Holydean did say "If you can get them for free" so whear's the scam?
"Audiophile Rocks"
MY POSITION ON THIS. I am an "audiophile rock" agnostic. I have been sneering and scoffing at the Ebay seller who seems to select rocks from around his front door and paint them different colors to masque their identity so he can sell them for a deceptive markup. They are painted like something my kid would make. I mean, really, if you are just going to rip people off, why not make it look really cool like the "Rodin coil Scalar Wave toroidal field generator module, torsion field, vibrational healing, radionic machine" on Etsy? I love audiophile products but this Ebay guy, not so much.
MY CONFUSION. I was watching a video on YouTube by an audio dealer verbosely and authoritatively denouncing all "tweaks" as snake oil, including cables. He said all of these change the sound but do not actually improve the sound to be of any value. He then held up a 3 pound rose quartz rock, and said, "except for this super cheap rock." Which really caught my attention. He elaborated something to the effect, "This is just a quartz rock from my back yard. I had it in the house and while I was messing with my gear, my wife was sitting there listening and to move the rock out of the way I set it on my component and she looked up and said, ’what was that what did you just do?’ If you think about it, your transformer makes a big electromagnetic field and when you put a large semiconductor on it, it will transform that electromagnetic energy into physical vibrations. Quartz rocks are almost free and you can just find them on the ground, so go put these on your transformers they work."
MY QUESTION. If a guy who denounces "all tweaks" as snake oil is recommending setting a free quartz rock on each of one’s transformers. Have any serious audiophiles experimented with other semiconductor crystal rocks? I don’t want to sound like a mystic, but what’s up with all of this anecdote?
MY CONFESSION. I’m going to buy some rocks on the internet and try them out. I found rose quartz coasters and cheese cutting blocks that I can stealthily slide under my components so that none of my friends think I have healing crystals on my audio gear. If they don’t make rainbows come out of my speakers they can be used for evening wine and cheese.
Thanks for providing input on this!
Halz
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- 13 posts total
For me the strangest phenomena in humans' psyche is that automatic hate for everything that a person has little to no knowledge/experience of. I admit, I was a little like that before as well (just not straight-up hating, only cautiously sceptic), but still opened for my own experiments and findings. And it paid off big time for me. Good luck if you're starting to experiment with the crystals now - that guy you despise, is developing crystal mixtures for a decade. I rather pay for a finished product, as I don't intend to spend a decade on my own research just on this. Now I'm waiting for my third batch of those Audiophile rocks and looking forward to it, since I can't achieve similar gains/effects on my fairly resolving & tuned system with anything else (and definitely not for that modest price). |
@holydean: I'm also using Heartsound's Holostages as room treatments to good effect. Checkout Audiogon member gladmo's system. He gives an informative writeup on them, As stated above, they do come with a generous money back return poicy. Good listening. Jeff |
In my system, solid quartz on source devices sounds way too focused on a narrow high freq range. It is harsh, shrill, edgy, and not desirable. I thought it was interesting at first, but quickly realized how imbalanced and unnatural it sounds. Holostage devices mentioned above are, on the other hand, really excellent. They can be used acoustically and near wires/circuitry. They also clean up very high freq noise. If you get a whole bunch of them in your signal and power paths, yes, they too can be overdone resulting in too much top end energy. But then you can just add the extra device to your acoustic array application. |
- 13 posts total