Michael, I take all kinds of crap from folks here, primarily the respondents to this thread so far, for wanting the measurements. The irony is I don't have much test gear at all. I wish I did. I want to know what I'm hearing.
Talk but not walk?
Hi Guys
This isn't meant to start a fight, but it is important to on lookers. As a qualifier, I have my own audio forum where we report on audio issues as we empirically test them. It helps us short cut on theories and developing methods of listening. We have a wide range of systems and they are all over the world adding their experiences to the mix. Some are engineers, some are artist and others are audiophiles both new and old. One question I am almost always asked while I am visiting other forums, from some of my members and also members of the forum I am visiting is, why do so many HEA hobbyist talk theory without any, or very limited, empirical testing or experience?
I have been around empirical testing labs since I was a kid, and one thing that is certain is, you can always tell if someone is talking without walking. Right now on this forum there are easily 20 threads going on where folks are talking theory and there is absolutely no doubt to any of us who have actually done the testing needed, that the guy talking has never done the actual empirical testing themselves. I've seen this happen with HEA reviewers and designers and a ton of hobbyist. My question is this, why?
You would think that this hobby would be about listening and experience, so why are there so many myths created and why, in this hobby in particular, do people claim they know something without ever experimenting or being part of a team of empirical science folks. It's not that hard to setup a real empirical testing ground, so why don't we see this happen?
I'm not asking for peoples credentials, and I'm not asking to be trolled, I'm simply asking why talk and not walk? In many ways HEA is on pause while the rest of audio innovation is moving forward. I'm also not asking you guys to defend HEA, we've all heard it been there done it. What I'm asking is a very simple question in a hobby that is suppose to be based on "doing", why fake it?
thanks, be polite
Michael Green
www.michaelgreenaudio.net
Showing 50 responses by kosst_amojan
@geoffkait Ok.... Guess i have to dumb this way down for you... First, you're little imaginary scenario is wrong. I know how to surf and when you come off the board the water you hit is quite stationary relative to the motion of the wave. It's only moving up and down because that's what waves do. If your imaginary mechanics of a wave we're reality, surfing would be an impossibility. It's why you can't surf the top of a breaking wave. |
@prof I find myself completely falling into your camp of opinion and perspective here, especially after scouring the OP's website for anything that would withstand analytical scrutiny. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, I found myself somewhat appalled sorting the cable section. None of the terminations except the AC cables have any sort of connector body on them. It appears their solder joints are open to the world. And the power strip... It looks like the one in my listening room I run my lighting off of, but mine still has the stock 14AWG cable instead of what I'm assuming is 20AWG based on the name. That strikes me as a fire hazard. 20AWG is only good for about 11 amp in short chassis runs. And speakers with 3.5 inch paper tweeters??? In stamped steel baskets? With ceramic magnets? That jazz would be out of place in today's white van speakers! Finally I clicked on the "More Info" under "About Tuning". To my utter surprise, not a single freaking word! Just a slide show of some rooms. Given the propensity of the site creator to randomly splatter the site with pictures of himself, "Harold", composers, instruments, still life, and women I'd like to see naked, I'm not going to make any bets on these pictures. A tuned dressing room??? Really? Are drop tile ceilings truly the optimum ceiling substrate? Just about every picture has them! Sorry, but I just can't take a lot of wood blocks, incomplete cables, and 3.5" tweeters seriously. There's absolutely no substance. It's vacuous ad copy. There's not even description of what the stuff might do this way or that to tempt a customer to use the product to solve a problem he might have. Except for the tuning bar in the speaker... it loosens or tightens the timbre, whatever that's supposed to mean. This reminds me of my dealings with Roger Paul, the snake oil salesman who invented the "holographic cloning" amplifier. LOTS of claims his stuff did things nothing else in the world can do, which most stuff in fact does, or claims that were just pure lies. NO actual substance to the claims whatsoever. That's the kinda feeling I'm getting here. And just like good ole' Roger, it looks like Mike is loosing his cool under scrutiny and resorting to sophomoric insults and attacks. It's rather pathetic. |
@geoffkait Not really. The dominant cause of molecular momentum in a room is heat. Since heat and pressure directly correlate, a sound wave is indistinguishable from a wave of heat passing through the air. The mass of air isn't moving anywhere. It's stationary and only changing pressure and temperature. The sensation of it moving something is just the result of objects being pushed and pulled across the pressure boundary. That's the entire premise behind thermobaric weapons. They use heat to produce extreme distortions in pressure to pop people like bags of blood where they stand. |
