Do equipment stands have an impact on electronics?

Ralph, I absolutely do not think I know everything. I do think that everything that affects audio fidelity is known, and so there’s no mystery, but I know very well that I don’t know everything. A list of just what I know that I don’t know would be pretty long. Then there's the stuff I don't even know that I don't know. That said, if you think people like cockrum and kait have anything to offer that will increase my knowledge of audio, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

Regarding kait, I invite you to reread some of my prior comments that were directed at you; you should already know I don't take him seriously.

OK- so where we really differ is that I know for a fact that 'everything that affects audio fidelity is known' can't possibly be incorrect. Its an attitude I've run into before and I always find it puzzling, as it should be obvious that it causes the holder of that attitude to not know what they don't know.

I found out a long time ago that when I think I know everything that is why I'm most likely to screw up.

While I do agree that most of the technical stuff seems to be well understood, occasionally I run into things about which the current paradigm doesn't seem have any knowledge. This is why I hold a couple of patents.

In fact I'll take that a step further, if

everything that affects audio fidelity is known

then innovation would be impossible; inevitably a person with that attitude will find themselves on the wrong side of history so to speak.

One area of interest to me is the physiology of human hearing (**not** psychology, just to be clear); IOW how sound is perceived by the human ear/brain system.  There has been a lot in that field that has only been figured out in the last 30 years or so, and some of it only in the last 10 years. But the test and measurement concepts employed by the audio industry are based on our understanding of how the ear/brain system worked from 60-70 years ago. And even 'way back then, some of what was known got ignored by the audio industry (although Norman Crowhurst made inroads in that regard).

My conclusion is that equipment that sounds correct to the human ear does so because it follows those rules of human hearing more closely than equipment that does not. This is not a big step to understand! But the simple fact is that most audio equipment (about 99%; includes your Pioneer receiver) violates one of the fundamental rules of how the ear perceives sound (how we interpret sound pressure). This fact was understood by the mid 1960s but the industry has chosen to ignore it because it was inconvenient.

Its disparities like this which is why there is the objectivist/subjectivist debate (and why this thread is as long as it is...). If the audio industry measured the right things then there would be no room for that debate.

This is why I say that the industry is about 40 years behind where it should be. It appears also that the only progress that occurs as a result is in high end audio (and I freely acknowledge that high end audio has a good deal of charlatans as well).  

For the record, I usually find myself on opposite sides of a debate when kait is involved.

Ralph, do you know about nulling? It reveals everything that differs between two signals, including stuff you might not even think to look for. Nulling has been used since at least the 1940s (early HP distortion analyzers), so if there were some unknown aspect of audio beyond distortion and hum and aliasing etc, it would have been revealed years ago by nulling. That’s the gist of the project I’m working on that I described in my first of the two deleted posts. :->)

As for innovation, that’s more to do with better ways to solve old problems such as loudspeaker design, less battery consumption, making HD TV screens cheaper to manufacture etc. There’s not much "new" in audio science itself, though lossy compression (MP3, AAC) is fairly recent.

I’ll email you about my project because I imagine you’ll find it interesting. And maybe you’ll be around for a phone call over the holiday "dead" week between Xmas and New Years? I'm sure we do in fact agree on 90+ percent of this stuff!

It was David Hafler (I believe) who proposed the "null" test for power amplifiers. Once an amplifier so tested produced zero sound, it would ipso facto be producing zero audible distortion, for any audible artifacts produced by an amp in a null test would be, by definition, distortion. Hafler put on demonstrations of his then current (late 80’s?) amplifier, in which the amp produced no sound when nulled. The test, and Hafler’s claims regarding the threshold of distortion audibility, was covered in both Stereophile Magazine and TAS at the time.

^^^ Yes, exactly. And nulling can be used in many other interesting and creative ways. The device I'm currently developing can measure distortion down to extremely low levels, and it can even use music as a test signal. It can also compare two wires to see how they differ. So you could compare the $3 RCA wire that comes free with every CD player versus a $2,000 "interconnect" and see how similar they are. If they null to below -100 dB then you know both wires must sound identical no matter what the vendors claim. Pretty neat, eh?!