First things first. My fundamental objection to your tweaks: Exactly
the same as my objection to ABX. I know of no validation of either by a
controlled experiment. And controlled experiment support is the only
basis on which I'll grant consent to a procedure, drug, treatment.
That a theory appears to someone or to millions to be
sound or unsound is of no interest to me. The hell of science is paved
with millions of sound theories that came and died. A scientist called
Pettenkoffer (lovely name for a mad scientist-no?) had such faith in
"bad miasmas" as the source of epidemics that he swallowed a culture of
cholera bugs to disprove Pasteur. And lo and behold- he sailed through
it.
He performed an uncontrolled experiment that confirmed that most people
survive any epidemic. Inborn resistance etc. The conversion on the road
to Damascus of Fella and De Wal is an uncontrolled experiment. Results
are valid for Fella and De Wal and long may they enjoy them. Long may
Sullivan enjoy ABXing. If he ever does it in his real life for his real
choices. Not just on one of the RAO email pages.
In fact I can think of no way that one could devise
a controlled experiment for the infinite variety of human response to
aesthetic stimuli. Even if one enrolled tens of thousands all one would
get would be the responses of these subjects to these test samples. So
you're free to enjoy your tweaks and publicise them to others who may
have similar response. It "proves" nothing either way. The contention
begins when you claim universal validity.
And since it is an argument about nothing very
much it may never end. Just like the ABX argument.
A few unimportant clarifications. I did not put
the tweak assembly on the floor. I put it on the bottom of the frame
of my Acoustats under the wiring.
I chose the Xover for the third tweak because
that is where all four inputs and outputs meet conveniently.
I did not measure exact distances for the
pinpricks.
What conrolled experiment? A simple one would
not constitute true "scientific " validation but go a long way towards
real life:
At random keep changing tweak /no tweak. The subjects don't know which
is which. Give them a paper with 30 like/ don't like squares to fill
for a series of 15 "tests". In fact Fella and De Wal could do it at
home with any assistant. I'd trust them to be truthful. Ten correct "I
like" choices and you're home.
And then please let's get back towards
exchange of "subjective" views about equipment, recordings etc. One
soon learns to recognise those whose opinions one'd consider seriously
to agree with or not.. Most of the professional reviewers? No.
Ferstler, Sullivan, NYOB, ScottW? No. J.G. Holt, Atkinson, Jenn, Scott
something in RAHE? Yes.
This is a personal, idiosyncratic listing
valid for this writer only/
No I did not think you were a professional
audio reviewers. Most are interminable bores, stretching minuscule
material to fill the pages. I thought you might be a better kind of eg.
columnist.
I meant it as an unsolicited compliment.
Where do you get the stamina to fill the
pages the way you do is a true mystery. I already exceeded my ratio.

Ludovic Mirabel
-----------------------------------------------------
wrote:
wrote:
wrote:

Red-faced disclosu I tried what you're pleased to call a
tweak.

You're wrong, I'm not pleased to call them "tweaks". I feel it is
undignified for the importance of these techniques. I prefer to call
them "treatments". I only call them "tweaks" because it is what you
people understand. And as you've just shown me, some of you even have
trouble with that term.

Redfaced because it shames me that I bothered.

Very interesting. It's always the same reaction. When they can't
discern differences, then people feel ashamed, and they would never
give the -- **treatments** another chance if their life depended on
it. Ruling out any further chances that they can detect changes by
improving their initial experiment (e.g. it may not have been done
right) or trying different ones.

I applaud you anyway, because at least you took a chance, however
small, at expanding your mind and fighting a lifetime of conditioning
through education in conventional laws of science. By me, you just
didn't fight hard enough.

after spending my
professional life giving wide berth to medical and nonmedical quackery
("functional hypoglycemia", "kissing disease", "fibrositis", "chronic
fatigue"
and such) I decided to try a quack remedy from another area.

You're not the only quack... I mean "doctor", to have done so. One of
Belt's best customers is a doctor (ever heard of Dr. Graham?).

