Funniest snake oil theories

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#3,241
marce, I think we've been here before ... my call sign says it all, if the behaviour exists, it exists.

But, I'll tell you what ...we'll acquire a Boeing, and every length of electrical cable in the beast we'll cut, solder on a standard quality audio RCA plug and socket on either side of the break, and simply plug together. Then we'll send you and your friends on continuous plane flights for a year or so on it ...

How about that, then ...?
 
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#3,247
marce said:
Its hard to wire wrap a 1000+ pin BGA
🙂
Last one I worked with was a 68030. These days you need a PCB, especially if you have DDR memory.
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😀 They were also still teaching us things like the correct way to bind up a wire loom with string.

I suppose it was mildly interesting to learn how they had wired the Titanic's radio equipment, but not very relevant for electronics servicing in the late 1980's 😉
 
#3,249
marce said:
Its hard to wire wrap a 1000+ pin BGA
🙂
Last one I worked with was a 68030. These days you need a PCB, especially if you have DDR memory.
Click to expand...


Some of these were instrumented with massive wirewraped RCA CMOS logic circuits that I designed (the first CD4001's cost $11 @!).

(Walter Lewin) joined the X-ray astronomy group at MIT and conducted all-sky balloon surveys with George W. Clark. Through the late seventies, there were about twenty successful balloon flights. These balloon surveys led to the discovery of five new X-ray sources, whose spectra were very different from the X-ray sources discovered during rocket observations. The X-ray flux of these sources were variable. Among them was GX 1+4 whose X-ray flux appeared to be periodic with a period of about 2.4 minutes. This was the discovery of the first slowly rotating neutron star.
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#3,250
fas42 said:
I agree that that sort of thing should do the trick ... but it doesn't. 30 years ago I went nuts about this problem, I went through all the contact treatments, tried different maintenance 'regimes' over a period of some months - and none would do the job properly. In the end, I gave up, bit the bullet - and hardwired everything, problem solved!

A cliche, but a dirty connection gives 'dirty' sound - an element of roughness, unpleasantness intrudes - a just passable recording becomes impossible to listen to with pleasure ...
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I disagree. Deoxit works as claimed and so does what I described by doing maintenance. How can you not simply make sure your connectors are working as designed? It's not all that hard to do. I solder my copper speaker wire so it doesn't corrode before connecting to the amp and speaker terminals, problem solved.
 
#3,255
I found this discussion on cable burn in and this has be to the most ridiculous statement I have ever read.

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Do used cables moving to a new system need "break-in"?
We don't call that burn-in preferring to call it "settling time".

If you remove the cable carefully and don't bend it too much the settling period will be very short. A few minutes to a couple of hours.

If you want to experiment, take a cable out of the system and bend it in several places along the cable. Then, if your floor is carpeted, throw the cable to the floor with some force. Then put it back in and listen to it.

Unfortunately, shipping a cable virtually erases burn-in. The settling time for a burned-in cable after shipment is about 5 days - the same as a new cable. Probably because of the extreme coiling of the cable for packing and the vibration of the trucks that transport it. This is one of the reasons we don't pre burn-in cables at the factory.
 
#3,256
The Pikey's around these parts do a good line in burned cable (usually pre 'broken in' by the railway for a number of years) and they don't tend to remove the cable very carefully, shocking behaviour!
The scrap dealers they sell to don't give the resulting melted copper much of a settling in period before selling it on either.

I don't get much satisfaction from listening to cable but I suppose it a personal taste thing.
 
#3,257
DavidL said:
I disagree. Deoxit works as claimed and so does what I described by doing maintenance. How can you not simply make sure your connectors are working as designed? It's not all that hard to do. I solder my copper speaker wire so it doesn't corrode before connecting to the amp and speaker terminals, problem solved.
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I agree with soldering the speaker, or other wire strands. I'm no expert on the subtleties of metal to metal behavior in connections - books have been written on the matter! - but I do know what makes a difference. The wirewrap works because it's a form of coldwelding, a true gastight contact is made - and if a mechanism of equivalent integrity was engineered for the joins in audio gear systems then the issue wouldn't arise.

I can trust my hearing on this, because I've gone through the exercise hundreds of time - put on a 'rough' recording and indeed it does sound unpleasant, there's an irky, irritating quality to it which means that you're not going to keep listening to it, for pleasure anyway. Uh-oh ... non-optimum connection somewhere ... let's track it down ... ah-hah, there you are! ... let's sort you out straight away ... . This is an iterative process, the 'really bad' recordings will still be a bit off, most likely - the next most dodgy area has to be found ...

Normal systems stink quite badly of this distortion mechanism, most of the time - I've got used to mentally bypassing the classic signature of it when listening to other systems, just put on 'good' recordings to minimise the problem ...

Edit: Many people say they hate MP3 sound, it sounds 'bad' compared to the uncompressed original. Well, to me, sound going through connection problems has a similar sort of 'badness', subjectively - which means I do everything to get rid of it.
 
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#3,259
I forgot to mention a funny thing about the x-ray ballon, the CMOS was used so the entire package could be set up in our lab and powered by a pack of D cells for the entire boat trip to Australia and the flight. No one ever realized that alkaline cells fail at cold temp long before the 150,000 ft mark. The first flight had problems.
 
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