@geoffkait You’re silly idea about how waves in water work doesn’t even make sense on the most obvious level. If there was any horizontal motion to the water at the peak of the wave, two opposing waves would send spouts of water into the air. That very obviously doesn’t happen. They cross with a smooth peak proportionate to the amplitude of each wave and continue on their merry ways. By your theory, the two waves would physically crash into each other and nullify the kinetic energy. That’s not how waves in air or water behave. |
Awesome, Mike! You built a tweeter that beams like a tactical light at 6KHz! On top of that, it doesn't look like there's anything between the woofer and tweet sections of the cab. Kind of hard to imagine how there would be given the giant hole in the back right between the two sections. This whole post is about walking the talk, supposedly, and you claim to have some vast wealth of experience and knowledge, but I'm not seeing it. I'm not seeing any intellectual property here. I'm not seeing measurements. I'm not seeing technical analysis. Did you miss the part where I suggested your power strip is a fire hazard? If that "20G" in the name of the product is meant to suggest that's the gauge of wire used, I hope you go to prison for premeditated murder should one of those cause a fatal fire. At least Geoff is smart enough not to sell things that might kill people. None of your AC power products would pass any kind of certification. Snake oil is one thing. The things I saw on your website illustrate abject ignorance of basic electrical safety. Nothing there suggests an advanced knowledge of engineering or acoustics. |
@geoffkait You're lack of facts never ceases to amaze me. Research shows that those who've used serotonergic compounds typically have fewer flashbacks of prior life experiences than those who never have. In other words, you're wrong. Just like your silly wave mechanics. They guy has invented a gimmick and built a whole product line to cater to that gimmick. It's products for fool who have more money than brains. This is why Focal, B&W, KEF, and the like are multi-million dollar companies and this guy never will be. |
I've used gear covers on and off. It's made no difference at all except for my F5. I'm running 1.42 amp of bias on 32 volt rails. Putting the lid on it puts another 5C+ into the heatsinks and 10C into the JFETs. That changes the sound. So in the interest of keeping things cool, I go cover off. This condo is unusually free of dust, but sometimes a spider likes to crawl up in there and make webs. It's not hard to clean and every board has LED indicators that show any residual power in the cap banks. |
Mike, you sell cables that could easily burn a house down. I addressed that matter with moderation a short while ago including links to your page. Looking down this thread it looks like you're abusive to others in a thinly veiled passive-aggressive sort of way and I'm most definitely not the only one who thinks so. Your last post demonstrates that. You don't run this place and you run NO risk of seeing me pop up on your forums so don't bother threatening me in some sideways manner. As for my doing, I've built or restored everything I'm listening to with the exception of my speakers. Your OP presumes the audience to be rubes and fools because they haven't measured up to your idea of "walking", whatever that is. It's flagrantly insulting. |
@inna I think the lack of forthcoming information has been a big frustration in this thread. Mike, I'm looking at the page right now. How exactly are you making 20g wire, which only has a maximum rating of 11 amps as hookup wire, carry 20 amp? You're typical UL rated 3 outlet cheap chinese Walmart extension cord is at least 16g which gives it the current carrying capacity to at least pop the breaker if something goes south. Your 6 outlet power strip will burst into flames way before the outlet is tripped. There's no way you got that thing past UL. As for what I've built, there's no way I'd sell that amp I built. I fully acknowledge it's a risk every time I flip the switch. It runs hot as a toaster, has exposed components, the most basic inrush current limiting imaginable, and it was built by an amateur for the purpose of using in a room no warmer than 74 degrees. I watch it like a hawk and measure the it's temp once it's warmed up before I listen. Nobody should ever sell an amplifier like that. I'd have real reservations about selling my old Marantz 2238B too. I bought it out some guy's trunk in Detroit for next to nothing and it was the first thing I ever really worked on. Not knowing too much, I didn't use the right parts in some places and I kinda cobbled it together in ways that would make a serious tech cringe. My other work is a lot better. If somebody wants to know what it would cost to build another amp like the F5 I tell them "A lot more than I spent because I'm not going to hand you something that runs right on the edge like that thing does". I can relate to wishing people dug into the nuts and bolts of their gear a little more and better understood that there's no magic hocus-pocus going on in those boxes. It's just cold, hard science and totally understandable if you just apply yourself to it. I'm NOT a fan of this mentality that tells people to just buy and experiment and