Dyak;231539 Wrote: > I am skeptical of "their" claims and will test and evaluate them for > myself. I was skeptical of the audible benefits of component vibration > control. I was skeptical ... snip > > But I've researched, tested, and then evaluated, which is the very > foundation of critical thinking which you just bashed in your post. > As defined on Wikipedia: "Critical thinking consists of mental > processes of discernment, analyzing and evaluating. "
Its a matter of degrees, I guess. When I see statements I know or suspect to be ridiculous, I make a decision NOT to spend money/time to test them. THAT is the essence of critical thinking. If you have to go out and test everything for yourself you're NOT applying critical thinking. If I tell you that shooting yourself in the head will make your system sound better, will you test it? Of course not. No one would, therefore everyone is capable of applying critical thinking to some situations. Critical thinking is about applying your knowledge and experience. Knowing the effect of a gun is enough to know that it can't possibly improve the sound of your audio system. Granted some folks have less knowledge and experience than others and therefore will need to perform more experiments, but another place to apply critical thinking is in knowing whose opinions to trust and in the design and analysis of the experiments. The first sign of someone being less than trustworthy is when their income depends on your believing what they have to say. There are other factors as well, such as the person's statements about other topics, etc. Some people are just misled and repeat what they have heard elsewhere and others are just pathological liars and will make up whatever pleases them for whatever reasons they have. Surely we can agree that there is a huge change, detectable by anyone with functioning ears, when one plays music with the amp switched off and then switched on. The experimenter's expectations are unlikely to influence the result of such a test. However, when the likely (or unlikely) effect of a tweak is small, the effect of the experimenter's expectations must be considered. Someone wraps equipment in CF and by golly, they hear a difference. Can it be a huge difference? maybe, if they live next to a TV broadcast antenna or similar high power RF source. If not, which is the majority of locations in the world, it will be at most a slight difference. This requires proper experiment design to test with any significance. Proper design includes double blind testing. Instrumentation would be better than a human listener because it has fewer biases, but then you open the whole measurable vs. audible can of worms and the whole thing, like this thread, quickly becomes mind-numbing. No one has denied that there may be an effect when wrapping equipment with CF cloth. It is conductive. Conductive shields are used in electronics everywhere. The difference is that those conductive shields are part of an overall system design to improve or maintain performance. What has been pointed out is that using CF cloth as a shield is likely to end up wrecking the very equipment that the CF wrapper is trying to improve. It has also been pointed out by experienced people (well, me, anyway) that handling CF cloth in a living space is not a good idea because the same flying fibers that will short electrical circuits are easily inhaled and caught in the eyes and skin and the reaction is definitely unpleasant to say the least. I'm going to apply some critical thinking here and state that using aluminum foil instead of CF cloth is likely to provide the same audible benefit as CF, but it doesn't have the associated risks (or cost). However, having been schooled in electrical engineering and worked as an RFIC designer and applications support engineer for about 15 years of my past career, I can also tell you that the haphazard method of randomly placing sheets of aluminum or CF cloth on objects without actually "designing" the system as a shield is just as likely to cause as many problems as it fixes. Ungrounded pieces of metal wrapped around signal leads are as likely to acts as antennas as they are shields and capacitively couple noise into the circuits they are intended to protect. I know a lot of people like the way CF cloth looks. It is pretty stuff, in an industrial sort of way. If they use it in cars, motorcycles, aircraft, and even bicycles, it's gotta be good for audio, too, right? Wrong. Advertisers have worked for years to train people to think that by showing pictures of high performance cars you'll think that the computer is faster; that because some athlete wears a particular brand of shoes, you'll be able to do what they do if you wear the same shoes; smoking is sexy and enhances athletic performance. The list goes on and on. CF is a material that all sort of magical properties have been assigned to simply by the nature of the things it is used in, and for audiophiles, by its high price tag. Critical thinking, indeed! TD -- tyler_durden ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tyler_durden's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2701 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=38628 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
