Groundside Electrons

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Hi BudP,

About the groundside electron, maybe you could start a new thread on that one :D ? Is it electron trapped on the dielectric material ?

If that so, Bob Pease mentioned something similar on before and the effect is worse on Teflon PCB, The isolation of the Teflon is too great that the electron have nowhere to be disposed, his solution is same with yours, poured groundplane covering all empty part of the PCB.


Hartono Tandjoeng
 
Hartono.

Poured ground plane, two 300mm lengths of #8 stranded wire, with as fine a strand of copper as you can get and a decent poly-something sheath. Or a 150mm length of true Litz wire with three 9mm pieces of polyethylene shrink wrap tube, shrunk tightly by 50% or so, distributed on the length of wire. The Litz must be made from insulated magnet wire and should have at least 10 times the surface area of an equivalent piece of solid copper wire. This is circular mils per amp equivalence.

One, two, three, sometimes four pieces, will increase retention of something akin to electrons and allow the circuitry to retain very fine detail and amazing amounts of coherent, large scale tiny amplitude signals. The information is there already, even in red book audio. The EE's who fly around here and pooh pooh Audiophools are quite correct about the tremendous job they have done... they just missed the ground plane side of circuitry somehow. Not as a connection to ground, with noise reduction and all, but apparently as a close by reservoir of....must be electrons, though, why they would choose to loiter within a loop of Litz wire with small pieces of plastic attached, is quite beyond me. Yes... thats a soldered together loop of wire, just attached to a convenient location, on the signal ground. Though, using the wire as a ground side conductor works just as well, if the loop thing is just too weird for you.

I buy and use a cable made from 140 strands of #40 AWG magnet wire, made from four nines copper. Quite expensive in bulk, but not so bad for one piece. Email me if you would like to know more.

Bud
 
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BudP said:
Hartono.

Poured ground plane, two 300mm lengths of #8 stranded wire, with as fine a strand of copper as you can get and a decent poly-something sheath. Or a 150mm length of true Litz wire with three 9mm pieces of polyethylene shrink wrap tube, shrunk tightly by 50% or so, distributed on the length of wire. The Litz must be made from insulated magnet wire and should have at least 10 times the surface area of an equivalent piece of solid copper wire. This is circular mils per amp equivalence.

One, two, three, sometimes four pieces, will increase retention of something akin to electrons and allow the circuitry to retain very fine detail and amazing amounts of coherent, large scale tiny amplitude signals. The information is there already, even in red book audio. The EE's who fly around here and pooh pooh Audiophools are quite correct about the tremendous job they have done... they just missed the ground plane side of circuitry somehow. Not as a connection to ground, with noise reduction and all, but apparently as a close by reservoir of....must be electrons, though, why they would choose to loiter within a loop of Litz wire with small pieces of plastic attached, is quite beyond me. Yes... thats a soldered together loop of wire, just attached to a convenient location, on the signal ground. Though, using the wire as a ground side conductor works just as well, if the loop thing is just too weird for you.

I buy and use a cable made from 140 strands of #40 AWG magnet wire, made from four nines copper. Quite expensive in bulk, but not so bad for one piece. Email me if you would like to know more.

Bud

must be that I just didn't spotted beginning of that issue........but I feel somewhat puzzled what you talkin' about ;
do you mind few words more or even nice pic attached?

btw- you didn't answered - which parts of Mile's document regarding 20W lab amp you need me to scan?

TIA
 
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Hi Ed,

I don't think you can compress electrons - but you can do some very strange things with them - if they don't do them to you first! :xeye:

For example you can make them "bunch" together - you can "aim" them - you can "focus" them - "accelerate" 'em etc. The little buggers can be influenced by static fields - magnetic fields - electrode capacitance and we can use those fields to make 'em do little tricks. I'm not sure what exactly is going on with BudP's traps (or whatever it is) as I'm new to the concept and haven't given it a close look (yet :devilr: ).

Take a look at this link on Klystron tubes to get an idea of how electrons can be made to "jump through hoops" and "bunch" (compressed mass of electrons but not compressed electrons) together.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klystron

I used these and magnetrons - traveling wave tubes - amplitrons when I played around with RADAR's while in the Navy.

One thing you can always count on with electrons - they like to take the path of least resistance so if you decrease or increase the resistance they encounter they will find the path of least resistance even if they need to do strange things to get there.

BTW Bud - you might want to consider a new thread for this subject before you and Dave (Planet10) need to do a "rework - repost" thing. You know what a PIA that can be!

:cheers:
 
Ridiculous Litz wire.

