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PS Audio Noise Harvester

pchams said:
Headphones!

Are you the same duck who bypassed the fuse on his amp because it sounded "so much cleaner"?
More sizzle and shine in the highs....a deeper more refined bottom...
Audiophools make me laugh.
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Headphones don't require 10 million dollars worth of room treatments...

It's obvious that all fuses must be bypassed. I don't want to feed power to the component through a frail connection that easily breaks.
 
I hope you have no aversion to smoke detectors.

Since I've always worked in the electrical and audio industry, allow me a quote from
a man I considered wise, yet unknown:
"A watt's a friggin' watt"

If your amp is calling for a certain amount of power, and the fuse is passing the required
amperage for that power, where is the problem?
As stated before in this thread, the power supply in your amplifier is where the rubber
hits the road. If you have a decent power supply, all the blinky lights will do nothing,
except perhaps some confirmation bias.
Don't burn your house down.
 
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ExtremeSkeptic said:
Yes it's a no. Ever since someone said they listen for the improvements without any music playing I have ignored everything in this thread.
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Hmm. I wish the quote function worked a little differently. Commenting on your reply, my original question dropped out. However, the question I was asking was if you had any refutation for the facts presented.
Your personal philosophy and opinions, while amusing, are not germane to a fact-based argument.
 
ExtremeSkeptic said:
When I was a kid I learned basic physics in couple of days because I needed it for another sport that I practiced professionally, but a few years later I realized I didn't really need it to win.

Having knowledge of physics isn't needed if you tweak the audio system, it's just counter-productive. In audio, little knowledge is worse than none at all.


Audio is a sport to me where I practice the whole day and write what I hear into my logs. I write many megabytes per year.
I hear many variables, even ambient temperature makes a huge difference. I need to keep the headphone drivers at a certain temperature and softness to get the highest resolution, I'm using 46dB volume overnight to keep the drivers warmed up, but I still need to listen 6 hours a day at 60dB to keep it consistent. If I only listen 2 hours I need to leave it running at 50dB overnight etc. And if the ambient temperature changes, I need to compensate for that as well. It gets more complicated since the temperature has a delayed effect and affects the components differently.
I don't do it by looking at the numbers because I don't know all the variables yet. I listen to my audio system to hear what it needs, just like in athletic sports where you need to listen to your body to prevent overtraining and injuries etc. If the body is hungry you need to insert food instead of type on calculator...

When keeping the audio system warmed up, if I use too loud volume for the drivers then it sounds too warm and bassy on the next day. If I use too low volume, then it sounds edgy and muddy with lack of low-level detail.
I always use 60dB volume when I listen to music, and I have tweaked my system to match that volume.

The amount of time a component has been turned on matters also, the problem is the optimal time for each component is different, and whenever you unplug the AC connector it needs to burn-in again. Since I need to get the correct combination I only have a 10 hour window once a week where my system sounds the best.

I'm still a beginner at this audiophile sport, but my results are still consistent.
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Posting stuff like this will keep the thread going for weeks:D

I’ll bite.

What do you use to calibrate your hearing?

Doesn't ear wax and mucus affect your hearing on a day to day basis?

How does your level of alertness impact your ability to pick up on details?

What does the phrase “60dB volume” mean? Do you compress all your music to have the same dynamic range? Or do you multiply every input signal by 1000?
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
Posting stuff like this will keep the thread going for weeks:D

I’ll bite.

What do you use to calibrate your hearing?
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His preconceptions and desires.
Doesn't ear wax and mucus affect your hearing on a day to day basis?
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Ear wax and mucus are products of simple physics, and have no place in his world of "Advanced Physics."
How does your level of alertness impact your ability to pick up on details?
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He's so stoned on whatever it is that he smokes that he doesn't have any alertness. He's kind of like the squirrel in "Over the Hedge," but on quaaludes. No attention span to speak of, but by the time his 'lude soaked consciousness notices that he's lost the thread his scatter brain has flitted back to the original concept.
What does the phrase “60dB volume” mean? Do you compress all your music to have the same dynamic range? Or do you multiply every input signal by 1000?
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How would he know? He studied simple physics in one day and learned everything there is to know about it, but it's so confiningly dull that he promptly forgot every bit of it so that he could parade around here claiming to be totally ignorant of physics.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
What do you use to calibrate your hearing?
Click to expand...
I use a ticking clock on the wall to keep myself calibrated.

