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

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RE: Believing in belief.

Posted by rick_m (A) on September 7, 2009 at 17:47:49

In Reply to: RE: Believing in belief. posted by caspian@peak.org on September 7, 2009 at 14:03:29:

"tweaks that DO make a measurable and quantifiable difference [like] keeping RFI and EMI [(by)put(ing) ferrite beads on all your cables] out of the signal path, etc. This is about empirical evidence, not belief."

"I think people who do that [demagnetizing your CDs, painting the edges green, or putting rubber rings or mats on them] are actually trying to recover some of the lost ritual of prepping a record."

Assuming that I haven't altered your meaning by compacting those two statements, and I don't believe that I have, then I don't see a substantive difference. In both cases they are behaviors based upon empirical evidence. Do you really think someone is going to continue taking the time to color disk edges or mess with mats on the player if they haven't found that it improves the sound?

It seems to me that you 'believe' in beads but don't 'believe' in markers. I presume that you've tried markers and mats and they didn't make any difference in your system. True? The 'in your system' clause is important because that's all a single data point will give you.

Your experiences aren't directly transferable because the things being affected are usually not controlled parameters during device manufacturing AND are often system specific. The implementation details of a CD player for instance can make all the difference in whether mats, markers and mirrors, or whatever and/or z-beads will improve performance. My take is if you can hear a difference, it does, if you can't, it doesn't, or it doesn't do so to a significant extent in you system for your ears. To muddy the waters, even the CD is part of the system and some may be more susceptible to the effects of mats et al than others.

I'm a pragmatist. Empirical is good. Objective is gooder (objective in the sense of correlated measurements). Three things make objective gooder: 1)it furthers understanding, 2)it can be controlled in production, 3)it aids in optimization. BUT if it's just MY stereo and MY ears and a rabbit's foot laying on the amplifier oriented to magnetic north improves the sound, guess what?

I've probably got several decades of electronical experience on you and I strongly encourage you to not dismiss others observations just because they seem silly or you can't imagine a mechanism. Sure, they may be bogus, but my experience is that most of the time they aren'. I've learned to apply this initial working hypothesis: believe the observation, ignore the explaination.

Disclaimer: I do use Z-beads and I don't paint disks or use a mat, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't or that what I'm doing is optimum. It's just a combination of empiricism and wont.

Rick

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