Gee, I never needed one!

Dave, dave, dave...

Such a closed-minded post! Where is your sense of exploration, your open mind, your open pocketbook?

There are people out there who *need* these products! They *need* to be sure that the electrons flowing into their sound systems are pure and free of pollution. Those kids down the street playing that excuse for "music?" Without adequate filtering, how can you be sure that *rap* stuff isn't getting into *your* equipment, hmmm?

So of course you *need* the $400 mains cable (even though your house was probably wired with #14, or #12 if you're lucky), and a $1500 state-of-someone's-(f)art filter/regulator. Can I sell you a nice

*Tice* *Clock* to go with that?

Never, never, underestimate the sales potential of the simple phrase, "Did you hear that?"

...A few years ago at CES Las Vegas I was sitting around with some friends and we were talking about the "high end" wire biz. We started brainstorming about doing some hoax products, and sketched out some stuff. We thought we had some pretty good stuff going.

The next day we see a guy selling adapters to let you use standard extension cords (3-wire 120 volt extension cords) with your XLR system... The possibilities of that are, well, fascinating.

And we saw some wire vendors that convinced us that no matter how much tequila and oil of snake we could put into our schemes, we were pikers. These clowns had us out-weirded by a good 40dB. I have no idea why anyone would want or need a monocrystalline silver mains cable, but they were taking orders for the things...

Made an offhand reference to another guy that if he wanted extreme connectors and cables, he could use one-inch Andrew Heliax

for speaker cable -- hey, it will handle any power level you want, and the response is flat from DC to at least a GHz, so it should handle the Stones' latest, right? The cable is big and bulky, as are the connectors, and you need special tools to (properly) fit the connectors, and of course the cable needs to be cut to length. Big, ugly, got to be custom fit, expensive -- sounds like a winner! The guy scribbles furiously, shakes my hand, and hurries off in glee -- I think I've given him a license to print money.

And of course there's the guy down the hall extolling the sonic virtues of capacitors rolled on the thighs of virgins, but that's a tale for another day...

Namaste-

artie

But is the copper so pure it's pink?

Has it been cryogenicaly treated (_not_ just dipped in LN2 like those pikers do, but carefully brought down to temperature and back up)?

Does it have _soft_ and _very flexible_ insulation?

I mean, if not it's just amateur crap, right?

Be sure to look at the prices, particularly for the LN2-dipped plugins.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Thanks for the summary. Did you have a question, or are you just hoping for an argument? ;-)

As many of us know in the electrical/electronics world, all home electronics equipment has a form of filtering associated with the a.c. line and/or the filtered d.c. down the path. Series noise filtering can be a line transformer as you would find on better equipment or an rc network as found on direct line connected equipment.

I see these "line conditioners" in the stereo/tv stores selling for as much as $500.00 to $1500.00. These units clean-up noise as well as stabilize the 120 volt line voltage.

As I have come to understand, the need for these units is grossly exaggerated by salesmen to unsuspecting customers, as the line noise levels are already reduced to acceptable levels in the tvs/stereos in general. Also, dc voltages are regulated and actively filtered, further negating the need for " ac voltage regulation and noise filtering benefits of these conditioners. But the point is, it's probably not necessary at least for the low/mid end equipment they buy and is a disproportionately high investment.

--
Dave M.

-- Dave M.

benefits

Yes, I ASSumed I would get some kind of "feedback".

You are quite right.

There has been a scam for many years offering such 'snake oil' products to the hi-fi fraternity in particular. Possibly the ultimate was 'one way' speaker cable !

More recently I've heard of salemen suggesting that gold plated connectors will make your video picture quality sharper !

OTOH one wonders if ppl gullible enought to fall for it deserve any sympathy.

There is no doubt though that very questionable sales tactics and advertising have been used, often employing pseudo-scientific terms in an attempt to make the 'magic component' appear in a better light.

I'd love to see some consumer protection legislation used to stop this shit.

A decent line conditioner will at least offer some real benefits such as ( hopefully ) eliminating mains borne 'clicks' if it's any good. The same can't be said of gold plated mains leads though.

Graham

I recently went to the local "Best Buys" (an over-priced electronics supermarket here in the states) to buy a USB 'A' to mini 5-pin 'B' cable. They wanted $33 for the damned cable! Note that the widget that needed the cable (an MP3 player) only cost $32 and came with one! Ok, the BB cable was "gold" in a pretty package, that would piss me off opening!

You know better! Litz, anyone?

How would you measure such adverts? I'd rather see some consumer education, but that's just my conservative bent.

I think you're dreaming now. Maybe, just *maybe*, a UPS will do what you proposE[12ut a "line conditioner"?

--
  Keith

In the early eighties when I switched on my incredibly powerful Acorn Atom computer my radio could no longer receive any station and my TV showed heavy snow on all channels due to the interference generated by my Acorn Atom. Today you can have a radio or TV card _inside_ your PC without any interference at all. Thanks to (electromagnetical) interference control.

The filters you talk about are for interference control. They will not make your stereo sound better, but (in Europe) they are necessary for a product to be "CE" compliant. To be CE compliant the equipment should continue working properly under certain difficult conditions like strong glitches on the power line or EMI (try holding a working electric drill close to the equipment under test). Also CE compliant equipment is not allowed to pollute the power lines or generate too much interference itself. These filters are meant to help achieving this as they are kind of bidirectional, they keep helping interference getting in _and_ out.

My Acorn Atom clearly was not CE compliant (CE didn't exist yet at the time).

BTW, I've never heard the argument that a line filter improves the quality of your sound system, I guess only americans would fall for that ;o)

--DF

In article , keith wrote: [...]

Litz would cost more to make. Gold plating is usually so thin you could spit through it. "monster cable" is just zip cord with clear covering that works like a lens to make the copper look bigger.

The snake oil is extra thick in the audio for cars market. There they sell banks of capacitors for hundreds of dollars etc.

[...]

It is really a shame that all that money ends up wasted instead of paying for an education for the people which would in turn cause those people not to waste the money.

--
--
kensmith@rahul.net   forging knowledge

Yes. You too, I see. 8^)

On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 16:04:20 +0000, Dave M. wrote: ...

That's the "A fool and his money are soon parted" syndrome. ;-)

A corollary to that is, "It is morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money." ;-)

Cheers! Rich

That stuff, like cocaine, is just Mother Nature's way of saying you have way too much money. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

So, you not only didn't ignore the useless post, you've prolonged the thread? ;-)

--
Cheers!
Rich

Probably not after it's been dipped in LN2 ;-)

Cheers! Rich

... Anybody remember in the - lessee, '70's, when the Altair 8800 and so on were coming out? There was a project in one of the nascent computerist mags with a program that would play "music" on an AM radio set next to the computer.

Now, I, of course, did it right - with interleaved timing loops and a speaker on one of the output ports. ;-) The first tune I made it play was "Daisy, Daisy," for all of the obvious reasons. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Who was it that said, "No one ever went broke by under estimating the intelligence of the American public."

Mark Twain? Mencken? ...

Ted

Bill Gates? Martha Stewart? George Bush?

->> PT