Unfortunately in a CD-player the data integrity isn´t sufficient to ensure that no difference in analog signal quality will happen.
You are right, all chip sets for cd decoding and reply have a buffer. In the early days mostly an external memory chip though.
There you go - you just proved my "thinking" (NB!) in my above post
Guilty as charged.
//
Unfortunately the physical world - ie physical reality - is profoundly non- intuitive so statements like yours above come as no surprise. If ferrites indeed make a difference in the audio band there is a rational explanation. And you should be able to measure it. So far I’ve seen evidence of neither in any discussions on the subject.
I agree it should be measurable. It may have just been something pathological to the situation, since there was RF in the vicinity and multiple possible ground paths. In any case, I was not working on evaluating ferrites at the time, so it was it a distraction. If anything at all, I claim a perceptual experience I was not expecting and the experience changed with a cable swap. While it says nothing about a possible mechanism, it may suggest a type of scenario where people tend to implicate ferrites (perhaps as they may tend to suspect the last thing they ate when they unexpectedly become nauseous).
I'm sure there's a rational explanation to everything in this universe... Except sometimes, most of the times, we don't know it. Sometimes we find an answer, and we're happy, and we share it, or we hide it, it's all legitimate, that's what makes life interesting. Other times we don't, and we keep looking, or asking.
On the contrary, stating there's a KNOWN explanation to everything is only reserved for the deities.
I once had a physics teacher with enough guts to say right at the beginning of his class: "Guys, everything I say is based on simplifying assumptions". That translate to "the truth, but not all the truth".
As has been pointed out already, when both conductors carrying transverse currents are wound through a ferrite core, a common-mode (CM) choke is formed whose primary affect is adding impedance to CM currents while ideally not affecting transverse mode currents. However, due to asymmetrical characteristics small amounts of series inductance can be added to the individual conductors passing through the CM choke.
When used in AC line circuits a CM choke can introduce a beneficial high CM impedance to the AC mains connection, reducing mains noise CM currents between chassis. There has been no data I have seen which shows a deleterious affect on the operation of power supplies, especially linears. I have also not seen any data supporting a negative impact on audio quality due to AC mains CM chokes, indeed many including me have reported the opposite. They can also be used to improve power supplies via inclusion on the DC lines post rectification, and pre-regulator or capacitive multiplier.
In an IDEAL unbalanced line-level interconnect system winding a CM choke on such a cable will have no effect on the transverse currents within the cable, however in many or most audio systems with unbalanced interconnects there is indeed audio currents taking alternate paths, and therefore a CM choke will pose a series impedance to this current, perhaps altering the sound. And asymmetries in the CM choke construction can add undesirable inductance to the internal conductors themselves, creating a LP pole with the parallel capacitance of the cable.
Series inductors in an audio circuit have long been used in professional audio, indeed many of the recordings valued for sonic characteristics have been made with circuits having ferrite inductors in the RF suppression circuits of equipment inputs and/or outputs. The well-regarded Jensen 990 discrete op-amp has inductors in parallel with the input pair emitter resistors to lower noise as well as in a series output isolator, and this circuit has been lauded many times for it's sonic attributes and has been used in many types of pro audio equipment. The most modern designs like JCs do not need inductors for this purpose and I would opt for his approach; I mention the 990 only to say there are a lot of recordings made with them people love the sound of...
Of course the devil is always in proper implementation: proper design will ensure staying in the linear portion of the ferrite's BH curve and away from saturation. Some will say any non-linearities ferrites cause will have to be corrected with evil NF....and so it goes...
Cheers!
Howie
Would the ferrite affect the characteristic ringing due to rectifier switching?
Thanks for the link. My experience is close parallel to findings of CH. I am currently devising ways to record and discriminate these low level signatures/changes caused by the likes of ferrite snapon filters. Hi Andrew, thanks for the lesson, I do understand the theory. One counter to your otherwise correct information is for example the situation of an el cheapo portable Radio-Cass on two wire AC cable. Sure the cheapest tx/bridge/cap psu stage possible, maybe zener stabilised transistor as a regulator somewhere so expect such items to be prone to mains borne noise. Clipping a ferrite around the load end of the AC lead does have the expected outcome of reducing audible noise floor.
