[jrebman]

As far as I am concerned this is nothing more than a power resistor, and until I know what other measurements I can do to prove otherwise, I am going to leave it at that.

Got a mass spectrometer handy?  How about a full analysis of the ceramic material.  It would also be interesting to try to get an accurate reading of V sub p to see if it falls closer to theoretical max velocity in a vacuum.  Got a way to measure if any tunneling effect is happening in the ceramics?

A black gate probably measures like a typical hq electrolytic in terms of LCR and transfer functions, but the graphite doped electrolyte, once formed allows for charge exchange via tunneling as opposed to the much slower electron/ion charge exchange, which probably accounts for the difference between a black gate type (which is meant to refer to a more generic graphite/ceramic dielectric type capacitor) and other standard electrolytics in terms of their sonic qualities.

I obviously don't know for sure, but I'm thinking that the doped ceramic could be contributing a tunneling type pathway, which could be a) vvery hard to measure and b) account for the audible effect that those of us who have heard the effect, know we've heard.

I don't doubt that these devices look pretty simple on the surface, and that they are overpriced, but beyond some basic and simple measurments, they appear to do more than a simple inductively wound resistor in terms of the audible effects.

-- Jim

[Daryl]

I obviously don't know for sure

Hi Jim,

You don't know yet but there is a lot you can learn if your interested.

Knowledge of materials used or velocity factor are unrelated to this issue.

Simple electronic measurements easily can show what is at work here.

As I detailed in my earlier post this thread it would be near impossible for this device to work as claimed.

Check it out and see why.

A black gate probably measures like a typical hq electrolytic in terms of LCR and transfer functions

If it's transfer function measured the same it would be no different.

Why?....

There are three categories in signal reproduction which all errors must fall into.

Noise
Linear
Non Linear

If you don't find something in one of these categories it does not exist.

When looking at P.S. capacitors you are not concerned with their Noise or Non Linear characteristics.

You simply want the lowest possible impedance across a wide bandwidth for the purpose of clamping signals on the supply rail.

Since you are not concerned with noise or non linearity that leaves the capacitors linear transfer function which is frequency response, LCR and impulse/step response (they are all different views of the same thing).

For a Black Gate capacitor to perform differently it would have to have a different transfer function (and I bet they do).

It does not matter what materials are used or how they work, their performance can easily be quantized electronicly.

[JoshK]

Jim,

You don't know yet but there is a lot you can learn if your interested.

could you be anymore condescending 

As I detailed in my earlier post this thread it would be near impossible for this device to work as claimed.

Check it out and see why.

a little heavy on claims, little light on proof/substance, if you ask me.

[Scotty]

The AA thread is funny. You can't have it both ways,first the resistor type and
PPM noise contribution doesn't matter and the next thing you know the resistor
currently used  is the most exotic on the planet, which of course makes what ever the device does more effective. I will allow as how you can probably hear the effect of inserting a passive component such as the bybee into the signal path, but the explanation for why you may observe a change in the sound for good or ill only feeds into the audiophile's need to hear a complicated pseudo-scientific story to provide a reason for purchasing such an expensive piece of ______.  If I can cobble together an assemblage of microhenry inductors, milli-ohm resistors.and pico-farad capacitors into a filter that sounds the same for under twenty-five dollars the cost of the Bybee is unsupportable.
    Daryl, you left out a category of distortion type. Transient dynamic non-linearity.
Check out the work of Richard C. Heyser as chronicled in the JAES.
    * TIME DELAY SPECTROMETRY edited by John R. Prohs. Thirty-two articles of the works of Richard C. Heyser on measurement, analysis, and perception. Reprinted from the pages of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society and other publications in the field, including Audio magazine and IREE Australia. The anthology serves as a memorial to the author's work and as fundamental material for future developments in audio. It will undoubtedly provide the stimulus for expanded discussion. 280 pages

Audio Engineering Society Store
http://www.aes.org/publications/anth.cfm
Scotty

[Daryl]

could you be anymore condescending 

Not necessarily the intention Josh.

Jim's post was 'cheeky' though.

a little heavy on claims, little light on proof/substance, if you ask me.

Not even close Josh.

