Audiophile mythology: fact or fiction

[wgscott]

I can't wait until I am over 65, so that by then my hearing will improve to the point where I can hear all of these night and day differences.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Another one I like:

Tuning your system using expensive speaker wire, unusual USB cables and interconnects, audiophile fuses, tiny, audiophile-grade electrons, uni-directional wires, etc. is good.

Tuning your system using room measurement/correction software is bad.

That is because of particle/wave duality of reality. Room measurement and correction via software is digital man. Like lumpy particle based reality. All that other stuff is like smooth waves man. Real smooth. Particles can like bounce around like balls on a pool table. Waves, like righteous waves at the beach, they only roll in man. They are unidirectional.

 

[wgscott]

Quantum mechanics seems to get invoked quite a bit to "explain" audiophool paranormal phenomena.

Please forgive my cut-and-paste:

I was reading the Zu website, as I have some curiosity about high-efficiency speakers.

This caught my eye first:

In 2001 Zu began tracking and investigating the effects of signal and power on various cables and loudspeaker systems and has stumbled on a few tricks and process that get us pretty excited. Electric burn-in seems to relate to the stressing of the insulator's electric behavior (Wave Mechanics or Quantum, both seem to get you there in this case), standing waves, or is it electron orbital, or is it electron clouds, or sets and metrics.... Interplay with van der Waals forces, electric standing waves and Pauli exclusion effects too; not only between signal / power and insulator but also the conductor and the conductors electric behavior. Catalyst for electronic change is the propagation of signal and its power component.

If someone wrote that on one of my exams, I would draw a red line through it and mark it "0".

This made me throw up a little in my mouth:

ZU ON THE ATOMIC

Humanity's creative prowess and appreciation for music is a clue to human awakening. Is mankind's understanding of the atomic world correct? Don't know, but if we look back in through history you would have to say it's unlikely, we only model as bold as we think. I know that I prefer wave mechanics and talk about the electronic in terms of standing waves—more the Schrodinger view—makes a ton of sense to a guy with a very strong acoustics bend. But it's the craziness that is Quantum that holds a lot of the keys or tricks to audio fidelity and real solutions for the electronic. Since the days of Rutherford, Born, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and others, really since the general acceptance [sic] of the Copenhagen Interpretation of the atom, we have had these models by which a very high degree of observation and prediction can be made. This culmination of understanding, what is held as the new and current view of atomic physics, takes us back to the late 1920'—concepts and mathematics that we are still struggling to wrap our minds around. Despite being at odds and less than unified, Wave and Particle Mechanics, Matrices Math, and Quantum Theory are the language through which non-mechanical burn-in (electric) is to be comprehended. For most of us I would simply say, use your ears—God didn't just glue them on for looks you know. It's the sonic observations of change (observation and application) not the theoretical that have formed and guided audio freaks like you and I in our handling of the burn-in phenomenon.

Admittedly this might just be the result of a few too many bong hits, and is not quite as egregious as the claims here: Quantum-mechanical tunneling and cables - Blogs - Computer Audiophile

But, still …

 

[wgscott]

For your added enjoyment, the above-linked screed on tunneling and cables:

I was poking around the USB cable thread and saw reference to this, so I went a hunting, and found the following claim:

By applying a two million volt signal to a cable at a specific pulse modulation, and ultra high frequency for an exact duration of time, we transform the entire cable at a molecular level through a phenomenon called Quantum Tunneling. This process is performed on all TESLA Series cables, from Galileo Basik Strings and Au 79 and Magnetic Tricon to Apex, and can be applied to models not Quantum Tunneled for an additional charge. The before and after is startling, with a lower noise floor and improvements in inner detail, air, low frequency extension, and overall transparency and signal speed.

http://www.synergisticresearch.com/tesla-series/tesla-series-technologies/

So, you might ask yourself, what is quantum-mechanical tunneling?

When I teach this (as I do, every year), I sometimes make reference to a more familiar phenomenon. If you take a laser beam, and point it at a glass prism, what you will find is that part of the beam is transmitted in the original direction, and part is split off, and reflected. If you change the angle of the prism relative to the incoming laser, there comes an angle, called the critical angle, beyond which all the light is reflected, and none is transmitted. It looks like this:

Now take a second prism, and place it next to the first one. If the two glass surfaces touch, suddenly you get the laser beam propagating out in the un-bent, transmission angle again.

That's the optical version of tunneling.

You can treat this classically, using something called an evanescent wave. You can also treat it quantum-mechanically, and it is again the same sort of wave phenomenon, except the wave now describes the probability of finding the particle in what we call a classically forbidden region. So it works exactly the same way for photons and electrons. The electron "tunnels" through a barrier despite not having enough energy to hop over it.

It doesn't change the molecular structure of anything. Not the glass. Not the wire. Nada.

These guys might be doing something else to "change the molecular structure" of the wire (which, by the way, isn't made of "molecules" in the first place, but rather an array of metal atoms). But it ain't quantum tunneling.

 

[tomelex]

If all this micro micro quantum bottom esoteric stuff has such an affect on the audio signal, its a wonder anything at all can get through the thick as a brick wire and stuff we use now. ahahahah

 

[Purité Audio]

Wg that is fascinating stuff, I sadly I don't know much about quantums, although I know Daniel Craig found some solace there, I do know that ZU make some of the most consistently poorly measuring and terrible sounding speakers in the history of mankind.
Keith.