Extreme Snake Oil

[mhardy6647]

The driver placement is awesome screw acoustic's we know better we want loobing and jagged fr in all directions

Oh, you'll really love their better (i.e., more expensive) offerings from the late '70s. Maybe they were Denney-engineered!
(not @rdenney... that other guy!)

Actually, their cheaper speakers (i.e., the little guys in the previous post), for their price, weren't all that horrible in their day at the entry level.

The abomination above, to its (their) credit, does include a good Peerless cone tweeter and Philips (twincone) MR driver -- as well as the ahem classic Motorola "lemon juicer" piezoelectric torture device... umm, I mean, tweeter.

 

[John Atkinson]

Um, electric and magnetic fields in a conductor are capacitance and inductance. The last I heard, electricity in a conductor is carried by electrons. Synergistic is confusing radio waves with electrons.

Please note that I am not endorsing Ted Denney's odd ideas. But to clarify, while you are correct that electrons are associated with current flow, they move relatively slowly, and with an AC signal they oscillate around a mean position. An AC signal associated with the electrons doesn't move within the conductor but is actually an electromagnetic wave that travels outside the conductor in the dielectric. Its velocity is affected by the insulator's dielectric constant but is close to the speed of light.

For more on this subject, see this 1995 article on electromagnetic signal transmission:
https://www.stereophile.com/content/essex-echo-1995-electrical-signal-propagation-cable-theory

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile

 

[rdenney]

...
100% Denney-free, AFAIK -- although who knows what @rdenney was up to in those days?

...

Riding bikes, finishing (and finishing, and finishing, and finishing) an engineering degree, building econobox race cars, and listening to prog and classical--anything but disco--on a Kenwood integrated amp feeding Advent loudspeakers. I suspect not unlike many here.

Rick "now you know" Denney

 

[mhardy6647]

Unsubstantiated rumors would suggest that I was dabbling in recreational pharmacology whilst aggressively pursuing my baccalaureate degree... or perhaps vice versa... I don't remember all that clearly.

 

[rdenney]

Unsubstantiated rumors would suggest that I was dabbling in recreational pharmacology whilst aggressively pursuing my baccalaureate degree... or perhaps vice versa... I don't remember all that clearly.

No pharmacology for me but I have few memories of my last year studying architecture, when I was averaging maybe 12 hours of sleep a week. Drugs might have been safer.

Engineering was more difficult but I got a lot more sleep.

Rick "woke up once driving 70 mph straddling a bar ditch" Denney

 

[Mnyb]

Oh, you'll really love their better (i.e., more expensive) offerings from the late '70s. Maybe they were Denney-engineered!
(not @rdenney... that other guy!)


View attachment 488392

Actually, their cheaper speakers (i.e., the little guys in the previous post), for their price, weren't all that horrible in their day at the entry level.

The abomination above, to its (their) credit, does include a good Peerless cone tweeter and Philips (twincone) MR driver -- as well as the ahem classic Motorola "lemon juicer" piezoelectric torture device... umm, I mean, tweeter.

recognize the lemon juicer appeared in many home made disco or rock club speakers in my youth , black hand painted chipboard and a 15" bass no filter lemon juicer(s) (why stop with one ) with one cap in series that's all, horn loaded 15" of course . Speaker engineering truly was the wild west all the way trough the 70's and 80's

 

[mhardy6647]

recognize the lemon juicer appeared in many home made disco or rock club speakers in my youth , black hand painted chipboard and a 15" bass no filter lemon juicer(s) (why stop with one ) with one cap in series that's all, horn loaded 15" of course . Speaker engineering truly was the wild west all the way trough the 70's and 80's

Those piezos - which are, in essence, capacitors, with a natural cutoff @ ca. 4kHz - are nasty, spitty things if allowed to serve as their own crossover. Adding an 8 ohm resistor across the piezo makes it look enough like a normal dynamic driver so that a "proper" (i.e., relatively normal first or second order) XO can be used to raise the XO frequency a bit (to 5 or 6 kHz, e.g. -- or more). That smooths 'em out considerably.

There just might be a few of those (and some of the other variants using essentially the same piezo "engine") floating around in dark, dank corners of my basement....

Oh and FWIW: The off-brand/knockoff piezo tweeters were (are) even worse!

 

[Salt]

And still alive (for a bargain):
https://www.thomann.de/intl/cts_ksn1005.htm

 

[bdougwrx]

This one always gets me

 

[Purité Audio]

These are not only snake oil but potentially dangerous, the same company well they beggar belief, ‘mains plug dampers’!

