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Which is worse?

Posted by Charles Hansen (M) on September 24, 2005 at 11:14:06

(John Atkinson recently posted an interesting reply [linked below]
in a thread which was unfortunately "buried" way down on this page.
I have taken the liberty of moving this topic up the page.)

JA wrote, "I think that over the years, each bullshit,bogus
'explanation' offered for some new tweak has eroded my
tolerance for tweaks in general."

I agree that the explanations offered for many phenomena
accepted as audible (cables, cones, CD tweaks, AC filters,
amplifier circuits, etc.) are unsatisfying. But are they
really any worse than outright lies perpetrated by "respectable"
sources? Such as:

1) Madrigal claiming they developed the adaptive bias circuit
used in their power amplifiers, when in fact it was taken
directly from a 1981 AES paper written by a Sansui engineer.

2) Sony's claims of so-called "DSD" being a completely new format,
when for roughly 10 years prior to SACD's introduction virtually
all CDs were made with A/D converters that create "DSD" signals
then subsequently (and presumably magically) turned into PCM
simply by running them through a low-pass digital filter.

3) Halcro's claims that their low-distortion amplifiers did not
use high levels of feedback, when their patents reveal these
designs to have extremely high levels of feedback.

Personally my tolerance for tweaks has gone up significantly
over the years, for one simple reason -- they work. I'd rather
have good sound from my stereo than worry about whether the
explanations offered are the correct ones or not.

And as far as bringing more people into our hobby, there can be
no doubt whatsoever that Consumer Reports and Sound & Vision have
inflicted a 1000-fold more damage than silly explanations
regarding tweaks ever could.

I say we start a campaign to take over Sound & Vision from the
inside and turn it into the US equivalent of What Hi-Fi.
That would probably triple the sales of Stereophile, along with
other high-end gear.

(If we could somehow disappear all known tweaks, do you really
think our hobby would somehow grow? I don't.)

• John Atkinson's full post   (Open in New Window)

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