And they shall know us by the trail of dead.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Sullivan wrote:

Let me know when Middius signs on to the new enlightenment...it can't be long
now.

Sander deWaal wrote:

"You *do* realize that finally, after 10 years, this newsgroup isn't
all about bashing Arny
anymore, but there's actually a discussion about audio? "
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Bad news, boys. I'm afraid I'm gonna have to stop playing with you
now. (awwwww). Sorry, the mothership has called me and I have to travel
back to my planet. <insert recorded sobs and cries of now dead people>.
Got other planets to conquer, in search for signs of intelligent life
in the universe. <insert Star Trek theme here>

Thank you for all the mockery, derision, ridicule and scorn you heaped
upon me. The lies you wrote about me, the internet resarch you made to
dig up dirt about me, the harassing emails you sent to the doctor you
stupidly thought I was...(or at least that Robert Morein stupidly
thought I was). I had a lot of fun watching the many frenzied attempts
you all made to attack my anonymous character and discredit my
valueless reputation on RAO. It was very time involving for me, but
very entertaining and even educational, and so, I don't regret it. I
just want you all to know that I'm not angry with anyone, and I leave
without holding any grudges against anyone. No, not even you Middius,
or Dave Weil, or crazy Robert Morein (although you went hairballs on me
at the end, at least you finally loosened up), or Westface, or Mirabel
Ludovic, or Art Sackman, or Steven Sullivan, or ScottW, or Powell, or
Elmira, or Fella, or Arny Krueger, or Nyob, or Signal, or Goofball...
well anyway. I wish everyone well, and happy mockery and malice to you
all, for the years to come on RAO.

Here's the final score:

Out of dozens of RAO members and who knows how many lurkers, two (2)
people tried my tweaks. (Thank you for not mocking and ridiculing those
two as much as you did with me. Most people are not as secure with
themselves as I am, and can't take that crap. I should also like to
point out however, it still makes you hypocrites for not mocking them
as you did me....). Ironically, they waited until AFTER I called
everyone "ignorant pigs" and declared that no one was open minded
enough to try them, to try them. The result was that both audiophiles
heard exactly what I did. Mass delusional placebo? Not possible. They
described in their own words, the exact influence that a 5-pinhole
paper device had on their perception of sound, as I knew it to be.
That's no coincidence. That fact in itself immediately kills any
arguments for autosuggestion or about the theories. Of course, these
facts don't prove everyone will hear differences: that all depends on
your listening sensitivity and maybe if you have enough resistance to
create "negative expectation effects".

What they have only taken baby steps in the effort to discover, is the
fact that your audio systems are right now putting out far more
information in the room than you are all capable of hearing. It's
estimated by us (Secret Society Of Advanced Audiophiles) that your
systems are only working at about 15% capacity, wrt perception of
sound. Meaning that whatever quality of sound you are listening to
right now, you are not able to hear about 85% of it. You all can't
conceive of what that means, because you don't "miss" what you
don't know (or hear), do you. But once you hear it, as Sander
discovered, you miss it dearly when it's gone. That's another
mysterious effect (solved) called "working memory". Another mysterious
effect I keep observing that hasn't quite yet been solved (but I have
my theories), is the fact that sometimes when I'm testing a change
produced from an alternative audio concept, and the change has produced
a significant positive difference, I can "feel" that a positive change
has taken place, -before- that I hit "play" on the CD player. (This is
what I mean by "advanced audiophile" stuff, and I don't expect anyone
here to understand that (you will insantly snap into a "placebo"
knee-jerk reaction, because that is what your conditioning has taught
you to do). A placebo isn't what I'm talking about, but even though
no one will believe it, I thought I'd put that out there anyway. ;-)
)

Think of what happens when you change an IC in your system for one of a
better quality, say between your preamp and your amp. The interconnect
upgrade allows you to hear more information, and you are a happier
person. But what about all the ICs that you didn't change in the
system? If you follow the signal path from source to speaker, the
signal will travel along all kinds of wiring that was never upgraded,
beyond the IC that was, and then beyond that to other wires that were
never upgraded; which will nevertheless carry the signal out into the
room and allow more information through.