Ivor the Engineer said:
Doesn't ear wax and mucus affect your hearing on a day to day basis?
Click to expand...
Cleaning wax makes hearing inconsistent. So I don't clean my ears frequently anymore. Maybe twice a year.

Ivor the Engineer said:
How does your level of alertness impact your ability to pick up on details?
Click to expand...
It's only a problem after I have been tweaking my system for 16 hours straight, I need to sleep before listening.


Ivor the Engineer said:
What does the phrase “60dB volume” mean? Do you compress all your music to have the same dynamic range? Or do you multiply every input signal by 1000?
Click to expand...
Almost all of my trance albums are within half dB volume so I don't need to adjust it before listening. If I listen to classical albums I need to increase the gain of my amp.
I made a 20 trial blind test and guessed within 0.2945 dB of the correct volume.
 
Interesting. But not very responsive to the question.
What physical units are you measuring logrithmically?
 
CBC Radio One's Quirks and Quarks program includes the following blurb at the end of every broadcast:

Quirks and Quarks said:
If you're interested hearing any of our episodes again, check out our web page. We have an extensive collection of audio files going back several years.
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But what I hear is, "We have an extensive collection of audiophiles going back several years." Oh yeah ... I get this image in my mind of a photo gallery of balding, frumpy, middle-aged men with too much money and too few brains playing around with their equipment!
 
When I worked in the medical laboratory, there were laboratory assistants, lab technicians and medical scientists. Above them were the pathologists (who were mythical creatures rarely seen and often talked about).

Assistants were your basic lab rats who would do the grunt work. You needed no expertise to clean glassware. Techies knew how to run the equipment, and needed some skills to be able to do basic tests, but needed no experience in reading the results of diagnostic assays. Now, the techies often knew more than they needed to as a result of being in the environment, but to do their job effectively they didn't need a degree or to have demonstrated the ability to understand how the assays worked. They just needed to be able to do it.

The scientists needed to know everything about the test; how it worked, what it was testing, what could go wrong... To understand this, they needed foundational knowledge and some expertise, and significantly, when to delve deeper and do some research. Without foundational knowledge they were virtually technicians.

Techies were vital. I loved working with mine as they knew a lot of stuff. But to claim they were the equivalent of scientists in any sort of definition was totally wrong.

In this case, claiming to be an EE while arguing they don't need the basic skills, or a degree, is like a technician claiming they are the equivalent of a med-lab scientist. Sure, both often 'do' the same thing; running diagnostic assays. But a scientist by definition should have the experience and knowledge to go beyond the routine.

For Extremeskeptic to insinuate that one can do without the basics in a science is laughable. You might make an ok technician, but doing more than the monkey work takes knowledge gained through understanding the science you're playing with.

Athon
 
My only exposure to audio-phile-dom was a magazine I picked up from the freebies rack on a Boston-NYC shuttle flight. I read a lot of the reviews describing how various components, accessories, and techniques made the sound "rounder in the midrange" or added "brightness to the brass tones" or gave it "soft notes of tobacco and vanilla" (though that last one might have been from the wine magazine I also picked up that day). They sounded as if they knew what they were talking about, and some of the equipment looked to be almost worth its price as post-modern sculpture alone. The hot style, at the time, appeared to be reverently illuminated vacuum tubes, centered on brushed chrome terraces to form elegant miniature temples where cockroaches might gather and worship obsolete technology.

Then I got to a review of a cable. It was, according to the review, a masterpiece of technology. Made of gold and platinum parts, hand-assembled by virgins in sanctified stone circles during the equinoxes, priced at something in the neighborhood of $1200, it was well worth the price, said the reviewer, as it made the midranges rounder and the brass tones brighter and the soft notes ever-so-much more tobacco-and-vanilla-y. The reviewer was thrilled.

As one might expect, this technological wonder was very specialized. It had, in fact, only one function: to connect the digital output from a CD reader to a separate stand-alone digital-to-analog (D/A) converter. Which apparently is something high-end-audio afficionados have to do. A CD player isn't good enough; surely no single unit can be properly optimized for the tasks of reading data off a CD and converting the data into an audio waveform. Hence, two units, a CD reader and a D/A converter, and the need for a cable connecting them.

