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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
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.


mikelavigne
2,194 posts
 

looking around my room at my gear; there are only 5 pieces of gear where i have not personally known the designer/engineer/builder of the gear and spoken to them a number of times.

my Ortofon MC Anna cartridge, my 2 Studer A-820 master recorders, Herzan active isolation shelves, Entreq grounding boxes and my Furutech GTX-D(R) duplex outlets.

I know all the other gear's designers (and they know me); speakers, amps, preamp, tt, tone arms, digital dacs, power cables, interconnects, speaker cables, tape repro, system power grid isolation transformer, record cleaner, even the rack and decoupling footers. i know all those people and appreciate their perspectives and passion for their products.

these designers have the technical chops and degrees; but also they all love music.....passionately. and they 'get it'.

acman3
4,223 posts
 
And then you have Japanese designers like Shindo, who through listening, consider every rca, capacitor type, volume control, and so on, to tailor a sound they want for each component, starting with their own power cord, and ending with specific brands of tubes.

czarivey
5,939 posts
 
There are plenty of them here and they participate on discussions. No biggie.
I spoke years back with Vince from Totem Acoustics and with Chris from Sonic Frontiers (now from partsconnexion). 

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