"My" tweaks don't change the signal of course, since they don't go
anywhere near the signal path. But they change the listener's
-perception of sound-. Not by way of so-called "placebo" or
"expectation effect" or any nonsense like that. If another human being
comes into the room, and you've changed the perception of sound
sufficiently to render them conscious of that fact, they can also
observe the fact that the sound has changed, despite not being
conscious of the fact that you did something to change the sound (or
for that matter, what you did to change the sound). This confirms not
only that there is no autosuggestion at play here, but that the sound
has changed for **all who perceive the musical reproduction**. This is
possible because you have succeeded at doing things that change energy
patterns that surround objects in our environment and even link objects
to another. The belief is that the primordial senses which we retain
from our very earliest origins (long before we took "human form") are
always sensing objects in our environment and maintaining a certain
kind of communication with our environment; which tells us to varying
degrees if an object is "safe" or "harmful" to us. Reduce the adverse
effects of this energy and the object becomes "safer"; increase the
adverse effects and we sense it as "dangerous", which keeps us under
tension and limits or reduces our senses due to this type of stress.

My tweaks are an intelligent attempt to decrease the adverse effects of
our environment. But they can easily be increased as well, without you
having to be conscious of this. All you have to do is introduce a new
object into the listening environment that has detrimental energy
patterns. It can be a magnet or a clock or a can of beans with a bar
code, a metal box, a plastic or wooden object... what have you. It can
be the simple act of spraying your furniture with chemical cleaner,
particularly your audio equipment. Whatever is unnatural to our
primordial senses and causes them to go under tension. For this reason,
in many subtle ways, the quality of our perception of sound is changing
all the time, as our environment changes. But change the environment in
ways that reduce these types of stresses (my tweaks are a few small
ways to do this) and you've done several things. First, you've
increased perception of sound for everyone who listens, but as well,
you've increased perception of sight for everyone who sees (that is a
sense as well). This is why people who dabble in alternative audio
concepts report better video image as well. Furthermore, you've
decreased a type of stress in the environment, which means that you and
everyone in that environment, is reacting to the objects in it with
less stress. (Whatever other types of stress you had will still be
there, but the overall level of stress is reduced by the amount of
stress you managed to reduce in the environment). This means that not
only does your picture and video image sound better, but you might also
find yourself feeling better in general in your listening environment,
as many Beltists who make great changes to their environments to reduce
these types of stresses, do.

Now does any of this pan out when the rigorous standards of science is
applied to it? Well, as with everything in science, that often depends
on who's applying the rigorous standards and what "agenda" and biases
they have against the phenomena in question. For example, with
morphogenetic fields, the underlying science that explains much of the
above phenomena I just described (which has been studied for some 80
years now), many top scientists believe that our known laws of physics
aren't enough to explain the existence of morphic fields. Does this
mean morphic fields is a phenomena invented by researchers as a lark,
because they got bored on their lunch break once? A fantasy dreamt up
by crazy scientists? Obviously not. But it stretches our knowledge of
knowledge; as do many things in science. This might make it more
vulernable to being dismissed by the more rigid thinkers in the
scientific field (who never do anything to progress our knowledge of
knowledge; say Robert Morein or Steven Sullivan to give examples on
this group). But it doesn't invalidate the science.

Nor does any arguments that anyone posits here against the tweaks I
posted invalidate their merits. They can still be valid even if there
was no known science behind them at all, just like many things in this
world. Anything science can be argued. Someone could even argue that
science can't really explain why wire of one material (ie silver)
should sound better than copper. The significant thing is, the tweaks
on average can be validated by anyone in about 30 seconds. Much less
time than it takes the naysayers to tell you that they can't possibly
work, pretending that they understand the principles that make them
work. I've not talked all that much about the principles myself
because of this very reason. That it complicates things unnecessarily,
creates even more prejudices in people, and takes the focus away from
the fact that you need to experiment in audio if you are to find out
what is and isn't valid. Whether we're talking about cables and
wires or aspirin with pinholed paper and funny looking animals.

Once that people do try the tweaks and are able to ascertain effects,
only then can the scientific principles driving them be looked at.
Until then, it's all just pompous theory, folks. It don't mean a
thing. Just as the self-professed "objectivists" on this group (aka
religious polemicists of audio), who try to tell us that everything
sounds the same in audio because their theory says it is so (when we
know otherwise because we've heard otherwise), don't mean a thing.
The way I feel, and I've said this before in many different ways, if
you're not willing to listen to things for yourself in audio and find
out what is and isn't valid, then you really have no business calling
yourself an audiophile or even being on an audio discussion group.
Especially if you're going to post your opinions on an audio
discussion group whilst you sit on your can and criticize everything
and everyone in audio on this newsgroup that tries to improve their
sound, in nearly every way that they try to do so. While at the same
time maintaining the position that your system is perfectly fine for
you and you have no need or desire to ever improve upon it's quality
of sound.