A cable that carries digital data.

Binary bits.

Streams of ones and zeros.

Of course, what makes digital signals digital (and in need of being converted into analog before being sent to your amplifier or speakers) is that each one and each zero is either there or not there. There is no possible issue of "noise" unless there's enough noise to turn a one into a zero or a zero into a one. Any lesser amount of noise will have no effect on the D/A converter. A D/A converter reads a noisy high-impedance zero as exactly the same as a clean noise-free low-impedance zero: as a zero.

The idea that this $1200 piece of wire could make the midranges rounder or the etc. etc. makes about as much sense as saying that a specially made USB keyboard cable will make your verbs more expressive and your allusions more alliterative when you type. It makes about as much sense as saying a hand-made platinum monitor cable will make the women in your computer's porn collection look rounder in the midrange.

And I suddenly realized that the only explanation for the reviewer's and editors' failure to recognize that simple fact was that the entire magazine, and the industry it supported, had to be an audacious scam.

Nice to see nothing's changed since then.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
Some people think that there are images of 1's and 0's flowing inside the cables. They are analog, everything is. Since they are analog signals the timing of the data is affected. It's the same data but with a different timing. If the timing is different the end result sounds different. Perfectly jitterfree data doesn't exist because everything affects it. Vibration, AC noise, EMI etc.

Since the music sounds different if the timing changes, you can change how it sounds like with tweaks, you can make it better or worse, or do combinations. You can manipulate the sound in many different ways. Everything doesn't work as perfectly as engineers believe.
 
ExtremeSkeptic said:
More of them isn't necessarily better. How many you need depends on your system and what sound you like to hear. In my system I'm using 3 Harvesters right now. I added a 4th but it made it sound worse, the sound got too heavy. When I removed the 4th one the synergy was back.
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I'm sorry, you are fooling yourself. There is no difference.

Hans
 
ExtremeSkeptic said:
Some people think that there are images of 1's and 0's flowing inside the cables. They are analog, everything is.
Click to expand...

They are, of course, represented by analog levels. The trick is that the decoding circuitry will only recognize two levels: Zero or One. There is no such thing as a good One or a bad Zero. Either it is recognized correctly or it isn't, period. Now, if the signal is so bad that recognition of levels is uncertain, then, yes it affects the sound. But such a transmission system is almost difficult to make. Even a 50c cable can reliably transmit a digital signal.

Since they are analog signals the timing of the data is affected. It's the same data but with a different timing. If the timing is different the end result sounds different. Perfectly jitterfree data doesn't exist because everything affects it. Vibration, AC noise, EMI etc.
Click to expand...

The timing does not change. The signal is retimed using a crystal-controlled clock. I have seen some articles that made a remotely plausible point that certain types of jitter might show up as side-bands on the signal, but even if this is true, the level is negligible. The largest amplitude possible is ½ the amplitude of the step-resolution. And of course, you should not be able to hear the step-resoution (otherwise you have other problems).

Since the music sounds different if the timing changes, you can change how it sounds like with tweaks, you can make it better or worse, or do combinations. You can manipulate the sound in many different ways. Everything doesn't work as perfectly as engineers believe.
Click to expand...

The greatest manipulation happens in your mind. You can make yourself believe that any tweak at all makes a difference (I recently had a heated discussion with someone who claimed that polishing his line fuses improved the sound).

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
The timing does not change. The signal is retimed using a crystal-controlled clock.
Click to expand...
How is that clock powered? With magic?

MRC_Hans said:
The greatest manipulation happens in your mind. You can make yourself believe that any tweak at all makes a difference (I recently had a heated discussion with someone who claimed that polishing his line fuses improved the sound).
Click to expand...
It's not hard to know which one has more credibility. He actually tried it himself, and he had music playing too. Skeptics listen to the improvements with the music paused...
 
ExtremeSkeptic said:
The more you believe in something the further you are from the real truth.
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Well, that applies more to you than to anyone else in this thread. You obviously can be led to believe just about anything. I'm sure you'd hear sound improvements in your headset if you installed resonance dampeners on your toilets.
 
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