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RE: Those cryptic "tweaks that don't work" again....

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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  • RE: Those cryptic "tweaks that don't work" again.... - Tony Lauck 10:34:45 04/13/12 (0)

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