However invariably ime a low level but ever present hard glassy characteristic is 'injected' into the sound which is all the more revealed by the fact that mains noise caused masking/noise floor is lowered !. The listeners first reaction might be that the subjective sound is indeed 'clearer' or 'brighter', but continued listening reveals this to be due to false detail and once detected becomes strongly fatiguing. Removing the ferrite restores 'random' AC line noise and associated maskings but also removes a constant or stationary 'wrong' sound characteristic that can become especially noticeable on particular programmes.
Dan.
If you won't seriously use them much, you'd be better off keeping them original
and selling them in an auction.
That's another option, but at least I need to know if they're still working. And they're not original, the Swiss radio has already messed with them, fitting some sort of custom wiring and connectors.
"Hi Andrew, thanks for the lesson, I do understand the theory."
No lesson intended, and if it came across like that, I apologize.
But, in all honesty Dan, do you expect me to accept your findings at face value without a shred of explanation or proof?
Keep in mind, EM theory is one of the best understood branches of physics (just ask JN). So, no point in saying the sound is hard 'n glassy without telling us why. If you invoke a change in noise floor as the reason, then if you can hear it as you say you can, it will be measurable with a sound card given the current performance of those types of instruments (-140 dBV with 50 averages quite achievable nowadays).
No lesson intended, and if it came across like that, I apologize.
But, in all honesty Dan, do you expect me to accept your findings at face value without a shred of explanation or proof?
Keep in mind, EM theory is one of the best understood branches of physics (just ask JN). So, no point in saying the sound is hard 'n glassy without telling us why. If you invoke a change in noise floor as the reason, then if you can hear it as you say you can, it will be measurable with a sound card given the current performance of those types of instruments (-140 dBV with 50 averages quite achievable nowadays).
I'm not sure which internet forum you are citing about. On this forum, it's more of "Thou shall expect challenges when making unsubstantiated claim".
Again, I'm not sure which internet forum you are citing about but there is no such written or unwritten rule on this forum that clamps down the freedom of expression. As for thoughts, until it is expressed in words, how does one get clamped down?And can we have a proper definition of the world "audiophoolery" as my Webster seems to have either omitted it or it is not a proper word?
Is it just a pejorative? Definition of pejorative: "Adjective, a word or expression that is pejorative is used to show disapproval or to insult someone." Yep, that sounds about right.
Seriously though, it really does sound like freedom of thought and expression is being clamped down upon. Galileo would not approved, he was guilty of making a 'claim' and it took 350 years for the said 'authority' to say sorry.
So what is the expression, something about a bath, water and a baby?
If somebody is guilty of fraud, which seems to be the added implication, then there are other bodies out there to deal with that. Not here. In the meantime, let people make claims, some of them might even be true. Is that so horrible?
"And it's the same with ferrites. It doesn't really matter if you put them on the AC side of the power supply, the DC side of the power supply, or in the signal path itself -- they are still going to create a similar sonic imprint on your system. And again, I have no plausible explanations whatsoever. Nonetheless, I have performed these tests enough times to be confident in the results." [Charles Hansen]
But where were the measurements? Surely in this day and age, that's the first thing one would do to try to isolate: exactly how, why, when, because etc?
But where were the measurements? Surely in this day and age, that's the first thing one would do to try to isolate: exactly how, why, when, because etc?
More accurately, "some like what they think the product does."
More accurately, "one of speculations is that".
Just curious, if I claim that I can out run a cheetah in 100m sprint, would you treat it with open mind?
When in doubt, measure the sound. It will show if the audible soundwave can be confirmed or not. That is unless you don't believe that not everything we can hear is measurable.
You tried to hand paint bits back onto a CD?
I don't have measurements, but I can tell you the only successful placement I've had, I didn't place.. in my CDP there's several and it's better with them. Sometimes they have done nothing, but most of the time I just get poor sound. I use SE cables.
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