What’s your vote for the most ridiculous, overpriced, and useless tweak?

Uh, you guys must be slipping by not mentioning Peter Belt very much, if at all. Peter Belt’s products have, over the years, epitomized what many audiophiles perceive to be the high water mark 🔝for preposterous, ridiculous, bizarre, far out and inexplicable audio tweaks. One need look no further than Silver Rainbow 🌈 Foil, those teeny, tiny little holographic foils that are stuck onto barcodes on CDs, barcodes on books, COMPACT DISC logos on CDs, etc. to get an inkling of just how off the charts the Belt stuff really is. Not that I think his stuff doesn’t work. Surely the Belt stuff must put a bee 🐝 in somebody’s bonnet. 

I tried some of the PWB Electronics free tweaks. You shamed me into it. I found that I was able to perceive a difference. However, it was more in line with what May Belt herself claims for the PWB tweaks. She asks you to "see if you can listen to the same music with the same pleasure" without the tweak in place. She does not claim that it improves the sound, only the pleasure. She specifically states that the PWB tweaks do not change the sound, which is already in the room. I found that the presence of the tweaks did increase my listening pleasure. However, afterwards, I was able to train myself to experience the same pleasure without the tweak in place, through relaxation and concentration. And when my niece poured scorn on the PWB tweak (in the nicest possible way), it killed all the listening pleasure of the tweak and I shuffled off to bed crestfallen. Maybe I should try a more potent and expensive PWB cream tweak, but how would I ever choose between Green Cream and Cream Electret? Both sound so delicious.

When May says pleasure she is referring to the sound. “Sound,” “the perception of sound,” “our sense of sound” are all equivalent. You cannot separate them. One would experience more pleasure from a more musical sound, no? Your perception of sound changes. That’s really equivalent to saying the sound itself changes. Music soothes the savage breast. You could say the sound is on the CD but the sound changes when some tweaks are applied. It’s kind of the same argument inasmuch as the data on the CD cannot be altered. If you drink a couple of beers your perception of the sound probably changes, too,

Could there be two broad categories of tweak? One which reveals something new in the sound/music which you have never noticed before, and one which increases pleasure but does not necessarily reveal anything new or previously un-noticed. I don't think the PWB free tweaks revealed anything new to me about the recording, even though I was enjoying the listening experience more than usual. A more traditional tweak usually jumps right out and hits you with something you never heard before. The resulting stimulus is not necessarily pleasure, it could be excitement, interest or anticipation.

As for sound and pleasure being equivalent enough to use interchangeably, I think that may be a stretch. I could probably judge the sound (quality) of a system using source material which gave me no pleasure at all. Such as a dog vomiting, if it was really well recorded.

Listening to the same J.S. Bach or Mozart piece twice in a row increases my pleasure in hearing it, as I better understand it. And it’s free!