From my calculations of the 2 people who did try the tweaks, it appears
that about 95% of this groups membership are rigid thinkers, who do not
ever wish to change their beliefs, or even risk doing so. Even if they
think it might improve their quality of sound or life. It's an
interesting statistic I find, but when you try to interpret what it
means, it's also a sad statement on our society. How far we've come
and how far we can go, with the kind of thinking that we have allowed
to be conditioned into ourselves. (Of course when I say "we" I don't
mean MYSELF! No, I mean the YOU form of "we". But that goes without
saying). I've observed this phenomenon far beyond the reaches of
audio of course. Most people go through life with blinkers on, thinking
they're open minded, never daring to take them off and see what
exactly is around the periphery of their vision. My experiences here
have only served to confirm what I always knew "out there". Still,
there are those 2 anomalies.... and that gives me more hope that even
though non-blinkered thinkers are a very small minority, at least you
can occasionally find them.

Make no mistake, had you been more receptive and friendly toward me, I
would have shared a LOT more of my ideas (some of my better ones,
even). Some might even have made sense to you, and they could have put
your sound into a higher stratosphere, all for less than $5 worth of
materials. But because this group was so hostile, fearful and paranoid
toward me, even though all I did was post free tweaks for those
interested, I did not feel to do that. As the expression goes, "you can
not put pearls before the swine of RAO". Fella complained that I should
have been more gracious with those who attacked, mocked and ridiculed
me over my tweaks. Then maybe they would have been more receptive. Why
stop there? Maybe I should also have paid people to try my free tweaks,
like they do for pharmaceutical experiments. Given them the chance to
enter their names in a raffle to win a free vacation in the Bahamas for
every tweak tried, perhaps. Not bloody likely! I've said this before,
but my attitude is, if you have to be coaxed, cajoled or convinced to
experiment with the ideas, then GTH (figure out what that means....).
You're definitely not worthy of them and I'm not giving them to
you. Given what I've seen, I'm glad there were only two people that
eventually tried them. And I only think one of those two merits them.

In the interest of credit where credit is due, there's been some
controversy (thanks in large part to Westface) about me calling the
tweaks "my tweaks". Well I do, but I've also said many times they are
NOT "my" tweaks. Most were developed by one of audio's true geniuses,
an engineer named Peter Belt. For a quarter of a century, through PWB,
he's been selling novel audio products that work on the listener's
perception of sound, and not the audio system itself.
http://www.belt.demon.co.uk His products are as bizarre as anything
that I've mentioned and they more or less attempt to do what my
tweaks do, except they do it in far, far more effective ways than say,
taping animal pictures to your speakers can. They range in cost from
the equivalent of a cheap pair of interconnects (ie. rainbow foils) to
a full blown component upgrade (ie. quantum clip). I (and others) have
found that pound for pound, they have more benefits at their given cost
level than the benefits I receive from investing the same amount of
money into conventional tweaks. For this reason, I haven't upgraded
my components in years the conventional way, but instead, used the
products to ameliorate what I already had (and I've never regretted
using this route to audio nirvana). Although it's an alternative
approach to improving sound, both the alternative and conventional
approaches are valid to me. And when you have BOTH approaches at your
disposal, you have at least twice the means with which to hustle your
way down that path toward nirvana. :)

- Shippy


"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught
falsehoods in school. And the one man that dares to tell the truth is
called at once a lunatic and a fool." -- Plato.


One of my favourite Twilight Zone episodes is "All Quiet On Maple St.".
It's about lights and cars that mysteriously keep going off in a
residential neighbourhood. The neighbours start to get fearful and
upset, and blame each other for the cause. A little boy (I think his
name was Robert, if I recall. Robert Moran) introduces the idea that
there's an alien in their midst. Then everyone gets angry, defensive,
offensive, points fingers at who they think is the outsider and the
perpetrator for the shenanigans. And it ends with.... uh.... everyone
kills each other, and it becomes "all quiet on Maple St.".

Turns out there were these aliens that were thinking of taking over the
earth, and they just set off people's lights and car horns, sat back
and watched as they went ahead and killed each other.

.