Passive power?

[janneman]

Hi guys, was in Singapore last week. Discovered, quite by accident, a revolutionary new device, a 'passive power' device. It is supposed to be put between the power amp and speaker and has a small tube in it. When I asked the sales man what it did, he named things like 'round out the sound', 'make it more clear', 'much better', etc.

What do you think? Note: there is NO power supply or other power input. And no, I don't have a circuit diagram. Come to think of it, the designer probably has neither ;-)

Jan Didden

[richie00boy]

Well done for getting a pic, I'm surprised they let you!

Interesting, merely wired in parallel, must make massive impact on the sound

[Irakli]

It is a complete joke, forget it.

BTW, it is not wired in parallel. If you look carefully, the wire connected to the black terminal is undisturbed.

[janneman]

Originally posted by richie00boy
Well done for getting a pic, I'm surprised they let you!
[snip]

Me too! I put on my admiring face, and they were really beaming!

Jan Didden

[janneman]

Originally posted by Irakli
It is a complete joke, forget it.

BTW, it is not wired in parallel. If you look carefully, the wire connected to the black terminal is undisturbed.

A joke??? For around $ 80 US??

But, there's more to come.... I give you the passive pre! Just 100 $ US!
The fluffy (damping?) material under the tubes is a nice touch.

Jan Didden

[Jan Dupont]

Holy S...

This must be the mother of all c r a p

However it's quite interesting to have a peak inside these "magic" boxes ....

Well done Jan

It makes one think that if someone assembled a commercial high end preamp or poweramp the same way, how many would they sell (I'm not speaking about the very very cheap stuff from P.R.C and Taiwan, which have allmost similar assembly)

[FastEddy]

Jan:

Got any ideas about which of the tube pins are connected? A part of the grid? to the [6.3 V.?] filiment heater? ...

Consider: a few feet of speaker cable might act as an antenna to heat the filiment ever so slightly, driving a modest stream of electrons into the vacuum of tube and some kind of filtration / modest gain / other activity at work to modify or boost the audio signal ... (or not )

Or there could be some kind advantage taken of the local voltage gradient, the minute power differential relative to the local ground potantial. (FYI: the local voltage gradient can be huge, on the order of several hundred volts per meter, but the current vanishingly small from almost unmeasurable to a few microAmps. [This is what causes trees to grow up instead of out = )

[DCPreamp]

Very interesting devices. What a bargain too!

However, they're not too much beyond the realm of many other devices/concepts I've seen on this forum. Theories such as:

Burning-in op-amps
Freezing pictures of items to make the items work/sound better (WTF?)
Green ink on CDs
Raising the value of feedback resistors to "mellow" out sound
Super expensive interconnects
Able to hear op-amp sockets
Etc.
Etc.

Remember:
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

[es44]

That fluffy stuff in the "passive preamp" must be feathers from a newborn chicken. Should be plucked no more than 5 days after it left the egg, preferably by fullmoon, and blessed by a 35 year old virgin with six toes on her left foot.
Only that way you can get the real smoooth sound that's so rare to find.

Everybody knows that

[matt J]

Originally posted by es44
That fluffy stuff in the "passive preamp" must be feathers from a newborn chicken. Should be plucked no more than 5 days after it left the egg, preferably by fullmoon, and blessed by a 35 year old virgin with six toes on her left foot.
Only that way you can get the real smoooth sound that's so rare to find.

Everybody knows that

Tut tut, that wont work properly, you forgot to cryo treat it