What's the deal with the Machina Dynamica Clock?

Well, for the hell of it I got one to probably use as one of the door prizes for our NJAS holiday party next week. I've had a number of changes at once in my system recently involving my speaker crossovers, and my wife refuses to take the clock out of the house so I can see if there's a difference, so Sunday, Dec 4 the NJ Audio Society will use their golden ears to put this device to the test (hopefully before they've had too much wine). If you're interested, I'll report on how we did the test and what the findings were. I will remain mum for now as to what I think, as, like I said, there haver been too many recent changes to my system to tell whether the improvements I'm hearing are due to the changes to the crossovers or the clock.

Rcprince:

I would be VERY interested in the outcome of such a listening test, and would suggest doing the test with the participants not knowing whether the clock is in the room or not. Hopefully, the test will proceed like "clockwork" and you can post the results thereof back to this thread in a "timely" fashion.

Mdhoover--ouch, loved the puns! My initial plan is to have two people leave the house after everyone has listened with the clock as a benchmark, one with the clock and one without, and no one knows which of those two has the clock, then have them come back one at a time into the house, with a listening session with both out, only one back in and then only the other back in. I'll probably ask that people write down if they hear a difference or not, rather than have people say their thoughts aloud, to avoid any peer pressure issues as well. I'm sure that there are other variables, so this won't be a perfect test, but it will be interesting to see what transpires.

Sounds like a fun test. If you wanted to blind people in the first part, you could make it unknown to the participants whether or not the initial listening session has the clock deployed. They would be told that the clock was either in possesion of one of the two people or hidden somewhere in the room. The advantage would be that all participants (except the would-be clock smugglers) would be blinded throughout the test. The disadvantage would be the absence of a "known" benchmark. Either way sounds fun, and you could even do it both ways if you really wanted to.

Hey, if you're in the Northern NJ area on December 4, come on down and have a listen!