All I can say in defense of this foolishness is that I think of it as just doing a portion of the job that a true poured ground plane does. I really think it is already being done in those situations, but has never been "singled out" as a separate function from all other ground plane functions.

The #8 gauge wire, ground buss scheme, comes from Romy the Cats SE Meliquides amplifiers. I sent him some Litz to try and no improvement was discerned, at all. And he is good at this.

In my own headphone amp, with a Baxendahl tone control, driven by OP AMPs, into a long tailed cascode 6922 with cathode follower to capacitor output, I have implemented poured instrumentation grounds. Right and left power and signal are all kept separate till chassis ground and all grounds are under their function specific components. Traces are on the opposite side of the PCB. The Litz wires were applied to input signal ground and output signal ground with noticeable but not astounding results.

Addition of two loops of Litz to the output ground RCA jack to PCB lugs, in my Sony SACD / CD player, was subtly astounding. All of the high frequency energy I had been ignoring as "digital hash" in Red Book, became intelligible information about echoes, string squeaks, cymbal shimmer etc. This is just the analogue amp portion, but with single sided traces and zero PCB ground plane, except right at the ground side RCA jack lug connection to PCB and these on the same side as the traces.

I have gone on to add these to all other components. Typical is input / output grounds and cathode ground of the driver tube in preamp and amp. I also added them to speaker drivers and some modified, much reduced pieces, to phono cartridge and tape head grounds.

You can have too much of this stuff. A time smear is the result with amplified signal and a covered and dead quality occurs with the electromagnetic coil transducers, so, just slathering Litz wire all over every thing doesn't work. But, right up to that point, works brilliantly.

Bud
 
Hartono,

I am of the opinion, ignorant as it undoubtedly is, that the surface area of the Litz, the polyester / Nylon magnet wire coating and the addition of what appear to us to be tiny amounts of plastic dielectric to these 150mm wires provides a low loss, low energy threshold "storage" for electrons.

From the electrons point of view this is an enormous galaxie of easily accessed orbits, with a low threshold charge state required for E Field stasis, where before the nearest loitering zone was out at the device ground for the building.

That the addition of these "wires" aids retention of wide band, low amplitude micro dynamics, like hall echo, trailing edge of note artistic emphasis and very small signal information, retained as understandable information, seems to support this opinion. But I am willing to be taught the truth about what is already going on because this is not just a wild hair of a theory, it does work....just like all forms of Voodoo science do.

The post attachment activity is as follows. After soldering tthe lengths in place turn on the unit and listen.

Initial sound will be almost monaural (speaking of Red Book here) in it's stage width, very high frequency oriented and quite "thin" in musical color lower frequency ranges, hence the high frequency emphasis.

After about two hours, where all of this gradually changes to a wide open sound stage with X amount of detail and then back to a pinched sound stage and undynamic character, in ever lengthening cycles. You end up with a colorful, dynamic, extremely detailed sound, with perfect balance and very analogue like character. The X level of detail increases every time this cycle runs it's course and always seems to end up with the really musical presentation as the last step.

Really, as if the Litz wire was "filling up" with electrons. Not sure of the feasibility of this description in scientific terms, but, I am quite certain about the usefulness of the end result. Not a shocking difference, but not at all hidden and hard to find either. Just seems to make the component operate like it was designed to do in the first place, but was cost cut in manufacture to the minimum performance level they seem to come with.

Bud
 
You claim that an
(x) audible
( ) measurable
(x) hypothetical

improvement in sound quality can be attained by:
( ) upsampling
( ) non-oversampling
( ) increasing word size
( ) vibration dampening
( ) bi-wiring
(x) litz wire
( ) replacing the external power supply
( ) using a different lossless format
( ) decompressing on the server
( ) removing bits of metal from skull
( ) using ethernet instead of wireless
( ) inverting phase
( ) reversing “polarity” of resistors
( ) ultra fast recovery rectifiers
( ) installing bigger connectors
( ) installing Black Gate caps
( ) installing ByBee filters
( ) installing hospital-grade AC jacks
( ) defragmenting the hard disk
( ) running older firmware
( ) using exotic materials in cabinet
( ) bronze heatsinks
( ) violin lacquer
( ) $500 power cords

Your idea will not work. Specifically, it fails to account for:
(x) the placebo effect
(x) your ears honestly aren't that good
( ) your idea has already been thoroughly disproved
( ) modern DACs upsample anyway
( ) those products are pure snake oil
( ) lossless formats, by definition, are lossless
( ) those measurements are bogus
( ) sound travels much slower than you think
(x) electric signals travel much faster than you think
( ) that's not how binary arithmetic works
( ) that's not how TCP/IP works
( ) the Nyquist theorem
( ) the can't polish a turd theorem
( ) bits are bits

