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Have you ever spoken with a designer or audio engineer

I'll never forget I was doing an audio banquet some years past. At my table were 2 audio engineers. At the banquet they had a lottery for audio accessories. I happen to win a power cord from a fairly well known companies. One of the engineers laughed when I was showing it to people at my table. He said power cords are totally hocus pouch and there is no scientific studies proving there any better than stock cords. He said there basically made for insecure audiophiles. I had mentioned I already had some after markets cords in my system and they definitely made an improvement. He just laughed and said a sucker is born everyday in the audiophile world.


Now the guy I am talking about isn't some unknown schlub. He works for one of the biggest high-end companies in the world and is fairly well known. In fact some people think he is a great designer of audio equipment. I have only talked to a couple of audio engineers in my life and they were both skeptical.  I wonder if this is common among engineers and designers?
taters
charles1dad's avatar
charles1dad
10,250 posts
 
Audio engineers  and designers are not all cut from the same   cloth. Some are rigid in their beliefs and feel the notion of  tweaks or upgradeded parts and  accessories are pure foolishnes and money wasted.  Yet others who are just as talented and knowledgeable will openly  encourage  and embrace the merits of upgrading. They  will  tell you that  different tubes, cables, capacitors, fuses, vibration  control  devices   etc all make a difference. Just depends on  who you are talking to.

When you've actually   done the upgrades and modifications  and hear the improvement yourself then what others have to say is moot anyway.
Charles,
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,976 posts
 
No sooner had I posted the directly above, than I realized my comments about Bill Johnson and ARC might well bring out the knee-jerk ARC defenders. I in no way meant to denigrade Bill's design talents (he is single-handedly responsible for high end electronics as we know them, imo), or to imply Roger (or Van Alstine, or anyone else) is the "better" engineer. What I was attempting to do was draw a distinction between the traditional EE designer and the designer at a high end audiophile company, and the considerations the latter has to take into account in his designs. I do think it possible Bill (and Rich Larsen, as well as designers at other audiophile companies) incorporated some audiophile-credibility features in ARC products he knew provided no sonic advantage, for merely marketing reasons. That's mere conjecture on my part, of course! 
lak's avatar
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lak
4,685 posts
 
Personally, I don't care who says what. I trust my own ears and no longer care who believes what. Although I do feel sorry for those that don't have the ability to listen to music and figure out what they are hearing.
schubert
7,386 posts
 
Many/most engineers believe there is no difference because your brain runs the show and above all tries to maintain a stasis .Changing a core belief for someone whose life is centered around learned "facts" can upset same stasis and the brain will not let you hear the difference .

Simple example for our society. No hard-core racist has ever been converted by facts .



geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Amp designers are the worst, Jerry, the worst! They are at least two paradigm shifts behind the power curve.  Sad, really. It comes from putting blind faith in audio circuits and being close minded to any other way of thinking. Happens all the time.


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