But as the POOGE articles do no appear to be online anywhere and the book is long out of print any scientific approach that was in them has been long lost to the gods of rolling and glomming.
True. Like trying to converse with flat earthers, or apollo deniers...
Ignore? I'm not sure they are doing any harm in here.
There is so much good info in this thread - from JN, SW, Pavel, George, you, too many to mention them all, that is makes a great read despite the occasional FUD slinging
Some of us may yet escape...
But the boutique component guys advertised, I wonder what would have happened if someone was an audio hobbyist but worked in industry and sent a letter to the editor calling out the cases of literal re-branding and no difference.
I only corresponded with Walt and JC and pointed out several things like the Pease model was a perfectly good descriptor of what was going on in many ordinary commercial capacitors (DA does not equal distortion). I also thought the use of the terms "memory" and certainly "echo" were used in an inaccurate way. I essentially thought what was being published on capacitors in the audio press exaggerated and even sensationalized the problem.
I still have my POOGE'd amp right here. As the process was presented it would be typical to make multiple changes at once. I even had two amps to compare, I doubt most folks would have done that. I thought the changes were very subtle or non-existent except for possibly re-routing and starring ground and simply turning up the bias to 50W class A. The amp would probably fail power preconditioning after this but I never had a single issue or shutdown in all the years I used them.
BTW I suspect the diamagnetism in the relay issue is a red herring, the effect is extremely weak and I only know of bismuth that can be easily measured under normal conditions, adding the ferromagnetic wire in the wrong place would be a better explanation if in fact that was the problem.
Not sure anyone in the DIY world does that!
For me (others opinion may vary) this is one of the best 21st centure Pooge type projects Improve a Rotel amp THD by 20dB! . Clear measurable improvement, albeit beyond the ability of a capacitor replacer!
We can only hope (not meaning that you emigrate of course
)"To me, beyond a pleasant day with friends . . . "
You have friends?
Scote Wurcer wrote " . . . I wonder what would have happened if someone was an audio hobbyist but worked in industry and sent a letter to the editor calling out the cases of literal re-branding and no difference."
It goes better than that. Moon Audio (aka Simaudio - the Canadian high end one) was called out about 6 or 7 years ago for buying Japanese AV receivers (Onkyo IIRC), and transplanting the guts into one of their boxes and charging a whole lot more for the trouble. Quite a few people complained about it - don't know how it ended but there ya go, a real life example. There were some letters about it in Stereophile IIRC.
(I tried to find the story on the web but cannot - maybe someone is better at that than me and can verify it in the interests of probity)
Not sure, if a scientific approach was the basis of "Pooging" (not sure either why a scientific approach should have been needed), but afair it was not about (at least not mainly) to exchange parts for more expensive ones.
@Dan,
It was roughly 16 years ago, so I've to look for the parts (and documentation left) for a replication attempt.....
@ scott wurcer,
Often the rebranding is hidden and accompanied by some features like tighter tolerances/selection, but otherwise it could have invoked quite an uproar.
As mentioned earlier, doing comparisons with capacitors was our first "blind test" attempt and I later tried out the "Wondercaps" "Sidereals" along the usual industrial types.
My conclusion back then was to abandon the coupling capacitors wherever possible and I got some help from one of the fine AA-articles about servo-solutions.....
Could be; for serious work we had one (at least) unaltered device for comparisons whenever any critical component decision had to be done.
Hard to decide, as it often depends on the expectations and thing that one considers as important in the reproduction of music.
In this old days we modified a preamplifier - had 4 coupling electrolytics in each channel - and we wanted to do film capacitors instead.
Only one preamplifier at hand, we nevertheless tried to listen carefully before starting and after each step again to learn about what was happening.
Exchanging of the first cap at the input of the phono stage - wow, major improvement. We were amazed, eager to exchange the next one and expected similar improvements again.
But, not quite so, exchanging the next three ones did nothing comparable, subtle yes (quite likeley) but nothing near our expectations.
See my response to Max Headroom; I'll try to find the parts and replicate the measurements.....
It would still be useful to know whether any white powder also works, or any white powder which the recipient believes to be aspirin, ar any powder of any colour. Hence the need for blind tests.RNMarsh said:
That is a peculiar idea of the concept of truth, unless all you are claiming is that you and he believe that you heard something. I could say "I believe that Mr. X is an ignorant moron" and that might be a true statement, because its truth does not depend on the state of mind of Mr. X but on the state of my opinion.
It is true that they believe that they can detect differences. However, at least some of these will relate not to the capacitor in the circuit but what capacitor they believe is in the circuit. Others will relate to poor circuit design, as most capacitors in most audio circuits ought to be inaudible. Some will come from poor matching of capacitance values. Some will arise from personal taste, as when some people prefer slightly distorting capacitors such as polyester. Some will arise from possible correlation, such as the belief that high DA causes problems for audio. Finally, a few may actually come from real capacitor issues - these are the ones which should be investigated.
Having redefined 'truth' you now seem to be redefining 'work'.
A placebo could contain the same stuff as the real tablet, apart from the active ingredient. Most of a tablet is made up of fillers, coatings etc. which are used in all sorts of tablets.Max Headroom said:
Didn't know about Moon,but IIRC lexicon faced a similar problem with a player based on an OPPO (means it was apparently an OPPO device inside); although there is often justification (need) for the markup, it is very difficult to convey that.....
As POOGE has 'Progressive Optimisation' in the name and given Walt knows his stuff even if we do not always agree with his conclusions we can take it that this was one step at a time attacking the biggest issues first. Whether this is a true 'scientific approach' is not worth arguing about, but it was a damn site closer than what tends to happen today with a few exceptions.
Rebranding or buy/resale was not uncommon in industry in the 60's and 70's little of it was done with any attempt to hide anything.
There is a lot of DIY here, many do just that.
Yes Scott, difference from passives is mostly subtle but it is the choice of the designer or builder to make the choice.
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What about the people that can hear the differences apples for apples (caps of same values and materials) in a well designed circuit?
Ex; Dayton audio vs jantzen (just an example off the top of my head) and before you say expectation bias many times I’ve found less expensive to be better.
There have been no other inclinations/instincts I’ve had to ‘prove’ in my 54 yrs?
If I had to prove everything that came out of my mouth I’d be quite busy......but I can tell you I’ve never been much for exaggeration.
Chris spent a lot of time explaining what can and does happen. Of course you don't have to prove anything, but those who are in the business should provide some evidence. I have no problem at all ignoring what people say they heard without any evidence, it's just a nice story. In your 54 years you must have noticed how people make stuff up all the time. I particularly like it when somebody tells a story but have forgotten that you were actually there and it's not how you remember it at all, there could be a number of reasons for this, but it's still interesting and amusing, I don't take it seriously, how much of the time does this happen when you weren't there and how inclined are you to believe what they saying actually happened?
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