Mitigating the Bubble


Today after many years of trials and tribulations I have mitigated a sonic aberration a horizontal phase anomaly in my center stage.  While the center image was always stable and outlined it seemed narrow and bubble like and I would need to shift my body angle to really lock in the image. This was obvious on many CDs and LPs .

I have many man made fixes that helped the situation but never a total cure. Some of these are now permanent fixtures on the ceiling in 2 different locations. I made my own acoustic panels filled with long hair sheep's wool and 3 Argent Room Lenses.  I have laminar flow lenses that focus and stabilize the image across the front stage. I have built and treated an acoustic fan that overcomes the  boundaries with in my room by reducing interference. I have loaded my speaker cabinets 3 times with new drivers and now an outboard crossover. This was after my Essence 30s speakers and my Dunlavy SC4s.  ..All my components are hard mounted and direct coupled to the floor...on rock solid racks and speaker stands, custom mono bloc amps each on their own stand. All of these devices and angles and positions made the image wider and more focused but I still had that little  bubble and shift before me. Always less annoying with each new device and tweak.

So, your probably saying to yourself hurry up and get to the end. The end finally arrived today after having applied a contact enhancer 7 days ago to just 6 RCA ends out of many connections in my system.  Today with a friend who has been here a hundred times sitting in the Chair playing the same music as usual he said there was a wider sweet spot. I despise that term but he said it and not me.What we both heard was a super stable center image that was a few feet wide and not just one. The bubble was gone. The head in the vise was gone.  Off came the straight jacket and helmet. What I have now in this space intime is a glorious fully extended soundstage with all the meat on the bones and the features of talking heads on a real live performance stage. 

I have probably used eight different contact enhancers over five decades but this one blows my mind. This product  Nano Flo is the ultimate in transparency. 

Tom 

 

theaudiotweak

As a bulk material? Who cares about the bulk material? It's the surface chemistry that is of interest.

@whostolethebatmobile , stop trying to look like you know what you are talking about.

In the very best conductor surfaces, you are talking surface roughness 200+ nm. With audio connectors, I expect 2+uM. Nanodiamonds are <10nm, so we are talking at least 260+ stacked to fill in the voids (they are round), and that is assuming 100% material, but this is an oil carrier with indeterminate active material, so who knows what you will get. What you won't get is any improvement in conductivity beyond maybe, just maybe, some whiping of an oxide layer, but ... for that you would be much better off with something larger and angular as these would not cut through the oxide layer .. it's a fail all around.

Ah well, back to the Nano-flo.

I had a little bit left and previously I had shied away from doing the dual BNC cables between my cd transport and dac due to the equipment tending to ’mangle’ the wire point slightly by moving the tip away from the central point. It needs to be in the centre in order to mate into the female end. I correct this by using a long flat headed screwdriver and placing it at the appropriate place to straighten the wire to its correct position again. Because of this necessary procedure I don’t tend to touch the BNC cables but as this was the only part of my music system left untouched I did it today. Not too much straightening required afterwards to correct the pins and the process went quite quickly.

I turned the system on just to confirm everything was ok and music coming through both channels, which it was. Listened at low volume for about 15 minutes as I’m not a fan of turning equipment on and off quickly as it tends to shorten the life of the electronics.

Even at low volume and playing music just for a short time the amount of detail coming through was great, too early to say yet what impact this last update has overall, more listening tonight and over the weekend.

Elastic and mechanical softening in boron-doped diamond | Scientific Reports (nature.com)

Notice what is stated about conductivity below.. Not all materials combos are as simple as they may seem.

 

Sheridd2 thanks for the updates and I will add my own after my guests leave this Sunday...

Oh. the Kentucky Derby is on May 7 if any members are here in town send me a PM if you would like to stop over and hear my setup. 

Tom

 

Boron substitution in diamond modifies its physical properties, such as adding a distinctive blue color, best known in the Hope diamond29. Boron-doped diamond (BDD) has been widely studied on account of its semiconducting or superconducting properties at sufficiently high doping levels30,31,32,33. BDD retains the high thermal conductivity of pure diamond31, is inert to most chemical reagents, remains highly transparent over a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, and is resistant to high levels of radiation. These properties combine to make BDD an important material in potential semiconductor applications in extreme environments. Although the electrical and optical properties of BDD are well known34, and the compressibility of BDD is indistinguishable from that of diamond in volume-compression measurements35, the precise influence of moderate-to-high boron doping on the mechanical and elastic properties of single-crystal diamond has not been investigated.

I will state my qualifications again with more detail. I have a PhD in solid state physics and work predominantly in material sciences and have worked in the semiconductor industry and now battery industry. If you consider that a call to authority, good, it was.

Posting links to things you don’t understand and/or quoting things you don’t understand (and are ultimately irrelevant) are not moving this discussion forward. It is akin to all the Internet epidemiologists trying to justify their lack of being vaccinated by posting case rate data that demonstrated nothing more than their inability to put into practice basic math.

All these posts illustrate is a lack of understanding of relative conductivity, and how semiconductors operate, not to mention a lack of effort and research skills to discover that boron doped diamond becomes a superconductor at temperatures <= 10 KELVIN,

More to discover