You will try to defend you idea by:
(x) claiming that your ears are “trained”
(x) claiming immunity to psychological/physiological factors that affect everyone else
(x) name-calling
( ) criticizing spelling/grammar

Your subsequent arguments will probably appeal in desperation to such esoterica as:
( ) jitter
( ) EMI
( ) thermal noise
(x) quantum mechanical effects
(x) resonance
( ) existentialism
(x) nihilism
( ) communism
( ) cosmic rays

And you will then change the subject to:
( ) theories are not the same as facts
( ) measurements don't tell everything
( ) not everyone is subject to the placebo effect
(x) blind testing is dumb
(x) you can't prove what I can't hear
(x) science isn't everything

Rather than engage in this tired discussion, I suggest exploring the following factors which are more likely to improve sound quality in your situation:
(x) room acoustics
( ) source material
( ) type of speakers
(x) speaker placement
( ) crossover points
( ) equalization
(x) Q-tips
( ) psychoanalysis
(x) trepanation

I_F
 
Nice form. Original to you? May I borrow it from time-to-time? You unfortunately left out my particular brand of irrationality involving glass, metal, and a lack of matter.

I'd think that if the sound became "almost monaural" with a wire change, that would be trivially easy to nail in a blind test. I'd be on the phone to the Randi Foundation tomorrow.
 
Hi I_F,

BudP is just describing what he experienced in his experiment, we just trying to find out why it sounds different, maybe also not necessarily improvement. The theory maybe is incorrect(all theory is subject to improvement), but with further experiment and open mind maybe we can learn something out of this.

If it turns out that he is experiencing placebo effect, I believe he would tell us later.


"And you will then change the subject to:
( ) theories are not the same as facts
( ) measurements don't tell everything
( ) not everyone is subject to the placebo effect
(x) blind testing is dumb
(x) you can't prove what I can't hear
(x) science isn't everything"


.....................oh come on , don't be so harsh on BudP.:eek:

theory is good, yes, the only problem is when the theory is incomplete or even downright wrong, that's why we are discussing it.

It would be better to invite you to explain why this might not lead to different sound.




:cheers:
 
Please, PM me with your mailing addresses, I will send you both a pair and you can decide.

I do like the form, but there is nothing to defend, it just works, just as I have reported.

I also think it's ridiculous, right up there with EnABL, self demagnetizing E/I core construction, E Field shaping of tone in guitar OPT's, adjustable musical color speaker cables and interconnects, all of them are crazy, none of them fit into nice neat simple mathematical derivations, but they all work, same way, every time and so I just stupidly keep doing them.

If it were drug addiction at least it would be explainable.

Bud
 
while looking for conductive brush article, I found this article:

http://www.gordonbrush.com/esd/static.htm


"One common misconception is that conductive materials do not generate charges. This is because the dissipation of static charges from grounded conductive material tends to be complete and rapid. Ungrounded conductors can generate and hold static charges."

What the.......................:confused:
 
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Hi Ed,

I have a great deal of respect for you and the questions you pose.

You are not afraid to ask the questions that others simply think about but instead of asking themselves or others what really is going on they react by shooting off their shallow thoughts that more often than not reflect on their closed and biased thinking.

You at least have an inquiring mind and when a concept is unclear you stick your hand up from your seat in the back row and politely ask. You have a great gift in that sir - a gift possessed buy few - and that is the intelligence to ask and the willingness to listen.

When I hear a question posed by someone such as yourself I listen and I learn as well. Doing this is a pleasure.

Listening to others that think they already "know it all" and yet demonstrate just how little they are willing to listen to a theory or concept (without reasoning or respect for one that has years of experience) is a rather dismal exercise in that it is just a waste of time on the part of both parties. The fact that some of them need to resort to some sort of check off list rather that clearly express their thoughts or disagreement is laughable, callous, and revealing.

If you are interested in some of what I think is going on with BudP's "poured ground" see this article by Mr. Browkaw and Mr. Barrow at Analog Devices. http://www.analog.com/UploadedFiles/Application_Notes/55584673020828AN_345.pdf

As both of these gentlemen have their degrees (as does BudP) years of experience (as does BudP) and work for a major corporation well known for their quality engineering (BudP has his own little company) perhaps what they have scientifically studied and published a paper on will carry a little bit more weight.

I'm still wrapping myself around this concept but I believe that the tip of the iceberg is shown in the last couple of pages.

At the risk of being repetitive Ed, please feel free to ask any darn question you bloody well feel like anytime. Your questions are always welcome and refreshing!