Also, it might interest you to know that the concepts these tweaks are
based on have been blind tested by the medical community, and have been
proven to help tinnititus sufferers. Here's part of the story on that.
The Belt's have a daughter who requires a hearing aid. She always
complained that voices sounded unnatural and annoying (imagine having
to filter everything you hear through the sound of a hearing aid).
After treating the -battery- in the hearing aid, the problems
disappeared. Staff at a local medical facility got wind of this, but
being doctors like you, were -extremely skeptical-, to say the least.

Nevertheless, they actually granted a DBT study of the effects of the
battery treatment to hearing aid patients, who reported, like the
Belt's daughter, that the hearing aids after treatment were much more
pleasing and natural to listen to. It is the only official DBT study of
a Belt treatment that I know of. Nevertheless, continued resistance to
the ideas by doctors in the medical community, just like you, prevents
hearing aid wearers from ever improving their situation. That's only
one of the many ways in which our society is being "cheated" of
progress by the politics of science. (So unfortunately, it isn't just
audiophiles that are cheating themselves out of a revolution in audio,
due to social politics).

I got it all: five pinholes, picture of my beloved dead Siamese,
aspirin tablet
(actually ASA- I think Bayer made enough money out of it already).

Oh no! You didn't try the original BAYER Aspirin! No kidding!

(Actually, yes, kidding).


Since all my speakers are dipoles (no boxes) I had to compromise
and
put the lock, stock and barrel under the wires from the interface to
the ELS
panels.

Maybe I'm not picturing this right, but it sounds like you have not
enough flat surface area on your speakers to lay the 5-pinhole device
on it, and if you placed it on the floor underneath the wires, that
would not be good. If you'd have told me this, I would have responded
that although wood speakers are probably the best object to use this
device with, you're better off simply taping it as described, to the
top or back of your cd player, near the output jacks. And the same for
the amp as well (providing you don't have a Class A amp like I do, that
gets mighty hot and might burn the paper).

Besides being properly installed, it's also important to be sure the
device is properly set up. It's a plain white paper rectangle with 4
pinholes in each corner, one in the center along the diagonals of the
corners, -underneath that- goes the animal picture with 4 legs and a
tail, and the aspirin goes over the middle hole in the center of the
pinholed paper. Then to attach it, a single piece of scotch tape going
over the aspirin in the center, to hold it all together. It's all
described in this article here, in case you didn't read it:

http://www.musicweb-international.co...ep05/Snark.htm

To take no chances I put the third tweak next to the
inputs/outputs
on the Xover box.
Result: no difference
I got my wife. I told her to report any difference and told
her nothing
else. After a
few minutes I put the tweaks in. She listened again.: not much
difference,
maybe a little worse, she said.

So although she interpreted it as a negative change, she did detect a
change? Don't you find that interesting, since according to your
theory, no change should be possible since this device does not affect
the signal path?

Should I buy box-speakers?

Yes. Just get a cheap pair of entry-level Boston Acoustics, and then
you can apply the tweak, and they'll sound better than your
electrostats. (Note to: Robert Morein. This was a "joke". You know, "ha
ha"? Tongue-in-cheek? Farcical? Not serious? Kidding only? Nevermind).

Assuming you put it together correctly and installed it correctly, what
you should probably do is try something else. Frankly, I was suprised
the 5-pinhole tweak worked as well as it did for the other two.
Although I had no problem discerning its effect, when I tested it on my
wife, she couldn't reliably do so. This is why I came out with v.2 of
the L-shape printout most recently ("L-Shape Tweak For Dummies!"). What
you should have done is printed out the L-shape as instructed, and
taped one of these babies to the back of your CD player, next to the
jacks (and maybe a few more elsewhere). Whether you like the sound or
not, I feel its far more likely to produce audible differences than the
5-pinhole paper. I spent yesterday afternoon taping L-shape printouts
all over the seats and interior of my car (among other things), and
vastly improved the car's audio system.

