Tweaks you got rid of because they were not effective (enough)?


There are some audiophiles for whom cost is no object; they buy what they wish and every single tweak and gadget which promises to improve the sound. And the industry is all too happy to produce such tweaks -- often made of expensive materials with elaborate engineering explanations. Those who question the value of these tweaks are frequently accused of being "naysayers" who are either too ignorant or insensate to realize that "everything matters."

Of course, money spent one place cannot be spent elsewhere; expenditures on tweaks take the place of other more central factors affecting the sound. In some cases, those tweaks are worth it; you can hear the difference, and that $400 (or whatever) really could not have improved your speakers or sub or amp, etc.

So, the question here is simple: Which tweak have you tried which, after some experience and reflection, you realized was either *not* effective or not the most effective way to improve your system? 
128x128hilde45
I made a thread about my simple homemade experiments... It is easy to find.... :)

Thanks for your offer for another system free of charge....

I think it is simple to understand that any part of an audio system vibrate and produce internal resonance... Any component at any price...

It is also simple to verify that ANY electrical grid in any house create a too high level of noise...

It is simple also to verify the impactful change that any materials can produce in a room acoustically...

Calling them " embeddings"  is a simple way to resume the 3 dimensions in a single concept or word...

My best regards to you.....I will stay silent for the rest of this thread....I hate to annoy people....


I can't describe hard-core pornography to you, but I know it when I see it...

Justice Potter Stewart

Regards,
barts

Took me a while to catch onto mahgister, but once I did my understanding of what he calls "embeddings" is correct and proven by being exactly what I have been doing because it works, for going on 3 decades now.

The things we’re talking about, we really only understand them well at a very simplistic level. No one really has hardly any idea why one thing makes the sound deep and wide and real while another is flat and lifeless. Anyone can hear the difference, its predictably explaining why and how to do it where we get hung up.

I have compared our current understanding of electricity to something like the way a cave man knows fire: fire hot. Fire burn. Fire cook food. Fire hot.

We know enough about electricity to put insulation around stuff to keep it from shorting out. That’s about what we know. Why do certain insulators sound better than others? We have some ideas. No one really knows.

What is really going on with all this constantly changing electric field, anyway? No one has a clue. If they did then it would be easy to see why painting some paste on the outside of a wire makes the sound so much better. Sorry, be nice to tell you all what I’m talking about, but the Hateful18 et al make that impossible. Just know there’s good reasons why people who have heard my system are so impressed. Its not the components. Its the tweaks. Like paint and paste on wires.

That’s just one aspect of "embeddings", electricity, electric fields, whatever you want to call it. Its for real, and anyone can test and demonstrate this reality with something as simple as suspending speaker cables above the floor with paper cups or rubber bands. That absolutely zero of the people who will argue this point will bother to try this simple experiment tells you everything you need to know about them.

Another "embedding" is acoustics. If someone said GIK everyone would race to see who could prostrate themselves and brag how great it is the fastest. But mahgister says "embeddings" and uses bottles and stuff and everyone rolls their eyes. This again tells us more about them than mahgister.

The third "embedding" is vibration. Everything vibrates. Everything. Run a signal through a wire, just a plain old wire, the wire vibrates. Has to. Because the signal is electric, it produces a magnetic field, it must therefore interact with all the rest of the world. All of which is covered in electrons. Your skin holds together because of electron shell bonds. Speakers and air move in waves because of electrons.

Its kind of arbitrary whether we call one of these acoustic and the other vibration, or the other way around, or lump them together. The point is the only way to know is to try, and that means listening and evaluating.

Mahgister seems to have done an awful lot of listening and evaluating. He’s actually tried a lot of this stuff others totally dismiss. I wouldn’t be too quick to disregard what he’s saying just because the language or concepts are unfamiliar and hard to follow.
Can't think of any.   

Some required further tweaking to get right, like IC changes, 

I don't tweak unless needed.  But when I do....... 
Describing the potential problems or issues that require tweaking is not so hard. Nor is coming up with generic terms for it.

What often is hard though is not only recommending specific tweaks because "they work" but explaining how they work and why so someone who cares might reasonably assess how well a specific solution may or may not work for them.

The devil is always in the details, including the how and why, even with "tweaks".

I’m not one to spend time and money on something unexplained just because some guy on the internet says it works and "sounds better", but that’s just me.