Hope this helps!

:cheers:
 
Re: Not on the playing field...from back in the bleachers

Ed LaFontaine said:


Are electrons compressible? :scratch:

deltaP*deltaX > h-bar/2.

As far as we can tell at this point (and that's pretty far), electrons are point objects. You can compress the probability amplitude, subject to the above fundamental relation, but the electron itself is already basically sizeless. There's a classical radius (a little under 3x10-15 m), but that has no real physical meaning. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the momentum associated with that delta x.
 
SY said:
Nice form. Original to you? May I borrow it from time-to-time?

You can only use it if you add something to it. It was originally (?- first time I've seen it) posted by Sean Adams at Slimdevices in response to a question posted on their audiophile forum about whether a titanium dental implant might cause some interference to a wireless SB3.

Never underestimate the power of self-delusion!

I_F
 
Now that we have taken our due load of flack for asking questions I want to propose a test regimen. Not to find out only that this practice is worthless and ridiculous, but instead to discover what it can tell us about ground side, signal electrons, and what we can do to influence their performance in our information systems. C2C provided a link to a paper published about ground plane issues and the test devices are intriguing. Here is the paper's location.

http://www.analog.com/UploadedFiles/Application_Notes/55584673020828AN_345.pdf

The methods used here appear as though they could be used for a closer focus on the differences between ground plane, no ground plane, ground plane with Litz and no ground plane with Litz.

I am not a wealthy man but I do have some barter proposals for three separate EE' s who can provide a test regimen and equipment that the community of your peers here, and two professional level EE's specializing in audio and digital electronic local to me, think should be able to look at this question for the rest of us.

My barter proposal is as follows.You will provide the test materials that can be agreed upon, other than the Litz wire pieces. To offset your efforts I offer a pair of OPT's to your specifications, at our maximum level of performance.

They have the following limitations.

For SE, DC B+ not to exceed 700 volts. AC signal not to exceed 48% of that. DC current not to exceed 180 ma and SE power not to exceed 60 watts.

For Push Pull, DC B+ not to exceed 700 volts. Ac signal not to exceed 48% of that per half of primary, DC current not to exceed 500 ma and PP power not to exceed 120 watts.

Either style may have screen taps at 43% and or 10 % or other points of interest.

Or, a full set of Speaker cables and four interconnects, provided without plugs, but otherwise finished. These are Litz wire cables with cotton over braid and discreet plastic dielectric that can be removed or added to or altered for frequency balance in musical dynamics The speaker cables are limited to 12 feet per cable. The interconnects will be 15 gauge equivalent, a maximum of 2 meters in length and be unshielded. I assure you, this is not a problem with unbalanced, true Litz cables. The speaker cables will be 12 gauge equivalent. You will also receive one, 1 meter long, Litz SPDIF cable if desired. This will have RCA plugs attached.

In either case, you will get a product with very wide band, low distortion performance. I have yet to find the resolution limits of either transformers or cables and I can assure you that I have speakers and amplifiers, utilizing both, that are equivalent to full range bare ribbon tweeters, in the reproduction of music.

The ground rules also include a requirement that the three of you publish the results here and that you treat the project as one that has a high probability of success and you are actually interested in discovering the inherent limitations of that success. You will have to provide your own test gear and it will need to be competent to discover information within complex and simple signals that relates to comprehensibility. In other words I want you to be willing to prove the changes are real and also willing to venture opinions about possible improvements.

If there is indeed nothing that can be found, as a difference that can be laid at the door, of the benefit that ground side electron retention in Litz wire might provide, you still get your barter objects.

Bud
 
well Bud, I'm interested to investigate this phenomena, not because of any incentive other than gaining new knowledge.

About the barter, we'll talk about it later ;)

I do want to find explanation why it sounds different.
I assume you heard the difference and that's enough reason for me to investigate.


maybe you can start telling on which equipment ( CD, Amp, Pre-amp)
the effect of ground plane modification is strongest. and which one is less , and also try to describe the changes in the reproduced sound for each equipment.

It would also be nice if you can specify the equipment type/model.

from there on we will begin a series of examination, and if possible, some test.

I suspect the effect on different equipment is different, remembering their operating extremes, CD player has lot's of high frequency content and radiation, Pre-amp need low noise and distortion, Power amp has high current circulating around the ground.

Also identification of PCB material (FR4 , Teflon ,Phenolic , etc)

the way the PCB is suspended from the chassis (metal,plastic spacers)

single side / double side copper, ground plane coverage (%)

and also need the investigation/guess from your side, why it behaves that way for a particular hardware implementation.

what do you think of this approach ? :D


Hartono
 
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