Another disclosu huge negative bias. As you say my mind
is not ready. Not for your tweak, not for astrology, not for 89,9% of
codings in the psychiatric compendium of diagnoses, not for telepathy,
not for a host of other things.

Stop lumping in pseudo-sciences, paranormal and other things you don't
believe in, with the tweaks. That shows again, an extreme bias on your
part. That's not any way to practice science. You're supposed to try to
remain "objective", remember?

YES, the "huge negative bias" is going to be a problem, because it
colours your perception of sound. This means your brain most certainly
heard the differences made by the tweak. (Hundreds of people, including
3 on this forum, have heard the changes brought about by such devices).
But your thought processes coloured the interpretation. Maybe you
didn't even know what to look for, and were expecting the kind of
changes you normally get from audio products based on conventional
audio theory. Maybe you were expecting a "night and day change" (I
don't think the 5-pinhole device provides that, as I've said before).
When that doesn't show up, you might not be listening carefully enough
to the sound before and after, and overlooking the changes that you are
able to perceive.

That said, at least one of the other two fellows who heard the effects
of the 5-pinhole device did have a negative bias going in (though
probably not as HUGE as I'd expect yours to be, given how determined
you were in your attacks against me and my tweaks). He heard changes
anyhow.

I sincerely admire your incredible energy, your verbal
talents and I think you write well, amusingly and inventively.

Thank you. I do my best. Like all of us, I'm sure...

Are you a pro?

Hifi reviewer? No, I never really tried to go for that. Whatever I
managed to get into audio magazines was strictly non-paid. Now that you
mention it, I recall I was offered a reviewer position once, but the
deal fell through after the magazine folded.

You could easily be. Many worse writers fill the newspapers.

I think you're right, after a pro reviewer thought I'd be a good audio
writer, I thought so too... (but never pursued it). After I saw
Ferstler here (and RAHE), I thought "Well gee... it really doesn't take
much to write about audio professionally, does it?". In that way, I
suppose Ferstler's an inspiration for anyone to try to get into the
business. Didn't pass high school? No problem! Howard Ferstler's a
professional audio journalist! Did your last IQ score turn out to be
lower than your shoe size? No problem! Howard Ferstler's a professional
audio journalist! Do you hate audio and audiophiles with a passion?
Really??How about this: would you rather smash your fingers with a ball
peen hammer than upgrade your audio system? Hey, no problem! Howard
Ferstler's a professional audio journalist! You could be one too!

I regret that you managed to pervert a supposedly audio
forum although you're not the only one abusing the rec. audio. name.

I regret that you feel that way. Others have said the exact opposite,
that I managed to bring the theme of RAO back on to the subject of
audio, after 10 years of it being centered around what a dogmatic
trolling ******* that Arny is. And quite frankly, given all the
attention that you and everyone else here was lavishing on me every
single day, all day long, you'd have a tough time convincing me that
people would rather not have me here. I wish more people would have
taken Dizzy's lead to killfile me or at least ignore me a lot more,
because even though I only responded to perhaps a quarter of the posts
addressed to me, it's a very time consuming practice, nevertheless.
Even if its only to "fashizzle" someone's post.

But perhaps you've been here so long and never taken your blinkers off,
that you don't realize that your delusions are not shared by the Usenet
community. I was here before you ever head of the place, and I know
rec.audio.opinion has always been the "backwoods trailer trash cousin"
of the rec.audio hierarchy. Thanks in large part to Arny and the
contention he attracts, it is now undisputably regarded as a flame
group. Long before I came on with my little tweak posts, the vast
majority of the content on this group was an attack of some sort
against someone. Attacks based on audio and not character were rare,
until me (I admit most of the post SHP attacks were on my character,
but at least some were on my audio beliefs).


Have a good journey to Venus.
Ludovic Mirabel

Venus? Never been there. Although, I hear the weather's nice and I was
thinking of taking the shazbots there on vacation.

Something tells me you'll be back.

Well, I doubt that, but they say never say never. Something tells me if
I do, you'll know about it.