I was simply covering some basics.

Not advanced stuff just the simple fundamentals you would need to understand just to get started on your way to understanding singnal reproduction.

The information is there if you take the time.

If there is a question you have, just ask.

[fu_man]

Scotty,

If I can cobble together an assemblage of microhenry inductors, milli-ohm resistors.and pico-farad capacitors into a filter that sounds the same for under twenty-five dollars the cost of the Bybee is unsupportable

 
I'm not  trying to be  cheeky, but if you can..  you  could  make a lot of  money selling them, or, save a lot of  people a  lot of  money  telling them how do cobble it together.

Seriously, I'm not being smart but rather than argue  about how to test a Bybee,  how  about  replicating the effect that people  hear?
I'll  buy  one. (I don't have a Bybee to compare to but I'm sure many would be willing try it out)

[Daryl]

Daryl, you left out a category of distortion type. Transient dynamic non-linearity.
Check out the work of Richard C. Heyser as chronicled in the JAES.

Scotty that is not related to what I was talking about.

I was giving a simple mathematical breakdown that all errors must fall into.

Using this breakdown makes it easier to separate fact from fiction.

The three are...

Noise
Linear
Non-Linear

There can be dozens of categories within each family.

Your Transient Dynamic Non Linearity would fall into the non linear family.

[Daryl]

I'm not  trying to be  cheeky

Your funny, I'll give you that.

Seriously, I'm not being smart but rather than argue  about how to test a Bybee,  how  about  replicating the effect that people  hear?
I'll  buy  one. (I don't have a Bybee to compare to but I'm sure many would be willing try it out)

The effect is simply a placebo effect.

The Bybee measures as a simple resistor with an amount of parasitic inductance and will have an insignifigant effect upon high impedance circuits.

When employed in a low impedance circuit (speaker) it will add maybe 30% to the combined output impedance of the amplifier/speaker wire in the lower frequencies and less at higher frequencies.

The point of the thread (according to me anyway) is not so much about being able to replicate the Bybee for less money as it is about educating people not to be mislead.

The closest parallel is that we no longer burn witches.

If you follow these audio forum threads it is easy to see that people are no more advanced today than they were in the 1600's (indeed the testimony of an audiophile for the merit of his favorite Shun Mook, Multi-Cap etc. is the same as the testimony in the 1600's that PROVED BEYOND DOUBT the stupified victims to be witches) but due to education we now know there are no witches (too late for some).
 

[tomjtx]

Would burning a Bybee at the stake yield any useful information?

[fu_man]

big D

The effect is simply a placebo effect.

Even so... if all those that are so impressed with Bybees reported that they  were similarly 'fooled' by a device less than $25...  I would be happy to give them a try.  Maybe I would be fooled (and uneducated and foolish)too,  but still have  a lot more  cash in my pocket.  Okay, it's not such a noble  cause ....
I suppose the parallel is like... not actually burning a witch, just  singeing one a little?

[Dan Banquer]

The AA thread is funny. You can't have it both ways,first the resistor type and
PPM noise contribution doesn't matter and the next thing you know the resistor
currently used  is the most exotic on the planet, which of course makes what ever the device does more effective. I will allow as how you can probably hear the effect of inserting a passive component such as the bybee into the signal path, but the explanation for why you may observe a change in the sound for good or ill only feeds into the audiophile's need to hear a complicated pseudo-scientific story to provide a reason for purchasing such an expensive piece of ______.  If I can cobble together an assemblage of microhenry inductors, milli-ohm resistors.and pico-farad capacitors into a filter that sounds the same for under twenty-five dollars the cost of the Bybee is unsupportable.
    Daryl, you left out a category of distortion type. Transient dynamic non-linearity.
Check out the work of Richard C. Heyser as chronicled in the JAES.
    * TIME DELAY SPECTROMETRY edited by John R. Prohs. Thirty-two articles of the works of Richard C. Heyser on measurement, analysis, and perception. Reprinted from the pages of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society and other publications in the field, including Audio magazine and IREE Australia. The anthology serves as a memorial to the author's work and as fundamental material for future developments in audio. It will undoubtedly provide the stimulus for expanded discussion. 280 pages

Audio Engineering Society Store
http://www.aes.org/publications/anth.cfm
Scotty

Scotty: if you go back to earlier in this thread to Mike Galusha's post you will find he has already done square wave testing and found no anomalies. I will repeat that test sometime this week. In addition, if anything, the small amount of inductance that I measured on the Bybee unit may well be the only limiting factor. Really Scotty, TDL really applies to speakers, which is what Heyser was really going after in his writing. The late Bud Fried was a real "disciple" of Heyser.

              d.b.