buy some more. I don't have $99 to blow to find that $1 worth of improvement and I don't think most sane people have it or even want to spend it. I strongly believe in a more analytical approach to the question. I think the experience of listening should be taken with a healthy dose of knowledge and understanding so that the next choice is efficient and informed. I'm in NO rush to make my next equipment choice because the more I learn the better my choice will be. And if I have it my way, it will be a choice that furthers both my experience and my understanding though experimentation and study. I don't suspect too many can say their amp was voiced specifically for the speakers they're using, but I can. I think more people should give that a try, but I'm not showing up starting threads lording what I've done over anybody's head. |
I'm no electrical engineer, but do I really need to point out the obvious? Power line transformers? Where you're at on the grid? The wiring in your house? All the products Mike sells on his website? And now you all want to talk about everything working as one harmonious system while the vast majority of you haven't even bothered to voice and optimize your amp to your speakers and room? How many of you have even checked the DC offset on your amp or pre-amp? Maybe I'm crazy, but WAY before I spent $1000 on some cables I'm going to have the gear as optimized as possible. I'm certain people here spend that kind of money on cables and gizmos to make minor alterations to the sound while I'm just over here turning a pot 15 or 20 degrees and getting the exact same result. I do NOT understand why people think like that, and if somebody can explain it to me, I'm genuinely curious to know. No insult to anybody out there, but when the conversation goes in the direction of tuning all the applicable forces and factors, but absolutely NO talk goes on about doing something with the actual gear as a starting point, the whole conversation looks completely upside down to me. It looks to me like the presumption is that the gear itself is assumed to be in some state of perfection so there's nothing left to do except TUNE THE POWER GRID?!?! Risk burning your house down chasing that last once of nirvana? Like I said, I'm no electrical engineer, but I know enough about power supplies to know that their primary purpose is to output direct current in a manner as indifferent to the input source as possible. But.... instead of modifying the power supply to be more indifferent to the characteristics of your own mains power, we're here talking about running mains power through undersized wire gauges? I can't possibly be the only one who sees the inverted logic of that reasoning. So far as I can tell, pretty much every "mod" or "tweak" boils down to being some device or method to achieve a pleasing distortion signature where your sitting. The tuning gizmos. The cables. The speakers. The amps. All of it. Doesn't it make more sense to get the basic gear achieving that goal before doing crazy things like running mains power through 20g wire? Or buying $150 fuses? Or $2000 cables? Or filling a room with furniture and fixtures? I guess if all that stuff trips your trigger, go for it. But I'm telling ya, there's more effective ways of getting to that goal. How wires and traces are routed in your pre-amp make a LOT more difference than a lot of the stuff folks think is so very important. Perspective.... I feel like it's been totally lost. Folks who don't even know what kind of resistors their amp has are debating the most nuanced characteristics of a piece of wire or a block of wood. I don't understand that. Which one is really the more meaningful "walk"? |
Glupson, I don't have a problem with taking risks in principle. I actually prefer risk and volatility to none. I prefer it in my women, my cars, my bikes, and my job. But I don't prescribe it for others because it takes judgement, experience, and skill to properly manage risks and volatility. My mistakes kill people. I probably define "safe" a bit differently than other people. A big part of what I do for a living is trying to avoid making other people pay for their stupid choices with their lives. I do NOT give credit to the general public for recognizing clear and present danger when it's looking right at them. It's for that reason that I wouldn't assume Joe Smoe knows not to draw 15 amp through 20g wire. |
MG, The F5 is a juiced up Pass design. To be specific, it's a fully complementary. push-pull, 2 stage, FET based amplifier running in full class A idling at 1.42 amp at 32V. The heatsinks are at about 56c idling. It's what class A amps do, especially home brew amps. I run it biased up way past what Nelson sold his F5 at because I know it's going to sit in a temperature controlled room that will never see 76 degrees or more and I don't have to worry about it being stuffed in some guys equipment rack or bookshelf where it can't breath. That's why I'd never build and sell something like that to somebody. That's why I consider it a fire hazard. I used 16 and 14 gauge wire for hookup throughout except for the input where I used solid 26g twisted pair. That thing is built and operating at it's absolute limits for it's environment because I can do it. In all likelihood it'll probably be transplanted into a bigger chassis with much bigger heatsinks so that I can bias it up over 1.5 amp which seems to be the sweet spot from everything I've heard. Much beyond that and distortion doesn't improve much. I'm not really sure what I'm going to build next. I'm thinking I might start looking at rebuilding some test equipment. It seems like the next logical step if I want to further analyze and quantify what I'm hearing so that I can make the best judgments about what I like and where to go next. |
