powering up, so I suspected a bad cap, and sure enough, there was a swollen aluminum can in the power supply. It didn't looked burned, so I assume it was one of those batch of defective caps that made the rounds a couple of years back.

[salvarsan]

Wow, that's a mess. One of our DVD players stopped powering up, so I suspected a bad cap, and sure enough, there was a swollen aluminum can in the power supply. It didn't looked burned, so I assume it was one of those batch of defective caps that made the rounds a couple of years back.

A couple of those caps looked ordinary --
no swelling at the pressure relief marks on the top of the can --
but you knew they'd overheated and briefly bulged on the radius
because the shrink wrap had split.

Under ordinary loads, electrolytic caps swell+contract microscopically.
If you strip off the shrink wrap label, you get more microphonic 'sweetening'
of the sound. Some people like the pathological traits better than an honest
representation (Luckily, they get interested in audio instead of drug abuse).

By the same token, loosely wound pickups can sound good at
volume levels below feedback. Once potted, they lose the microphonic ear
candy.

-drh

[David Schwab]

Under ordinary loads, electrolytic caps swell+contract microscopically.
If you strip off the shrink wrap label, you get more microphonic 'sweetening'
of the sound. Some people like the pathological traits better than an honest
representation (Luckily, they get interested in audio instead of drug abuse).

Now that makes sense, but the reason given by the audiophools is that the plastic wrap sounds bad... because it's plastic! I guess the plastic inside the cap doesn't count.

[Steve Conner]

I don't believe it for a second! If electrolytics were microphonic, hitting them with a screwdriver should produce a Boing! through the speakers, just like with microphonic tubes.

If this large first-order excitation doesn't produce any audible effect, then it seems obvious, to me anyway, that the second-order effect of the capacitor's own tiny vibrations (which nobody has measured either, AFAIK) will have no audible effect squared.

Douglas Self tried this, and he was only able to get a dull thump out of the electrolytics on the input of a mic preamp with the gain turned up full. That's 70dB, a lot more gain than the average hi-fi set would have.

But then I don't really believe different kinds of steel and magnet wire sound different either. They might measure different, but I don't credit the human ear with that much sensitivity, especially after a couple of beers and standing next to a drummer all night.

[Robert M. Martinelli]

FWIW I have the feeling that the "audiofools'" wallets dimensions are inversely proportional to their brain's. I guess for them it's easier to spend money rather than having to learn something....

Oh, and I guess the old "small pr!ck-big machine" thing also applies, as someone wisely ( and in a more polite way ) pointed out.

Regards

Bob

[dai h.]

I've done the shrink wrap removal for a cap (or maybe it was both) alu electros in a wah after reading something about that but I didn't notice any difference. Also tried paralleling caps(several 1uFs for the 4.7uF IIRC). Didn't notice anything there either.

Done some other silly stuff like put weights on my CD player, green marker.

[salvarsan]

I don't believe it for a second! If electrolytics were microphonic, hitting them with a screwdriver should produce a Boing! through the speakers, just like with microphonic tubes.

You don't have to believe it,
and I never said anything about whacking caps.

My thesis involved stressing the little bastards
the way they are in a passive loudspeaker crossover.

Check out those photographs and tell me you don't
think an electrolytic cap won't vibrate when shunting
50 watts straight to ground (until it explodes).

Under power, these things happen.

At small signal levels (as in the D.Self demo using a single
unstated brand of capacitor), it is usually an insignificant issue
unless the caps are medium awful ... like bipolar electrolytics.

...but if you insist on whacking caps, note that disc ceramics
are substantially microphonic in the larger values (like .1uF)
when they are directly in the signal path.


-drh

[David Schwab]

But then I don't really believe different kinds of steel and magnet wire sound different either. They might measure different, but I don't credit the human ear with that much sensitivity, especially after a couple of beers and standing next to a drummer all night.

I can't speak for the magnet wire, as I only use poly, but the different steels sure do sound different! I've made identical pickups with different grades of steel for the blades, and you can really hear it. I've even gone so far as to mixing steel types in one pickup.

[David Schwab]

Done some other silly stuff like put weights on my CD player, green marker.

I've tried the green marker thing. Didn't notice any improvement.

I can see where you might not want your CD player to vibrate, but since the rotation of the disc is clocked from the disc itself, it's probably a moot point.

Same thing with jitter. CD's don't exhibit jitter because the clock timing is locked into the disc.

Another goofy thing is the CD "rippers"* that do multiple scans in an effort to get an error free "exact" copy. That's assuming there are no errors on the CD! But there are. Lots of them. Big chucks of missing data. And error correction to fill in the missing sections so you don't hear clicks and pops. So the best you can do is make an exact copy of that single CD, which will not be an exact copy of the source material. Pointy feet on the bottom of the CD player, or not.



*And don't get me started on the term "rip". How that started getting used to mean copying a file or files off an optical disk is beyond me. You RIP files to be printed... that's Raster Image Processing. Has nothing at all to do with audio or video. But it sounds technical so one idiot repeats what he hears or reads.