 

[mhardy6647]

This one always gets meView attachment 488493

those danged micro-vibrations!

That being said -- I see a massive business opportunity, as the whole realm of nano-vibrations is left utterly unaddressed by this product.

 

[Mart68]

Those piezos - which are, in essence, capacitors, with a natural cutoff @ ca. 4kHz - are nasty, spitty things if allowed to serve as their own crossover. Adding an 8 ohm resistor across the piezo makes it look enough like a normal dynamic driver so that a "proper" (i.e., relatively normal first or second order) XO can be used to raise the XO frequency a bit (to 5 or 6 kHz, e.g. -- or more). That smooths 'em out considerably.

There just might be a few of those (and some of the other variants using essentially the same piezo "engine") floating around in dark, dank corners of my basement....

Oh and FWIW: The off-brand/knockoff piezo tweeters were (are) even worse!

I used some of those Motorolas in a speaker design back in 1995 - I don't know if there still is but then there was a number of different types at different prices. The brief was for a speaker where the tweeters would not blow when playing loud dance music. I didn't think they were so bad at all but it's a long time ago. I think I still have a spare set of them somewhere.

 

[BlueMeanie]

Bloody hell, piezos bring back memories of the self made speakers a techno loving friend of mine had in his room back in the 90s. Basically oversized woofers and piezos in a big black box. Nasty treble and deafening bass was all you got from these things. He loved them, the neighbours definitely didn't!

I was so glad when he moved together with his girlfriend and she convinced him to get rid of these monstrosities.

 

[mhardy6647]

I used some of those Motorolas in a speaker design back in 1995 - I don't know if there still is but then there was a number of different types at different prices. The brief was for a speaker where the tweeters would not blow when playing loud dance music. I didn't think they were so bad at all but it's a long time ago. I think I still have a spare set of them somewhere.

Not horrible if used properly... but most were not. There is a box of piezos here.

 

[bishop44]

Here's a "review" of the entire "loom" at ~500k - https://www.soundstageaustralia.com/index.php/reviews/973-siltech-master-crown-cables

This contains the following "philosophising" on the effect of cables in an audio system:

"Cables, no matter the price, conductor, or configuration cannot add sonic qualities to an electrical signal. What well-designed cables can do is omit less or mask fewer subtleties than less elaborate design. In other words, they may subtract less from the original signal where another would distort the message. And that’s before considering factors like RFI and EMI interference, the effects of varying shielding strategies, the interplay of capacitance, resistance and impedance, the connector interface methodology, and the subtleties of microphonics, among other factors. Of course, even omissions, or suppressions, though often subtle, can be the differentiators that elevate a system from the impressive to the sublime."

There's also this towards the end:

"I know what’s coming. There will be the keyboard judgy spilling condescending anger, preachers alleging indulgence, and there’ll be rage from guardians of your finances. They’ll mock and dismiss."

There's a bit on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about a simulation of the universe which gets all necessary data from a single cookie (or, the author being British, possibly a "tea biscuit"). I think it likely that everything about human stupidity can be derived from a single cable review in the audiophile press.

I forced myself to read that entire article. Genuinely awful convoluted prose saturated with bullshit no matter how much he tries to disguise. The guy writes like he is in a creative writing class.... Which I guess he is.

 

[Mart68]

Not horrible if used properly... but most were not. There is a box of piezos here.

Probably I did not as I did not use a resistor with them. It was a two-way 55 litre ported box with 8'' Kevlar mid-bass - driver cost in today's money would have been about £450 so not cheap units.

However they sounded fine with an exclusive diet of EDM - the client was happy, anyway. He had a pile of little £100 squawk boxes with blown tweets so it solved that issue for him.

 

[mhardy6647]

Probably I did not as I did not use a resistor with them. It was a two-way 55 litre ported box with 8'' Kevlar mid-bass - driver cost in today's money would have been about £450 so not cheap units.

However they sounded fine with an exclusive diet of EDM - the client was happy, anyway. He had a pile of little £100 squawk boxes with blown tweets so it solved that issue for him.

horses for courses, as they say.

 

[pinger]

This one always gets meView attachment 488493

LOL maybe Stereophile can review that!!!

 

[Mnyb]

LOL maybe Stereophile can review that!!!

You can play jangling keys or a solo triangle , but for that they are unprecedented and class A

 

[egellings]

those danged micro-vibrations!

That being said -- I see a massive business opportunity, as the whole realm of nano-vibrations is left utterly unaddressed by this product.

Pico-vibrations, anyone?