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In Reply to: RE: MacMini vs Bryston BDP-1 Compared-It's posted by AbeCollins on April 12, 2012 at 08:53:21
Not surprising at all...And, to tell the truth, most likely wouldn't make any difference in your case if you did - you do KNOW everything, right? Meaning, only the small part of it your could wrap you head around...
Edits: 04/12/12Follow Ups:
I've listened enough to know that many so-called power supply and power conditioning upgrades have little effect on gear that have decent power supplies to begin with.
That's certainly possible - in one of two cases:
- resolution of a system as a whole, or of particular piece of gear, is insufficient to demonstrate the differences power conditioning makes. BTW, the difference can be negative, like for instance with most active conditioners on power amps - but it's ALWAYS there;
- hearing of a person is not discriminate enough, to hear these differences.
Being somewhat familiar with your posts about the (fine) gear you're using - I'll have to go with the reason #2 in your case.
You conveniently misquoted me by omitting the rest of what I said in my previous post. And you ignored or simply cannot comprehend the other possibility that I have already mentioned.... but I've seen you do this many times before so I am not surprised.
The power supplies in some audio gear may already be sufficiently well designed such that additional power conditioning may provide little or no benefit.
But in true audiophool fashion you and many folks here jump to the immediate conclusion that every piece of gear will benefit from a modded or aftermarket power supply and power conditioning. That's fine as it helps to keep those vendors in business.
"every piece of gear will benefit from a modded or aftermarket power supply and power conditioning."
Line cords, don't forget line cords and plugs and sockets and outlet covers and the metallurgy of the screw coupling the latter two and the hanging of tikis on the fuse box and...
On the other hand, have you looked at your powerline with a scope or spectrum lately? Not a pretty picture by any means. And if your stuff is like mine it's all unbalanced and probably designed by an audio guy whose whole RF experience is listening to the game on a transistor radio and doesn't know what EMC stands for.
So what we have are systems that are out of control at the system level and thus almost any alteration to them has the potential to change the performance for good, ill or just different. That's just currently part of the rich pageantry of audiophilism. It comes with the territory. And I'd it didn't, we wouldn't be chatting about it! It's part of the charm of the hobby.
Naturally, believing the above, I believe that what's good for the goose may not actually be good for the gander so he needs to sort out his own nest. It all depends on what the nest is made of, how it's assembled and the environment it's in. Enough metaphores?
Folks who generalize their experience rather than just sharing it bug me. It takes a lot of gall (and a high level of ignorance) to state that "anyone who doesn't find that hanging a rabbit's-foot keychain on their power plug gives their system more hop must either have a 'low resolution' system or bad hearing".
Maybe my system doesn't need it?
Rick
"and the hanging of tikis on the fuse box"
Most likely it's the tiki's. I've provided a link for those who aren't familiar with the concept. (Unless your fuse box is huge, I believe the proper term is Hei-tiki. My Uncle served in the Pacific in WW II and he brought back a tiki that was larger than a pendant but suitable for an inside table.)
Another possibility could be the tassels on oriental rugs in the house. These ward off evil-eye, according to rug experts and merchants. Tassels are undoubtedly why my system sounds good, even though it does not "resolve" differences created by many audiophile tweaks.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
"That's fine as it helps to keep those vendors in business."
It's fine only if those vendors are selling products that actually improve their customer's sound. Otherwise, it's not fine. If people waste money on tweaks that don't work they have less to spend on equipment that actually works, and as a result there is less incentive for competent products to be developed and marketed. No one benefits from useless tweaks except the scam artists peddling them. (The fools may think they benefit, but then they are fools.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
You were asked before what those are - and pretty much refused to name them.
So, once again - what are the tweaks that you tried, that didn't work in your system?
Of course, one has to be judicious - in other words, I wouldn't spend any money on, for instance, Coconut Audio products, however I'd be willing to try them for free.
The only tweak that I personally didn't hear any difference with, when tried in my system, was Shunyata cable lifters. Left them in the system anyway, since they didn't cost a lot, and look kinda nice.
Damned if I recall. There are a quasi-infinite number of failed tweaks one might wish to avoid, so unless they fit into some kind of pattern then they tend to evaporate from my mind, just like I tend to forget the bad things that friends have done (but not enemies). You have to understand. Most tweaks do something. At the very least they provide an excuse for one to admit that things are now different. But if this is all they do the effect doesn't last and that's the only thing that is relevant. There are many tweaks that do matter and I remember these. These include all matter of minor changes in speaker positioning and adjustment, adjustment of shades and furniture in the listening room, positioning of tube traps, minute (0.5 dB) volume changes, reversals of polarity, switching from foobar2000 to cPlay, etc., resampling from 44/16 to 176/24 including various settings of Sox or iZotope SRC.
Sometimes changes that I did not expect to make much difference had a rather dramatic effect. These include replacing the large power supply capacitors in a MOSFET AMP with slightly larger valued units, as well discovering that two "identical" files sounded different and then inspecting them and discovering that, indeed they weren't at all identical, differing in the dithering algorithm used to create them. There are some things that I simply do not hear despite my best efforts. These include offset errors in CD rips, and bit-identical files that were made by ripping the same CD using different optical drives. These differences I consider to be "fringe" but just barely. What would be "beyond the fringe" would be a claim that HDtracks.com downloads are (good, bad, your choice) because of the color of the Ethernet cable used to connect the server to the hosting provider's Internet router. I suspect there are some audiophiles that subscribe to the "everything matters" dogma, in which case I am definitely not with them.
I've heard too many obvious changes over the years that in the cold sober light of day proved to be mistakes to naively trust my ears. Yes, I trust my ears, but only after quadruple checking and carefully using my mind. And yes, I believe some "authorities" but relatively few of them because most of them don't know what they are doing, unless it is liberating money from marks. If I am going to pursue theories based on non-standard science, I'm not going to waste my time on things like high-end audio. There are much more important subjects, such as cold fusion, zero point energy, psycho kinetics and remote viewing that are about equally "out there" with some high end tweaks.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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