Hi CTV,
Thanks for rocking up to our little forum!
I've just had a good rest, collected my thoughts, and am feeling pretty chipper. Without pointing the finger at you, or any other EE, let me offer a few points about club membership.
#1 As members of an engineering (and indeed, any other) fraternity, you are naturally proud of your achievements, and most come to base their perceptions of the world on a 'them/us' scenario. The medicos, attorneys, priesthood and academic professions are likewise structured. This can get pretty interesting, too, see 'Bodies' a BBC series on hospital politics in Britain for a great example.
#2 The engineer's job is to take known science, and apply it to the world to create real, reliable, economically viable products. Difficult task, requires method, application, discipline. Engineers are very planted, seeking to measure and control all the variables, though there are some very dubious products out there for three reasons: bean counters strangling costs, entrepreneurs cynically exploiting contrived markets, and crackpots. God knows, there's enough of them.
#3 After a lifetime of success at this profession, most would justly say that there are no problems which cannot be reduced, analysed, and solved. Therefore there are very few products which cannot be created out of this methodology. This reductionist view of the physical world is both a strength and a weakness, the latter because it allows of nothing which cannot be analysed by known science and techniques. After all, everything has an explanation.
#4 Such a world view is exclusive by nature, and any pronouncements made by non-engineers of a 'breakthrough' nature are viewed with suspicion, and often, incredulity and/or hostility. Galileo dared to suggest the Sun as the center of our Galaxy; he was not a priest, this made a few waves! The warm and fuzzy feeling of a fraternity protects and nourishes the group and gives comfort to the mediocre, but it is not true to say that all advances come from such reasonable men as engineers.
Setting aside GB Shaw's famous comment that progress can only depend on 'unreasonable' men, it is still true that for every case of an engineering marvel, there are a good number created by non-engineers. Tesla, a wonderful engineer, highly creative; Wilbur and Orville Wright, non-engineers; Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern, amongst other marvels, engineer; Thomas Edison, non-engineer. The list goes on.
My point is this: If something works, but is easily explainable, everyone is happy. If something works, however, but cannot be explained, then confusion, even suspicion, reigns. I put it to you that there are few technologies where the engineering approach and the subjective appreciation clash as much as in audio technology; there remain many things in audio which are not explainable - or even correlateable - with the subjective observations. An example might be two amps which share 1dB points at 10Hz and 40KHz, yet one sounds bright, the other dull. Why is this? Why do a few extra pF of lag compensation have such profound effect on the WHOLE range, not just the top end? I won't even mention cables..... These observations can be tricky to explain - and the temptation is to fully examine the FR across the whole range looking for peaks and troughs to do so. But in all cases, we are forced to use single frequency tones to do this, while we listen to music, which is irreducibly complex - far to difficult to analyse. This is, of course, the archilles heel of specifications in audio. We listen to music, yet we test with tones.
In my case, I make the observations, try to understand the phenomenon - often without much success despite wide reading and experimentation - and then I try to exploit these observations in a commercial circuit. The important word is commercial; I don't have time to dwell too long on why, I just work at utilising and working within the observations as best I can.
Snake oil? Smoke and haze? Sorcery? Difficult to say, though intent has something to do with it, I guess. If you are trying to make as much money as possible, then possibly, but if you are quietly hammering away for the love of it, the very real challenge, and a quiet living, then maybe it's not the same.
Finally, I feel very little obligation to explain anything in technical detail. Why? Well, I find the language difficult, obstruse, and obfuscating, the math tricky and time consuming, and I note that lots of people out there spend a good deal of their waking time trying to pick faults, often in a very personal way, in some awfully complex arguments. Just read the Bob Cordell thread on negative feedback at diyaudio.com for a good example. Besides, why would I reveal all my 'secrets' in an area of technology very poorly served by the patent system?
One final point: If I made a lot of money from electronics I'd have a good suite of test equipment, but all I have is a siggen, Tek 466 storage CRO, numerous DMMs, and a couple of irons. I know you'd like to know why my PS works; I too would like to know why FF error correction works so well in an Orion power supply, but I can't quite figure it out. But I do know how to make a better power supply using the principles, and that's all I'm doing. If you can suggest why it works, let's talk it over, but keep it simple, EVEN though music is so complicated!!
BTW, Aurelius, a good friend and very clever guy, is an EE, and he knows the technology backwards, and he doesn't know why any more than I do!! One final point; you feel it is not enough that it works, you want the reasons; I'm there too, you know, but I find that explaining it makes very little difference to my customers. They want the sound, and be damned why!!
Thanks for listening,
Cheers,
Hugh
