[Amps] Relative influence of components to tonal quality (Was: Wrong Business)

[Karl-Arne Markström]

In the words of a lesser known competitor to the late P.T. Barnum: 
"There is a sucker born every minute..."

It appears that the audio industry can make claims that would make used car salesmen blush.

This reminds me of an acquintance from my University radio club (SK6AB) days in the late 70's,
that made part of his living by custom building audio electronics to discerning audiophilic buyers ("Golden Ears") .
There was a belief that the color of components could affect the "sound", so quite often a customer would specify that all capacitors should be blue or green, but not yellow or red...

To say nothing of the pure silver power cords that some specified.

A blow was struck to the "Golden Ears" when a Swedish electronics magazine published (about 1980) a 
throughly made scientific study to show if it really was possible to identify the quality of components by listening
to the sound from speakers. It was conceived and conducted by a veteran motion-picture sound engineer 
that had grown tired of trying to answer more or less silly questions from audiophiles about the tonal qualities of different components.

The study was conducted as blind tests, where selected audiences (in a cinema theater closed for vacations I seem to remember) listened to records played through either a network with gain = 1 composed of a collection of the most disgusting components known to audiophiles (color or otherwise), or a straight piece of wire, and graded the sound quality.

Whether the signal path went one or the other way was selected by a random number generator, 
and the configuration for each run was known only to the conductor of the test.

After statistically evaluating a large number of trial runs (to average out any "lucky guesses"), it was found that 
no systematic preferences could be found for the "better" signal path.

The publication of the results caused several previously very opinionated audiophiles to keep a very low
profile for some time, and also sent a rocking wave of laughter through the ranks of the "infidels".

73/

Karl-Arne
SM0AOM



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Will Matney" <craxd1 at verizon.net>
To: <amps at contesting.com>
Sent: Friday, August 05, 2005 11:51 AM
Subject: [Amps] Wrong Business


> Folks, I am definately in the wrong business. I was doing some research on audio transformers over a discusstion I had with another membor of this mailer a while back. Oh yea, Rich those windings I spoke about are called interleaved windings. Anyhow, while reading about them at sevral places using google as the search, I came across the website below. I knew I was in the wrong business as look at the audio amp and the price! The website is kind of neet too, especially the toolbar at the top.
> 
> I swear I'm strongly thinking about building these to sell. I didn't know there was that many idiots out there who would blow that kind of money. The only part I'd hate is lying to the customers about all the claims they have on capacitors and transformers.
> 
> http://www.vintone.com/clipper.html
> 
> Best,
> 
> Will
> 
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