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Frostbite Falls Audio inc

Posted by tomservo (M) on April 17, 2007 at 12:15:59

In Reply to: Some interesting replies. posted by May Belt on April 17, 2007 at 02:50:57:

Hi May

I enjoy reading your posts at times as they have a refreshing and optimistic new age like freedom to them.

You ask the question “How could a phenomenon like directionality in conductors, therefore, have been missed by researchers all this time ?”

Well, in all areas of electronics outside of high end hi fi, engineers design and adapt based on how things measure, more specifically the governing conditions.
An expanding understanding of how things work permitted the growth which spanned the Telegraph (governed by the behavior of very long wires) and a Cell phone or desktop computer. All digital circuitry, is governed by analogue principals, how fast can you get a signal from X to Y on a circuit board is deep into how conductors work. Modern computer stuff and Cell phones are digital at GHz frequencies and are still governed by analogue principals.
Designing any of this is only possible because how electrons flow is understood and repeatable every time. You would not believe how sophisticated modeling circuitry has become, your pc, cell phone wouldn’t work without it.
In engineering, for anything anywhere near audio, there is no net directionality observed in cables.

But you say
The dogmatic approach adopted by some engineers and scientists that a phenomenon can't be held to exist until it can be satisfactorily explained, is obviously unsound.

No, a curious engineer wouldn’t be willing to say “it” exists until “it” can be proven to exist. Casual observations don’t cut it in science.

That “proof” could be found in a “with and without” comparison measurements (various views) or by blind (listening without knowledge or clues) tests of sufficient number to be statistically meaningful. By statistically meaningful, I mean that getting heads in a coin toss 7 out of 10 times means nothing but getting it 700,000 times out of a million is huge.
Don’t forget, the sciencey approach is also familiar with the real reasons why blind testing can at times be the only way to discern details.
The sciency approach is not to look at a shape of a body and rate its esthetic beauty, it is to say, jump up on the scale and stand for a tape measure, breath into this calibrated flask.

That same “unsound process” you refer to of “following the book” applied to all areas of life, have after all taken us from the age of Spells, Witches, Voodoo all superstition, where people believed anything, to the modern age where they are more trusting the things which can be universally reproducible in the ever expanding “Science big book”. Ever since, some argued this was a mistake, some liked this direction.

The skeptic would say, ok, you’re sure of this, so prove it, go down as being "the one" who figured it out.
Why not discover the “mechanism” or its "footprint".
If the cable “does something” to the signal, this shows up as the signal being somehow different arriving at the far end right?
It is easy to compare the two ends to see if they are different, either by ear or by measure.
If the cable made enough difference to be audible, then when comparing the difference between each end, then on has “the effect” the cable has as the difference signal.

“Before you tell me that the current doesn't flow in the insulation, remember that AC signal flow is NOT synonymous with the movement of electrons; rather, it is analogous to a 'shock wave' travelling via the medium of the moving electrons. Heaviside showed at the end of the last century that, dependent on frequency and due to the conductor's self inductance, this 'shock wave' flows to some extent OUTSIDE the conductor.”

Ok, now you are getting into engineering, you just need to update.
These guys make good modeling software, check out what these packages do.

http://www.ansoft.com/index.cfm?&vflash=y
http://www.spectrum-soft.com/index.shtm

Maybe Enid Lumley was right after all ! In the meantime, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, something is going on, and we don't know what it is, do we ? " <<<

Well, both sides of any issue always think they “have a handle on it”, but that is human nature as both are usually at least partly wrong, sometimes it’s all a view of the same thing from different frames of reference.

Best,

Tom Danley

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