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Some time ago

Posted by bartc (A) on January 9, 2015 at 20:47:32

In Reply to: Alan Maher told me..... posted by Winston Smith on January 9, 2015 at 10:33:39:

I experimented with them and brought them to Al Sekela's attention. Then we experimented together with various ways of treating different piezoelectric and pyroelectric silicate crystals and discussed theory at length.

I alerted Al to the effectiveness of Alan Maher's devices of the day. We did not open them up or reverse engineer them. We devised our own from theory. And I came up with the treatment of them with warmed mineral oil, which Al built upon in his successive applications of the oil and paraffin. Again, built on theory of how to damp electrical fields using piezoelectric materials to dissipate RFI.

Also, surmising how some manufacturers of the day might be using granulated crystalline materials in their electrical products, I made matrices of tourmaline, silica, and one other crystal I cannot recall in acrylic resin. Used those in my sleeves on my PC plugs along with CF, as well as in the base of my power distributors to good effect.

Al's ultimate suggestions aren't exactly as described here, to my recollection. He suggested to me that they needed to be between and behind the place in the plug barrel where the wires trifurcated. He also suggested that I try using them at various nodes along the power cords.

You can see my observations and experiments with pix on older posts, and I can assure you that they were effective. Their impact also conformed to the theory as Al formulated.

At one point I was going to surround an entire power cord in a casing containing either silica sand or that and a combination of silicate crystals. Al said this would be too much, though it would provide larger scale vibrational damping.

BTW, for your information, Al surrounded his entire power cords with Don Palmer's wire wrap and he loved the effect. Something he picked up from Don, literally as well as figuratively, as Don supplied the wire wrap.

At the end of his life Al was experimenting more with both crystals and AC parallel filters. There were many private discussions that I'm not allowed to reveal with at least one manufacturer. My AC filters of the day incorporated both the crystals and the parallel R-C-R formula Al devised. Al kept his AC filters with just the R-C-R configuration without crystals.

There is one other tweak that you all were never apprised of from Al: "electropoop". That was his nickname for a barium titanate mix in a resin substrate. The nickname derived from the shape, which looked like a large animal fecal dropping. It came from another manufacturer's byproduct, which again I cannot reveal to you, other than the chemical composition. I have inherited his electropoop. Placed above the tranny coils in my amp and CDP it was equally effective as it had been in Al's more sensitive system. This is NOT a joke, BTW.

So now I've given you something else to pursue! LOL

Please remember our friend Al for the spirited and helpful EE he was. As I write this it brought back many wonderful memories and I realize I have never recovered from the loss of Al in my life. I have appreciated the advice and friendship here of several of you, including "Awe-d-o-file", Alan Maher, unclestu and Winston Smith. Though I've backed away from audionervosa, the years spent in conspiracy with you all were among my happiest in the tinkering avocation.

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