Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Propeller Head Plaza ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Re: what exactly is peter belt selling?

Posted by May Belt (M) on April 14, 2007 at 02:14:41

In Reply to: what exactly is peter belt selling? posted by jeromelang on April 12, 2007 at 22:53:04:

The rules of Audio Asylum for manufacturers is that we have right of reply but are not allowed to promote our products or services. So, my reply will have to be in a general form.
As my reply will also be quite a long one, I am splitting it with the first part here :-

We have been in the audio industry for over 50 years. Until 10/15 years ago, all information and discussions on audio matters were only generally available through the medium of the traditional Hi Fi Magazines and at the whim of what the Editors wished to publish !! Then, 10-15 years ago, the Internet became readily available for most people to be able to exchange experiences and ideas. However, this means that the first 30 + years of Peter's 'history in audio' is not available via the Internet. The people who ARE interested are aware of most of it and many people who had access to the British Hi Fi Magazines during the late 1980s and early 1990s know quite a bit of the background behind Peter's discoveries !!

I can only suggest you read (accessed via our Home Page) the articles published by the various (Internet) journalists and some of the background articles I have included on our home page.

Also, a very long discussion I participated in on the Stereophile Chat Forum can be accessed via a link in an article by me (Myth, Mirth or Magic) published in the current Positive Feedback Online magazine. Quite a bit of our background information is within this 'Stereophile' discussion.

I fully acknowledge that our web page is not the most professional looking - that is why it is really quite hilarious when such as Jim Austin comments that 'our products and devices have been claimed to 'improve the sound' because of (amongst other things) "effective marketing".!!!

Because many people are hearing about Peter and his discoveries and techniques only recently, they are not aware of the background to those discoveries nor what experiments other people have (independently) carried out. So, many people are not aware of the events which prompted Peter to take such a different path in the area of 'achieving improvements to sound'.

In 1981, Peter began to investigate what some other people in audio had been reporting - that they could hear different cables and wires sound different !! I have copied below a paragraph from an article by Keith Howard in the Hi Fi News July 2001 issue which gives, briefly, the background (from a 1977 issue of Hi Fi News) when the whole 'cable controversy' started.

>>> " The following article has aroused considerable controversy among the editorial staff, eliciting such comments as 'balderdash' and 'sensational'...."
Thus began the understandably cautious editorial introduction to a feature article published in the August 1977 issue of Hi Fi News. It was entitled 'Can we hear connecting wires'? And for many of us it marked the beginning of a controversy that has continued unabated across the quarter century since:
I still recall the impact of that Jean Hiraga piece, translated from the French "La Nouvelle Revue du Son." If even connecting cables sounded different, I remember thinking, then nothing of the old view could be taken for granted any longer. Intellectually, the earth had moved." <<< Keith Howard.

Peter listened to as many different bare metals (as a conductor) as possible and found, as others had done, that they all sounded different and also how some wires and cables could be 'directional'. After experimenting with also 'baking the different metals in the oven' (as reported by Martin Colloms in 1984 where Martin described Peter's work on cables) the sound of the metals improved somewhat but as soon as Peter put plastic insulation material anywhere near the bare metals, the sound deteriorated. He knew that he could not 'bake the plastic insulation material in the oven' so he tried doing the opposite - he put the plastic insulation material in our domestic deep freezer !!! This procedure improved the situation considerably so he tried this freezing technique also with the bare metals. Again an improvement in their sound !! The more things we put through this freezing/slow defrost procedure, the better the sound. So, the discovery that putting things through the freezing/slow defrost procedure and gaining improvements in the sound was made.
We knew nothing of Ed Meitner nor that someone else had been finding out that freezing gave improvements in the sound until we read Robert Harley's article in Stereophile in 1990. As soon as we read Harley's article, we realised that here was someone else (Ed Meitner) who had also discovered what Peter had discovered !!!

To quote further from Keith Howard's article.
>>> " I tracked Ed down to his company EMM Labs in Galgary, Canada, and spoke to him on the telephone about his many experiments with DCT (cryogenic treatments) and why his pioneering work has slowly slipped from view. You can read what he told me in the accompanying panel. I must say, even after that conversation, I remain puzzled. Having heard for myself the astonishing effect of cryogenically treating the copper in speaker and interconnect cables, I can't imagine how this process and it's benefits could fade into obscurity. As Ed Meitner himself says, it can't be due to cost. Although Meitner still uses cryogenic treatment himself, for everyone else in the audio industry it appears to have been a case of NIH (not invented here) or maybe IDU (I don't understand)." <<< Keith Howard.

I will take this opportunity to also quote a few sentences from Ed Meitner's interview.

>>> " There was never a failure. We treated tons of solid-state stuff, whole circuit boards, and the only bad thing that happened was that the electrolytic capacitors would lose their shrink-wrap. That was it. We even treated speaker voice coils.
What I've found over the last 15 years of being in high-end audio is that most of the minds are pretty closed. And this is strange: it's the opposite of what you would expect" <<< Ed M

To continue with further background information.

Peter also began to investigate reports (instigated by Ivor Tiefenbrum of Linn) that passive speakers, in the listening room, had an adverse effect on the sound. From those investigations Peter began to discover that magnets were also a problem and that batteries were also a problem. At this point he had no explanation why any of these things could 'change the sound'.

Months later something suddenly happened which changed our (audio) life !!!
This has been described in Greg Weaver's "Itty-Bitty UK Foil" Soundstage article and I have placed a copy of my full letter to Greg on our web page.
After this momentous event Peter went back and did all the previous experiments again and the results of those further investigations formulated his present concepts and techniques and, in time, our products.

In answer to the people who want to mock and snigger, then I have included some quotes from and about serious scientists.

"A refusal to dismiss a surprising finding."

"Breakthroughs come when researchers DON'T take things for granted ! When they look at the results of their experiments and see mistakes not to be thrown away, but to be the clues to a hidden message."

"It was one of those unexpected and counter-intuitive findings that sometimes make research so interesting, yet so frustrating."

Regards,
May Belt.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Amplified Parts

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---