(ed. note: This lengthy reply is here, but it really belongs in the audiogon thread. Unfortunately the moderators censor my replies so much that I have no hope of getting it in there.)It's pretty amazing that these people go on and on about how NO ONE knows what is going on at the quantum level... then they proceed to demonstrate that
they, at the very least, do not have any knowledge to share.
btw said Schrödinger equation surely exists. You can bet your last dollar that someone at Lawrence Berkeley labs already had written it down, and probably before then as well--any particle accelerator has enough demand for ultimate accuracy in such things. If that equation made for better stereos, do you imagine that the wave of audiophile EEs and physicists that emerged beginning in the 1960s (hi Dr. Bose!) would have passed up the opportunity?
However, the conclusion can be seen from a million light years away: whatever information you will obtain from optimizing such an equation will not be a first-order effect, and it will be surprising if it is even a fourth-order effect, given the conditions in ordinary households. You might as well worry about the effects of the gravitational interaction between the electron and the proton (
factual note for non-science people: the gravitational force between an electron and a proton is something like 0.000lotsofzeros005 % as intense as the electrical force between them).
Of course, if you were to place a cryogenic bottle in the room big enough to hold your hifi, that would change. Maybe some of the cable witch doctors can sell us one of those things.
So we are left with first-, second- and third-order effects that go unaddressed, whilst pursuing higher-order improvements from these cables, along with a measuring methodology that resembles the method used in those television shows that are so popular nowadays, where contestants prance in front of the camera and celebrities decide which one gets to return to prance another day.
Somehow, we are supposed to trust--and steeply fund, sight unseen--a "Cryocabling With The Stars" methodology instead of the methodology that leads to power plants, 24/7 worldwide electrical grids, Nobel prizes, and Frank's
garage research laboratory.
Yes, I know, my analogy is unfair; let me extend my apologies to those TV shows.
What ticked me off this time was not only that thread, but an echo from another thread... here Frank was announcing another one of his wonderful products, and the inevitable question came up as to whether he was going to provide a detachable power cord.
Frank's reply to that request almost made me cry--yes, I know, but stay with me. Let me recontextualize his reply as follows:
"Q: Frank, you will make a lot more money if you just go along with this hoax. You will sell more stuff, the magazines will love you, you will be wined and dined and your bank account will be happy. If do not go along, however, you will continue to toil along in virtual anonimity for 99%+ of the hifi-shopping public.
A: Screw that. People have enough to worry about everyday, I do not want to add to their confusion and make them lose money. I do not accept the offer to take money and fame based on misinformation and confusion."(Note: those are
MY WORDS, not the circle sponsor's.)
Time to make a short, shameful confession: I was two mouseclicks away from ordering a $995 AC power gadget at 50% off (I would give you the brand name, but I don't want to start a brand war between it and Frank; I would give you a functional description of what it does, but the manufacturer more or less refuses to give me one; send me a personal message if you really want to know). I stopped because the gadget required me to purchase a power cord for
it, and while I was making up my mind about spending another $100 or so... a fellow audiophile whom I contacted on audiogon casually mentioned that I was about to spend quite a bit of money (he sold me some fancy wall plugs for $10 a piece, which I felt was not too expensive for audio jewelry)... and that got me thinking.
Then I stumbled into this audiocircle and you guys set me straight. The question with an obvious answer became:
do I trust the witch doctors making 1000% profit margins with their magic cables, or do I trust the many years of schooling and the EEs and physicists that say otherwise?A note of caution: this point of view is heavily censored on that audiogon thread (I'm lucky if I get half my posts past the moderator). So unfortunately, we are going to continue to harvest the ignorance of new audiophiles who, bless them, do not have enough experience and are prone to trust the "golden eared".
Oh well. Some of us get lucky. I have $20 RCA interconnects (thank you, Redco Audio), $50 speaker wires (I splurged, but Mr. Poon makes nice stuff), and of course AVA's "lamp cords". My system sounds fantastic, and the people that designed it to sound so fantastic tell me that my cables are fine. Gee, whose word should I take for it? aa
