John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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You are on dangerous ground Joshua....SY has made many measurements of these devices and despite his bias against anything with the whiff of snake-oil he has published his results on that thread.....if you search you will find a lot of information [.......maybe this testing is responsible for his late desktop being safe in the arms of......:sing:]

I didn't ask about measurements results, I asked about listening to.
 
The early Nigerian scam letters (I received one sent to my business about 15 years ago) were quite well presented and looked plausible. One could almost believe them, except that they seemed too good to be true (always a wise test!). The modern illiterate emails are much easier to spot as being spurious - they must make life harder for the genuine scammers!

Audio is not much different, except that the 'scammers' genuinely believe that they have stumbled on surplus funds which they wish to share with the world so, at least in some cases, their sin is not dishonesty but naivety. Even worse, those who have been 'had' are keen that their friends are 'had' too.
 
You are on dangerous ground Joshua....SY has made many measurements of these devices...

It was a worthless pursuit. SY didn't have adequate equipment to measure them. In fact, no one does at this point.

New technology such as that utilized by the purifiers is virtually impossible to measure and quantify. It is at least one generation ahead of the available technology for measuring.

So we're just going to have to wait.

se
 
Actually, "prejudice" is probably accurate. It has come to take on a pejorative connotation, but that's really not so. Prejudice is not the same as bigotry. If someone claims to be the son of the Nigerian oil minister, my prejudice is that he's a scammer. If someone is trying to sell me a perpetual motion machine, my prejudice is that he's a fraud. If someone claims he's selling a hifi gadget whose effect can't be measured, offers no controlled listening evidence, and claims to violate fundamental physical laws, my prejudice is that it's a crock being peddled to the gullible.

Prejudice can be overcome with evidence- bigotry can't. It's a subtle linguistic point, but not well appreciated.
 
Actually, "prejudice" is probably accurate. It has come to take on a pejorative connotation, but that's really not so. Prejudice is not the same as bigotry. If someone claims to be the son of the Nigerian oil minister, my prejudice is that he's a scammer. If someone is trying to sell me a perpetual motion machine, my prejudice is that he's a fraud. If someone claims he's selling a hifi gadget whose effect can't be measured, offers no controlled listening evidence, and claims to violate fundamental physical laws, my prejudice is that it's a crock being peddled to the gullible.

Prejudice can be overcome with evidence- bigotry can't. It's a subtle linguistic point, but not well appreciated.

Couldn't agree more.

Though often times when arguments such as this are made, they're dismissed as "semantics." Which is another of my pet peeves.

Damn right it's semantics. Semantics is about the meanings of the words we use. Unless we can agree on their common meanings, there's no way for us to effectively communicate. Though that seems to be the goal of some.

se
 
Where would politicians be if we insisted on effective communication? I remember reading a sci-fi novel by Asimov (probably one of the Foundation 'trilogy'). A diplomat from a possibly hostile planet visited, and made lots of grand speeches. Fortunately they had technology to analyse what he said. The net result was that he said precisely nothing: every hint was contradicted by an opposite hint. Not long after that the invasion fleet arrived.

One of my pet hates is misleading names - they both confuse and annoy me. (Maybe I am a bit autistic, like most physicists!) If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck I get annoyed when people try to tell me it is a floating chicken, and I should not get so picky about words.
 
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Actually, "prejudice" is probably accurate. It has come to take on a pejorative connotation, but that's really not so. Prejudice is not the same as bigotry. If someone claims to be the son of the Nigerian oil minister, my prejudice is that he's a scammer. If someone is trying to sell me a perpetual motion machine, my prejudice is that he's a fraud. If someone claims he's selling a hifi gadget whose effect can't be measured, offers no controlled listening evidence, and claims to violate fundamental physical laws, my prejudice is that it's a crock being peddled to the gullible.

Prejudice can be overcome with evidence- bigotry can't. It's a subtle linguistic point, but not well appreciated.

Thanks for the education :eek:
Sometimes I forget I'm not a native speaker.

jan
 
The Nigerians are more honest than Bybee in that they don't claim to violate the laws of thermodynamics or basic quantum mechanics.

I didn't read the claims, I'm not interested in them. I didn't perform any measurements. I only tested them on my sound system. That's all I care about. I pity those who evaluate pieces of gear for audio systems by measurements only, without listening to it.
 
I didn't read the claims, I'm not interested in them. I didn't perform any measurements. I only tested them on my sound system.

Really? You just bought them not knowing what they were supposed to do? Wow, I'd like to have your disposable income! Poor folks like me generally don't plop down 700+ shekels for something that we don't know anything about.
 
As I said, those who have been 'had' want their friends to be 'had' too. That is how pyramid schemes work. Most people like to be part of a crowd. In a big fire, people will follow each other to a dead end even if some of them have spotted an apparent exit, as they think that the others must be right. People don't mind being wrong (even dangerously wrong) provided enough other people are wrong too.
 
Really? You just bought them not knowing what they were supposed to do? Wow, I'd like to have your disposable income! Poor folks like me generally don't plop down 700+ shekels for something that we don't know anything about.

I was reported by a local audiophile, an old timer and very experienced one, that they do good to the sound. He is a dentist with almost no knowledge in electronics or physics. He doesn't care about measurements or technical explanations. I decided to give them a try and found out that my money was well spent.
 
As I said, those who have been 'had' want their friends to be 'had' too. That is how pyramid schemes work. Most people like to be part of a crowd. In a big fire, people will follow each other to a dead end even if some of them have spotted an apparent exit, as they think that the others must be right. People don't mind being wrong (even dangerously wrong) provided enough other people are wrong too.

Well, you may have a deep understanding in psychology. All I know is that I follow only my own footsteps. I trust only what I hear, with my own ears, I don't give a cent on what others say. I'm not ashamed to discard audio gear into the classified section even after a short use, I never stick to what doesn't actually work for the better. I find no need to come up with some off hand psychological explanations to justify my decisions and actions.
 
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