MG, Nelson Pass seemed to think I did a really good job on it and complimented me on being brave enough to build something like that on my first attempt. Everybody that's heard the thing wants something that sounds that good because it really is a very good sounding amp. My efforts in tweaking it to sound it's best have included splitting the mica insulators down to .0007" for the best thermal transfer between the heatsinks and the MOSFETs, trying different input signal wires, trying different ground routing, working on getting the bias higher, and adjusting it's distortion character. I've put a lot of time and listening into getting that thing sounding just right. The signal goes through 2 JFETs, 2 MOSFETs, and 3 resistors before it gets to the output posts. If the theory is that simple circuits produce better sound, you don't get much simpler than that. The last time I bought a multi-outlet extension cord at Walmart the thing had a gigantic warning label zip-tied to the thing. Even those cheap 6 foot, 3 outlet things often have fuses I don't think I have a single power strip that isn't fused or breakered. That strikes me as responsible engineering. |
C'mon, Mikey... You didn't know what an F5 was. Your reply was as daft is it could get. I'd never heard of you before this post. I came it this with the same open mind I approach anything with. I've learned exactly nothing from. I'm glad you think the mods are great. I'm pretty sure they spoke to you about punitively flagging my posts. That didn't go unnoticed by the crowd here either. I'm also pretty sure you're the biggest laughing stock on this thread. You're one of those guys who hasn't actually done anything. You don't know enough to do anything. You're hung up on your gimmicks because doing actual design work is outside your scope of ability. It's obvious. Inna is up there stroking your ego like you're some kind of audio vanguard of the new age, explaining you away in god-like flattering terms, and it's almost as hilarious as your ego. " You don't understand. Children have no access to expensive high level components, all they can have are some parts around house to build something by themselves for themselves. That's what Michael tries to do - to teach children how to do it and how to get the most out of it. Disregard the adult world, to hell with it. I just had to write again because of those micro-brains having nothing to offer but primitive harassment." What does this even mean??? Technical questions are "primitive harassment" to the Great and Mighty Michael Green? I must have missed the DIY instructional guides here and on his website. It just looks like he's selling a lot of snake oil. Inna, have YOU even bothered to Google this guy? Can YOU find even ONE recording he's credited on? I can't. I can find more on my high school buddy down the street who built a recording studio and produced Billboard charting work than I can this supposed legend of audio engineering. I've learned more in 10 minutes talking to that guy than 35 pages of Mike's nonsensical ramblings. So go ahead, Mikey, flag away... I'll have this copied to paste and post again. We all know when my posts disappear it you flagging them. |
Mike, I'm pretty sure you'd be banned real fast if you decided to make yourself the post police around here. Pretty much any post that begins with "This isn't meant to start a fight" is designed to start a fight. I've never seen someone say such a thing without lobbing some incendiary nonsense into a crowd of people. I've been wanting to start a thread asking people where they draw the line of snake oil. I'm pretty sure leading with "This isn't meant to start a fight" isn't going to make such a thread go any smoother. In fact, I think it would just make me look like more of an arrogant idiot. But hey.... Why not actually answer your question with the most obvious answer? People depend on the science because the science does a good job of explaining reality for people who are subject to reality. (Not so useful for those functioning outside reality, I suppose.) It's also a much better solution to the problem of buying audio gear because science makes very useful predictions about what this, that, and the other will probably do. It avoids just blindly buying gear and trying it and most often getting poor results because the buyer didn't grasp the theory behind the component to make a proper match. People walk on paths through the woods in the daylight because it makes more sense than stumbling through the underbrush at night. Some would call such rational reasoning "close minded". Others would call that not being an idiot. "Close minded" these days is pretty much synonymous with "too smart to try failure". So.... There's your answer. Wandering blindly through a forest at night is just plain old stupid. Blindly buying gear with no theoretical understanding of what it's doing is just plain old stupid. You have provided absolutely no underlying theory to your claims or methods. If "snake oil" is roughly defined as "claims unsubstantiated by a tested, repeatable, enumerated theory", everything you say and sell is pure snake oil. |
