At the risk of opening up another worm infested container, the Bedini "Clarifier" is YAE of where a behaviour may occur for some users, where the provided explanation has nothing to do with the chain of cause and effect.
That chain is, at the core, that less than brilliant engineering has done to make the CD transport 'transparent' in regard to the level of electrical interference it generates in the physical process of reading the disk - we're talking here pure analogue behaviours. Hard to read disk, means more interference generated as the servos struggle to keep the laser, etc, aligned. And less than perfect power supplies end up spitting bits of electrical muck where they shouldn't go.
So, any of the myriad tweaks that alter how easily a CD can be read can alter the sound in a less than 'perfectly' engineered and assembled system. As a simple experiment, deliberately make a CD sit slightly out of kilter on the spindle, by adding a small bit of sticky tape on one side. The electromechanicals of the read mechanism now are heavily stressed, but on a 'good' system this should make no difference to SQ ...
That chain is, at the core, that less than brilliant engineering has done to make the CD transport 'transparent' in regard to the level of electrical interference it generates in the physical process of reading the disk - we're talking here pure analogue behaviours. Hard to read disk, means more interference generated as the servos struggle to keep the laser, etc, aligned. And less than perfect power supplies end up spitting bits of electrical muck where they shouldn't go.
So, any of the myriad tweaks that alter how easily a CD can be read can alter the sound in a less than 'perfectly' engineered and assembled system. As a simple experiment, deliberately make a CD sit slightly out of kilter on the spindle, by adding a small bit of sticky tape on one side. The electromechanicals of the read mechanism now are heavily stressed, but on a 'good' system this should make no difference to SQ ...
I'm just using the Bedini as an example of a "something" that alters, or possibly alters, the physical characteristics of the disc in some fashion - sufficient to vary the pattern of overall electrical behaviour within the transport area of the CD player while it reads the disk.
If someone wants to spend a lot of money to do this, that's their lookout - the 'smarter' approach is to prevent this variation in electrical behaviour interfering with the specifically analogue areas
If someone wants to spend a lot of money to do this, that's their lookout - the 'smarter' approach is to prevent this variation in electrical behaviour interfering with the specifically analogue areas
Fas42,
Could you give me even an insane answer to how a magnetic field is going to change the pits and value of 1's and 0's in a polycarbonate plastic structure? This is a non magnetic material with no ferro magnetic properties. Unless you are going to tell me that the metallized layer is changing in some fashion you sure are loosing me here. How in the world could you ever rearranged the molded pits on a plastic substrate without physically doing something?
Now I agree that a scratched disk can make some CD players have fits as this is a very easily understood principal interfering with the optics. But put all the magnetic energy you want around a CD and I would like to see something change that will interfere with reading a digital file by an optical laser.
Could you give me even an insane answer to how a magnetic field is going to change the pits and value of 1's and 0's in a polycarbonate plastic structure? This is a non magnetic material with no ferro magnetic properties. Unless you are going to tell me that the metallized layer is changing in some fashion you sure are loosing me here. How in the world could you ever rearranged the molded pits on a plastic substrate without physically doing something?
Now I agree that a scratched disk can make some CD players have fits as this is a very easily understood principal interfering with the optics. But put all the magnetic energy you want around a CD and I would like to see something change that will interfere with reading a digital file by an optical laser.
OK, so no data, as usual.
BTW, on the same subject, we might have a winner for perhaps the most intelligence insulting ad copy I've ever seen.
http://ultrabitplatinum.com/TechnicalWhitePaper.pdf
Sy,
If you had steered me to this tech paper earlier I wouldn't have had to send out one of my Windows disks to be polished after someone borrowed it and scratched the h**l out of the surface. I guess this would have allowed all those ones and zeros to just correct themselves! Or perhaps I just needed a very large magnet to get all those bits to go back into place. Thanks for the belly laugh.
If you had steered me to this tech paper earlier I wouldn't have had to send out one of my Windows disks to be polished after someone borrowed it and scratched the h**l out of the surface. I guess this would have allowed all those ones and zeros to just correct themselves! Or perhaps I just needed a very large magnet to get all those bits to go back into place. Thanks for the belly laugh.
