OT: Scam electronics

Some Audiophool stuff might come close if you were to put together an entire sound system.

IMHO MOV surge surpressors are a prime example, here in 230 volt land, not only do they short when they fail, but cheap ones without fuses have been known to catch fire. Even when they are still working, they "leak" dangerous voltages.

The only good ones, IMHO are the ISO-BAR ones made by Trip-Lite which use among other things patented inductance networks to slow down the surges and Trans-Tector ones which use silicon avalanche diode arrays.

Keeping it togehter with the post I am referring to, the Trip-Lite patents ran out a few years ago, and someone is making Trip-Lite clones targeted to audiophiles and large screen TV buyers. Trip-Lite units cost $50-$100 while these were well over $300 for essentially the same unit.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.

Strictly speaking, these products are not "scams", because their purveyors almost always think they really do what is claimed for them. "Scam" generally implies a conscious hoax, a deliberate attempt to defraud the customer.

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What about this one:

Excerpt from the site:

"The ALTMANN =93TUBE-O-LATOR" lacquer is a high performance overtone- filter coating-compound, designed for plastic encapsulated analog- and mixed-signal-semiconductors.

The ALTMANN =93TUBE-O-LATOR" lacquer is applied only on the top surface of plastic semiconductor packages of AD-converter-chips, DA-converter- chips, OP-amps and discrete transistors.

After application, the overtone spectrum of these active devices changes immediately and permanently.

The new sonic signature will be natural, full and tube-like."

I guess these products have a market, because I just found another one:

This one is another lacquer but at least the creator of it has taken the time to construct a bogus science explanation for it.

I suppose that anyone that pays 500,00 =80 for a bottle with 250 ml of varnish, and ruins their speakers with it, will for sure hear *a difference* :-)

'Get Smart'

PlainBill

Yes! How old are you?

This is worse than a scam. People who are gullible enough to buy stuff that doesn't work for them deserve what they get. People who let pathogens thrive in MY beer deserve to be shut down.

Old enough to have seen the episodes when they were first broadcast. Heck, old enough to have seen 'My Favorite Martian' and 'The Baileys of Balboa'

PlainBill

Ditto.

Old enough to have watched "Big John and Sparky".

"When you go down in the woods today, ......."

Hmmm... That was a Sunday-morning radio program, where BJ & S read the comics. I don't remember it being on TV.

I don't remember watching Big John & Sparky, but I sure remember listening to the show on radio from north Alabama. I heard it on WCKY, Cincinnati. On good days, I could pick it up on my little rocket radio (anybody remember those?), with the clip hooked to the bedsprings. One of the first TV series that I remember watching after we finally got a TV was Captain Midnight. Loved the Roy Rogers movies on Saturday morning too

-- David dgminala at mediacombb dot net

Allodoxaphobia wrote:

You are probably correct. I do remember it being on radio. But, my (faulty) memory claims I watched it on a 9" B&W Dumont. Many radio shows Back In The Day attempted the move from radio to TV. Not all were successful in doing so...

OK. I _do_ remember watching Crusader Rabbit. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :-)

Jonesy

How can anyone "watch" anything on a 9" TV?

Oh, God, yes. $2.50 at the drugstore. Good sound -- the bandwidth was a couple hundred kilohertz!

How about a 3.5" HDTV for $41.99?

--
For the last time:  I am not a mad scientist, I'm just a very ticked off
scientist!!!

To the ad's credit, HDTV is nowhere mentioned, nor is the display's definition. It's a pocket TV that picks up ATSC broadcasts, and nothing more.

Yeppers, those were the cat's meow!! I used to listen to baseball games while in school; thread the earpiece through my shirtsleeve and lean my head against my arm all through the class. Most teachers never caught on.

OK.. here's the big question. How did those things tune in a station with only an inductor? There was no capacitor in those gems to make a resonant tank. When I was in junior high school, I had already began a subscription to Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics magazines, and had begun reading and studying about circuit theory. I knew that to have resonance, you needed an inductance and a capacitance, but was forever puzzled by the absence of a capacitor. How did they work?

--
David
dgminala at mediacombb dot net

Two possibilities:

(1) You're mistaken, and they do contain a capacitor. The page at

shows a schematic, which includes a fixed (100 pF) capacitor wired across the coil terminals. (2) Some variants may not have had a discrete capacitor, but might have depended on parasitic capacitance (e.g. the distributed capacitance of the coil) to create a resonant tank.

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
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