Mike, I've Googled you several times. If you're in Stereophile reviews, they're keeping it a secret because you can usually Google "Stereophile (insert term)" and get the results. They aren't there. There's nothing out there you haven't created. No album credits. No white papers. No technical articles. Absolutely nothing. I can Google Curl, Pass, Lansing, Linkwitz, and many others and get piles of articles and actual hard theory. You? Absolutely nothing. I'm the attention whore? I'm not claiming anything except I copied an amp and fixed some stuff. Big deal! Nobody's clicking on the back of my head on a website. I'm not posing like Fabio for my website. You're silly. As for wire directionality.... No, there isn't. Never in the entire history of electrical engineering has such a thing been demonstrated. That's pretty much why the idea sounds like horse crap. It doesn't exist. @geoffkait I thought we talked about your psychological name calling already. I thought we agreed you would at least be creative enough to rotate through the mental illnesses in order to bring awareness to more of them. At least be creative, will you? Why's it always Asperger's? Are you well acquainted with it? |
Casting is a wonderful way to get a completely chaotic mass of crystal structures. Working metal is generally the best way to get the most uniform crystalline structure in metal. That's why people go to the expense to forge, extrude, and draw metal. Casting for uniform crystalline growth structure is a complicated and time consuming process really only perfected by the likes of silicon foundaries and Rolls Royce. It requires starting with liquid material and drawing the crystal out from a seed. I seriously doubt anybody is really doing that with wire. Even if they were, what's the point? You'd destroy it rolling it onto a reel. The opposite extreme is plastic metal which could be practically done with reels of wire. The goal in plasic metal is to produce a product with no crystalline structure at all. |
That OP posted the same stupid thread twice because it's like he wasn't satisfied with the crap he was trying to stir up with the first one. I run across arrogant punks all the time in forums and groups that want to lord the ludicrously priced systems over somebody else as if they need confirmation by strangers that the stupid money they spent is worth it. It's pretty pathetic. It's like they think just because they've used a bunch of crap they've got some sort of credibility. Sounds kinda like MG here with his closet full of amps. But honestly, I'd expect nothing less from somebody who doesn't have any sort of defined, systematic theory or understanding. That leaves you with just throwing anything at the problem and seeing what sticks. And all too often that joke of a tactic gets confused with experience and knowledge. |
@mitch2 I've got mixed feelings about Paul at PS. Chief among my complaints about the man is his overtly agreeable personality. It's beyond polite and I think it lends him to giving credit to snake oil. The man absolutely has at his disposal the tools and resources to investigate things, but in many instances he simply chooses not to. What's more, I'm not sure I'd call treating a hotel room a world class accomplishment. I sort of follow recording engineers and producers if I feel they're getting a particularly good sound of out their work, and these guys tend to be in high demand. Who's hiring MG to do anything? Nobody. What album is he credited on? None. I went to school with a guy who's recorded produced Billboard charting albums. I just Googled him. The second, third, forth, fifth, and sixth results were for him. I've been to his studio a few times. He's helped me sort out my room. I can find the guy on the internet!!!! He's got credits to his name! He actually produces results for paying, professional musicians! He does good work! He's the real deal. And I'd take his acoustic advice over MG's every single second of the week. |
MG, I can't figure out what you're babbling about. There doesn't seem to be a coherent idea being expressed, like you're throwing out evidence to support some unnamed theory. All I'm really seeing you say is where you voice yourself forums die. You claim you foretold the death of Stereophile forums. You come here and proclaim death here too. I hope to God you steer clear of AK and DIYaudio. They're doing just fine. I'm pretty sure this place is doing just fine too, but I'll give you credit for making it a place less pleasant to be. |
And you don't count MG is chief among those people? The OP of this thread can be summed up as "I'm the deciding expert! Why doesn't anybody measure up to me?" But when you grill the guy on what he's an expert about, all he bangs on about is his lifetime if empirical testing, but he's got absolutely nothing to show for it terms of accomplishment or theory. For all his rambling diatribes he says remarkably little. It's like he's never seen the inside of a college classroom. He's certainly never been critically edited or formally taught to express himself. |
Awww..... Mikey didn't like me pointing out that his MGA Facebook page only has 98 likes. THAT is the career I'm attacking, huh? Mr. Audio Legend with 98 likes who's got to create and manage his own forum because he can't tolerate any scrutiny from the broader public. You're just a bully and you're words and actions speak for themselves. |