[Daryl]

TDS is a method used when measureing loudspeakers in a live room so that you may aquire your data without it being contaminated by boundry reflections (no longer necessary with the advent of dsp).

[Daryl]

The important thing(s) about square wave response and impulse and step response which are similar is that they are simply frequency response albeit a different way of looking at it.

For audio you typicly will use the frequency response chart for system evaluations.

When a frequency response curve becomes ragged enough you might want to recalculate it into a step/impulse/time energy type chart to see how the energy is distributed over time and look for delayed/refected energy as a means of troubleshooting the system.

If a frequency response curve is smooth (doesn't have to be flat) there will be no signifigant time domain anomalies and you would have no use for step/square/impulse type charts for that system.

The issue is that snake oil salesmen often use step/square/impulse charts to confuse people.

You know someone is lying or at least incompetent when they use a step/square/impulse chart to show the superiority of a componet that has a smooth transfer function (because time domain analysis is of no use for such a componet except as a deception).

here is a measurement I took of a non-polar electrolytic cap and a polypropylene cap...



Here is a measurement I took of a section of speaker wire...



Both capacitors and speaker wires have smooth transfer functions anywhere near the audio band and time domain charts are unneccessary unless you are trying to decieve someone (capacitor and wire ads routinely use deceptive time domain charts and do not show frequency domain charts which would reveal the truth immediately).

The deception takes place because the consumer is unaware that the chart is showing effects that are far beyond the frequency range they want to evaluate.

Snake oil salesmen often help the deception along by providing information like "this is a 10khz square wave" or holding back information like the time and amplitude markings for their chart.

The 10khz square wave statement gets the unwitting thinking they are looking at 10khz energy when their attention might be directed to 1Mhz anomalies.

Holding back the time and amplitude scale indicators masks the fact that what is being shown is insignifigant or out of band or both.

Again, IF THE TRANSFER FUNCTION OF THE DEVICE IS SIMPLE/SMOOTH THERE IS NO NEED FOR TIME DOMAIN ANALYSIS.

The other issue with time domain or oscilloscope type charts is that your hearing does not function in that manner and it is easy give people the idea that certain things might be important which your ears would not be able to resolve.

Your ears have multiple filters at different frequencies like an RTA they do not measure air pressure from instant to instant like if you connected a microphone to an oscilloscope.

Here is an illistration I calculated showing how your ears would percieve a square wave...



You should be getting the idea here that a number of anomalies that might appear signifigant on an oscilloscope type chart would never appear on a time/spectrograph type chart which mimics the operation of your ears.

Also you should be able to see why frequency response is THE most important measurement in audio systems (not the only important one just the most important).

[jrebman]

Daryl,

Mea culpa.  You're absolutely correct and I defer to your superior intelligence and experience.

I really wish I had known all this before engineering school and my subsequent career at one of the top 3 high-energy physics research labs.  Everything would have been so much easier if I could have simply tossed out any non-linear and chaotic effects and just have stuck with the simple instrumentation, measurments and linear relationships.

See, my problem is that I just can't seem to get past the notion that reality is a lot harder to model and understand than it apparently is.  After all, this audio thing is just plain simple: convert some simple changes in air pressure to electrical signals, store them on some medium, retrieve theem from that medium, amplify them, and convert back to mechanical energy.  Pathetically simple... nothing to it.

Sounds like you yearn for those good 'ol days when there was a flat, stationary earth and we only had 3 elements to deal with.  The math was so much easier then.

Anyway, it is pointless for me to wander down this road on this forum -- especially since most of it comes from a place outside of audio for me and seems to have no chance of entering the box of thoughts that prevail here (and I'm not talking about anything so ridiculous as clever clocks or magic pebbles -- just to be clear.)

