Home Isolation Ward

From ebony pucks to magic foil, mystical and controversial tweaks.

RE: Believing in belief.

"Actually, I don't dismiss anything out of hand." --- Excellent. Suspecting that something may not matter isn't nearly the same as dismissing it.

I too haven't tried a mat, same reason, I can just visualize all too clearly what might go astray.

Taking Geoff's list from below...

Schumann frequency generator:
Sort of tried it. I fed an appropriate loop that I happened to have laying around with a function generator. It definitely had an effect, I almost immediately started feeling woozey. I turned up the frequency a little and the wooziness cleared up. The second frequency was about the nominal S. resonance. Stopped test. I don't regard this as a stereo tweak, more a mental one and a little scary, but interesting.

demagnetizer for CDs and LPs:
Tried my old RadioShack one, no effect. But I've been told that it's not powerful enough.

crystals:
Guess I've tried a little. UncleStu said that tourmaline was especially good and I happened to have a piece of ore with a decent lug of it sticking out that I had scavenged from the tailings of a mine. So I put it on my receiver in the study and found that it sounded better doing the normal on/off testing. I also ran across a chunk of basalt that was almost the same size and shape and tried that, it didn't seem to help and certainly wasn't as pretty. A lot of people believe that crystals help reduce interference essentially as an E field equivalent of lossy ferrite. They may be right, it would be fun to investigate. But in this application I suspect that the mechanism is acoustical reflections from the surface of the crystal. Physically it's nearfield to the speakers and the system is very sensitive to small changes in that area. On a related topic I bought one of the ceramic wallplates that were were in vogue a while back as affecting the sound. Screwed it to the outlet in the same system and it affected the sound alright, it made it worse. I found just having it laying around hurt the sound, but again it was nearfield to the speakers. I haven't tried them in other positions in the room but suspect that they might provide some improvements in the right spots. Guess you can see where I'm going with this. I think small, hard, objects given to specular reflections or high-Q inband resonances can affect the perceived sound far more than one would expect.

Red "X "Pen, Mpingo disc, siver holographic foil, clever little clock, cryogenics, ion generators:
No experience. One of these days I may splurge and buy the unbelievers kit or whatever it's called from May and play with it.

The thing is tweaks run the gamut and lumping them obscures the issues. But it's all fun. As a speaker tinkerer you have probably already found what a tremendous difference nearfield reflections and diffraction can have on sound. I've been enjoying this hobby for decades and one of the things I can see is that the commercial speaker manufacturers have come to realize and address this issue. Speaker cases are much smoother and swoopier these days.

Rick



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  • RE: Believing in belief. - rick_m 09:20:40 09/08/09 (2)

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