Not any more. They used to have an employee equipment auction every year. One bozo screwed that up for everybody by buying up all of the communications analyzers when they refitted the factory. He then took out an ad in a trade magazine and started selling them....in direct competition to Motorola who also made Comm analyzers.
No, but that is one of the reasons a pair was purchased. Measure AND listen. I.E. test them.
Please stick the subject. Your help is welcome. At the moment, you are not helping.
Wow this is an interesting thread. I have faith in SY, as a fellow materials scientist (didn't know you were one until I read your profile today), in conducting the experiment properly.
As an aside everytime I see the phrase Bybee I think of Bybee Pottery which is def not hifi.
As an aside everytime I see the phrase Bybee I think of Bybee Pottery which is def not hifi.
They don't.
They call it a resistor because it's a resistor. Not just something that happens to have resistance. It's an off-the-shelf mil-spec metal film resistor.
se
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I will try in the future to be more helpful but I have to admit with such low hanging fruit the temptation to be, shall we say, overexuberant is hard to resist.
Here might be something to try with lab testing: Usually the higher harmonics of signals are tremendously lower in amplitude even in complex signals. From what I'm hearing it seems at least possible that those higher harmonics in real signals are being restored somehow. This would imply information that is simultaneouly at the high end of the spectrum and low in amplitude are being affected by the bybees. Perhaps an equivalent static resistance resistor to the bybee can act as the control. Then send an extremely high frequency signal (relative to the audio spectrum) through both and do an A/B at its output compared to the control resistance. See where they differ.
It could also be that the resistance through the bybee isn't so much frequency dependent as current or voltage dependent. That is high or low currents or voltages are being passed differently. I would suspect both of these effects, if either one existed, might be very hard to detect. That doesn't mean that our ears wouldn't hear them.
Perhaps there is a combination of several of these effects at work. This is all pure speculation on my part but it would at least be something to try.
Hi Jacques,
Measuring low values of resistance like that can be problematic. Using a controlled current and measuring the voltage developed is the accepted norm in a calibration lab. However, the uncertainty of the actual number you do arrive at is pretty high compared to other measurements. I know this because I worked in an electronic instrument calibration laboratory for a while.
In other words, yes. It's easy to get a number. How certain are you that you have the correct number?
As for power dissipation, I'm not worried about that so much. I just normally exercise caution in cases like this. I personally do not know what the actual internal construction looks like, so I tend to err on the side of caution.
I hope a DC current doesn't polarize the device, ruining it's properties.
-Chris
Measuring low values of resistance like that can be problematic. Using a controlled current and measuring the voltage developed is the accepted norm in a calibration lab. However, the uncertainty of the actual number you do arrive at is pretty high compared to other measurements. I know this because I worked in an electronic instrument calibration laboratory for a while.
In other words, yes. It's easy to get a number. How certain are you that you have the correct number?
As for power dissipation, I'm not worried about that so much. I just normally exercise caution in cases like this. I personally do not know what the actual internal construction looks like, so I tend to err on the side of caution.
I hope a DC current doesn't polarize the device, ruining it's properties.
-Chris
Hi exeric,
-Chris
If that's the case, it will be extremely easy to show what is going on through simple measurements. A network analyzer (sorry George, didn't mean to put you on the spot there) will show a plot of amplitude changes vs phase angle. That effect you can not hide. The real clue is that there is a frequency selective function occurring.
That is exactly the type of tests that will be run, have no fear. Finding something takes a great deal less time and effort than not finding something.
-Chris
I for one would find it useful if you were to describe what it is you hear which is different when the Bybees are in circuit. A helpful description would be in terms of aural percepts (e.g. timbres of instruments), not signal elements (e.g. higher harmonics).
Not necessarily, Chris.
When you study audio at the university, you study not only maths, circuit design etc., but acoustics and electroacoustics as well. These disciplines are pretty far from analog circuit design.
Regards,
It is very difficult to characterize the sound but I will try. My original impression with my system was that it was a good, but perhaps not great system. It is a good system for rock music but it also sounds good with classical. Even unmodified it never seemed like a "fussy" sound.
However after the modification it was clear that some of the electronic-ness of the sound was removed. It surprised me because I hadn't noticed a lot of that before the mod. There was no tilt in frequency distribution, in loudness, in dynamics or anything else that I could pinpoint. But there was a feeling of notes emerging more distinctly out of silence and being able to follow individual instruments in ensembles more easily. This created the subjective impression that there might be less intermodulation distortion after the mod. I don't how that could be because one of the biggest effects with the bybees was with them installed directly on the individual woofer and tweeter in my Spica TC-50s. How can you remove that kind of distortion after the signal has gotten to that point?
I'm just reporting how it sounded and not what was actually causing the change. This one effect is why I'm not totally discounting things Mr. Bybee said about the QPs. I mean how can you reduce IMD at the speaker point unless something truly weird is going on.
However, I'm not totally convinced that it is not just a subjective, although very good, effect. I say this because I tried adding a second bybee in series with the first on both the woofer and tweeter. With the second one added to the tweeter the effect went from sublime to horrid. The sound became squeaky clean. You could follow everything going on in musical ensembles, understand lyrics you never understood before, but it sounded like an information conveying machine and not like music at all. Which makes sense because I understand they used these QMs to decipher poor radio signals in the military.
So that in a nutshell is what leads me to think that low level very high frequencies are being affected. I don't know however if that is all that is being affected. Used in moderation the effect is sublime, but don't overdue it. You'll know it when you do.
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"Which makes sense because I understand they used these QMs to decipher poor radio signals in the military."
Which must be true, since you read it on the internet.
I don't believe everything I read on the internet. For instance I generally like to give components a fair chance by actually listening to them before tearing them down. Is that illogical?
Interesting description. We should be able to find if the Bybee changes the harmonics. That certainly will change the sound. My experience has been that "bad sounding" circuits tend to generate a lot of upper harmonics and high frequency hash. That is usually easy to see in spectrum analysis. Much harder to detect in FR or THD.
hypernutremia
So is water...
Hypernatremia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Why Drinking Too Much Water Is Dangerous
So is water...
Hypernatremia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Why Drinking Too Much Water Is Dangerous
Agreed, Sy will have no problem. Resistance at the single digit milliohm is trivial.
Micro-ohm stuff is a tad harder, but quite doable. It's the nano-ohm measurements that start to become troublesome. There, you can actually probe the 3 dimensional nature of the current spread and the metal topology.
previous link: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-81171269.html
I followed that link, never heard of that company before. I've always used Brush Wellman.
Content missing from that link:
1. BeO toxicity is with the small dust that gets into the alveoli. However, it can be eaten with no consequence...although I would not recommend that.
2. BeO apparently has the same or similar outer orbital configuration as potassium. It replaces potassium in the cell walls of the alveoli, and renders the membrane inert to the diffusion of oxygen.
3. 4% of the human race is susceptible to berylliosis.
4. There is no cure
5. There is no test which distinguishes the humans who are susceptible. Therefore, all must be protected.
Cheers, John
ps.. note, I found out the potassium aspect from Issac Asimov in one of his short stories, I believe he was a PhD chemist..
pps...Sy, if ya finds anything, perhaps I'll get ya an invite to the auditorium again...
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