The only thing I will say to you is to be careful in citing the placebo effect -- it cuts both ways you know.

Anyway, thanks for the enlightenment, and as this is all way too far over my puny little head, I'll step aside now...

I'm going to go and remove a few bybees now because I now know they ovbiously don't work.

-- Jim

[rajacat]

Daryl,

I really wish I had known all this before engineering school and my subsequent career at one of the top 3 high-energy physics research labs.  Everything would have been so much easier if I could have simply tossed out any non-linear and chaotic effects and just have stuck with the simple instrumentation, measurments and linear relationships.

See, my problem is that I just can't seem to get past the notion that reality is a lot harder to model and understand than it apparently is.  After all, this audio thing is just plain simple: convert some simple changes in air pressure to electrical signals, store them on some medium, retrieve theem from that medium, amplify them, and convert back to mechanical energy.  Pathetically simple... nothing to it.

Sounds like you yearn for those good 'ol days when there was a flat, stationary earth and we only had 3 elements to deal with.  The math was so much easier then.

Anyway, it is pointless for me to wander down this road on this forum -- especially since most of it comes from a place outside of audio for me and seems to have no chance of entering the box of thoughts that prevail here (and I'm not talking about anything so ridiculous as clever clocks or magic pebbles -- just to be clear.)

Jim,

You hit the nail on the head. Perhaps many if not all audio effects have non linear influences that are not easily quantifiable with most of the current testing equipment. I'm sure that this really bothers the electronic technicians who simply can't acknowledge any effect that can't be measured with current or readily available equipment. They long for the 19th century.

Raj

[Steve Eddy]

...and I'm not talking about anything so ridiculous as clever clocks or magic pebbles...

But given the claims made about them by Bybee, why are they necessarily any less ridiculous than clever clocks and magic pebbles?

se

[Steve Eddy]

You hit the nail on the head. Perhaps many if not all audio effects have non linear influences that are not easily quantifiable with most of the current testing equipment.

Perhaps. And perhaps not. Thus far I have not seen any proof of this.

I'm sure that this really bothers the electronic technicians who simply can't acknowledge any effect that can't be measured with current or readily available equipment. They long for the 19th century.

But by the same token, those who simply can't acknowledge that there may not be anything at all going on that's actually audible are longing for a century well before the 19th.

se

[serengetiplains]

The only thing I will say to you is to be careful in citing the placebo effect -- it cuts both ways you know.

Jim, you're exactly right to suggest this.  I would suggest even stronger wording, as the notion "placebo effect" implies the existence of a listening experience---an audible difference perceived by the listener---that those who rely on placebo arguments deny.

In any event, the whole discussion regarding objective vs. subjective tests for audio is really very tiresome, and not well thought out.  Here's a notion one can assume is scientifically 100% true: everything, in a piece of audio gear, makes a difference (affects the signal): every resistor, every capacitor, every active device.  Given the unarguable truth of this proposition, whether the effect is audible to a given person depends 1) on whether the effect is in fact audible and 2) if it is, whether the listener has the ability to discern the effect.  In a situation where the listener says, "No audible effect," how can one say categorically the situation doesn't correspond to 2)?  Seems to me that a scientifically oriented person would say, "I cannot categorically so say."  End of discussion.

[rajacat]

You hit the nail on the head. Perhaps many if not all audio effects have non linear influences that are not easily quantifiable with most of the current testing equipment.

Perhaps. And perhaps not. Thus far I have not seen any proof of this.

I'm sure that this really bothers the electronic technicians who simply can't acknowledge any effect that can't be measured with current or readily available equipment. They long for the 19th century.

But by the same token, those who simply can't acknowledge that there may not be anything at all going on that's actually audible are longing for a century well before the 19th.


se

So do you believe that the SOTA of testing equipment has reached its zenith? There is nothing more to learn in science? That is really flat earth thinking!

Raj

[Steve Eddy]

So do you believe that the SOTA of testing equipment has reached its zenith? There is nothing more to learn in science? That is really flat earth thinking!

And putting words in another's mouth isn't any kind of thinking.

se