I'm sure it did. Because of human nature, there's virtually nothing that won't "work" for some number of people, no matter how absurd it may be. That's how quacks, frauds and charlatans are able to make money.
se
What's there to be surprised about? You're a human being and it's trivially easy to get things to "work" for human beings. Even when the "thing" is absolutely nothing at all.
Problem is, some peoples' vanity and ego keeps them in denial of their humanity and the weaknesses that go along with it.
se
oh yeah that ol thing, 'I didnt expect it to work, but it 'worked'' a bit like, 'my friend, who isnt even an audiophile was able to hear it'.
so the negative preconception is so powerful it overrides any need to control the test? its ridiculous, but things are becoming more and more clear here.
Yes, the 'insane' answer is that pits are changed - of course they're not ... but if in some fashion, any fashion, some real world, physical attributes of the plastic disk are altered such that the purely physical process of extracting data from the disk does vary in the electrical area then you have a 'source' for a difference in SQ. As a silly example, imagine endowing the plastic with a very strong, 'permanent' static charge - when the laser assembly is brought in very close proximity to the the surface it's attracted strongly to it, and the servo mechanism has to apply a constant, single direction force to balance that effect. Note, I'm not saying this is what's happening here - it's just an example of the sort of mechanism that can be at the heart of some of these tweaks.
The data is not really relevant when one can conceive of a logical, rational chain of cause and effect. So be silly, no-one ever built (I think!) a bridge that wasn't strong enough, just to see what would happen if too much traffic went across it. I could get a transport, deliberately reduce its electrical integrity until a particular instrument test showed a result ... but does that prove anything? This is in the arena where amplifiers show superior technical measurements, but sound "worse"... so I don't think any normal tests will show much that is useful ...
But that's precisely what Bedini was claiming in his patent.
And he even "proved it."
First, he took a Kodak PhotoCD and copied an image off it to a directory on his computer's hard drive. Next, he "treated" the disc with his "Clarifier." Then he copied the same file to his hard drive but placed it in a different directory.
Then he did the most bizarre thing. Instead of examining the files directly, he converted each one to a PostScript file. Then he pulled those PostScript files into a text editor.
First he noted that one of the files had fewer lines of text in it. This was the file from the "treated" disc. From this he concludes that there has been "data compression" performed on the CD.
Then he used a comparison function in his text editor and had it spit out the differences between the two files, which were significant. And from this he concludes that the data has been rearranged on the disc.
When I first read his patent, I was wondering what was going on and why he took such a bizarre approach to "prove" that his machine "worked."
So I took a JPG image file and pulled it into one of my graphics programs. Then I saved it out as a PostScript file. Then, without doing anything in between, I saved the same file out as a PostScript file but in a different directory in order to keep the file names the same for both.
I looked at both of the resultant files and saw that they were of different sizes. Then I ran the DOS file compare utility on them (fc.exe) and had it spit out the differences between the two files, which as in Bedini's case, were significant.
Since I hadn't made any changes to the original file before saving them out as PostScript files, all I discovered was that the PostScript algorithm produced different files even when the source file is identical, and this told me why Bedini had to go through such bizarre lengths to "prove" that his device "worked."
If there was anything going on with the physical medium, you wouldn't have to include all this intermediate crap. You'd just have to examine the before and after files directly.
se
The PostScript thing sounds as if the resultant file stores, say, a date stamp of the conversion and/or the location of the converted file, as part of the content. Hence, always different ...
The Bedini thing is just YAE of a behaviour, and the 'official' explanation for the behaviour not correlating. Which doesn't mean the behaviour is not there ...
The Bedini thing is just YAE of a behaviour, and the 'official' explanation for the behaviour not correlating. Which doesn't mean the behaviour is not there ...
No, the changes are far more than would be the case with just a difference in time and date stamps. The size differences between the two files were in the thousands of bytes. The changes in the files are the result of the PostScript algorithm. But this was given more as an example that patents have nothing to do with "proving" your widget actually does anything.
Strictly true, yet no one has ever demonstrated that there's any behavior that's having any effect on the analog audio output.
se
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