Here's the report of the test I did for our newsletter. It's fairly long, and likely does not prove anything.
Results of the Clever Little Clock Test
At the December 4 meeting of the New Jersey Audio Society held in my home, we held a fairly unscientific listening test to see if we could hear the effects of a tweak called the Clever Little Clock marketed by Machina Dynamica. The clock is an ordinary looking Timex digital travel alarm. For the test, the clock, together with its accompanying special spare set of batteries, was placed in a paper bag before the meeting and placed in the back of the listening room (a 20 x 18 foot room with a 10-foot ceiling). In addition, a couple of boxes of pens were placed in another different type of (but equally opaque) bag and placed next to the bag with the clock. No one even really noticed or asked about the bags prior to the test, and no one looked inside or lifted the bags prior to the test.
The test was conducted using one SACD played through my system, which is a pretty revealing system consisting in relevant part of a Sony SCD-777ES with both Richard Kern Superclock II, transport and resistor mods and a Jerry Ozment-designed and installed Audio Logic tube/transformer coupled output stage, running to a Jadis JP-200 preamp (special model using EF 86 tubes instead of 12AX7s), running to a solid state active crossover which feeds a pair of Sonogy Black Knight Mk III amps (handling from 220 Hz down) and a pair of Lamm ML-1.1 tubed amps above 220 Hz, which power a Sforzando JL-1 speaker system which has been significantly changed from its stock form (not many of these around, to understate itthis is a full range system, going flat in room to below 20 Hz, with two satellites having front and rear-firing tweeters and a midrange on a 30 degree or so angle giving both direct sound and aiming up to the ceiling). Those of you old enough to remember the ITC-1 designed by Richard Davidson will know this speaker, its Father Richards current statement design. An advantage of the design is that it behaves to large extent like an omnidirectional speaker, so off-axis listeners are not disadvantaged in listening. All cabling used in the test was Kubala-Sosna Emotion, their top of the line. The amplification was well-warmed up, having been on and constantly played for over three hours. This system has been highly resolving of differences between isolation devices, cabling and components in the past, so I believe that it would be able to show any difference the clock might make.
22 members of the club participated in the test; I did not. I had everyone sit in the same place for the entire listening session, so no one left the room or changed seats. Things were a little crowded, and everyone wanted to get on to our door prize drawings, so we decided to listen to only one piece of music. As the distributor of the clock had suggested something dynamic and well-recorded, and had mentioned the Mercury Suppe/Auber Overtures disc as a good one for the test, we listened to the first minute or so of track 5 of this disc, the Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna Overture, which features a good dose of full orchestra with strong percussion, loud brass, some pauses where the hall ambience is evident, and a nice cello solo over pizzicato strings. We listened to the SACD layer of the disc.
The participants were instructed not to speak or make any gestures or exclamations during the test to give away their impressions. Each participant was given a pad and a pen and was asked to write down if they were sitting on axis, off-axis left or off-axis right. The group listened first to the disc as a control before we started switching things around; impressions were written only and made anonymously. The participants were advised that the clock was in the system for the control; after that, the bags would be removed in a random order from the house and taken by one of our members to the street about 50-60 feet away. I did not say if the clock was in one of the bags or not. After each change was made the participants had to write down whether they heard a change in the sound of the playbackif they wished they could also say if it was for the better or worse, but that was not necessary.
The results of the test were as follows:
1. Bag without clock removed (i.e., clock not removed from house, no change)--6 heard a change, 16 did not
2. Bag with clock removed (both bags now out of house, change)--5 heard a change, 17 did not
3. Bag without clock brought back in (clock still out of house, no change)--3 heard a change, 19 did not
4. Bag with clock brought back in (both bags now in house, change)--5 heard a change, 17 did not
As you can see, some people heard a change when none was made, some heard a change when there was a change made, and many did not hear any changes. One person out of the 22 correctly identified each change or lack of change; two people identified changes when none occurred and no change when the changes did occur (i.e., they were wrong every time). 13 of the 22 members heard no change in any of the four scenarios. The position one sat in, whether on or off axis, did not seem to make any difference in the perceptions. The one person who correctly identified the changes advised me after the test that he preferred the system slightly without the clock, feeling that the highs were smoother and cleaner with the clock out of the system (that was how he determined if a change was made); some others who wrote their opinions when they correctly heard or didnt hear a change had a similar impression of the change, but some of those people preferred the sound with the clock in over the sound with it out.
Feel free to draw any conclusions you wish (other than, perhaps, that by a two to one ratio people found that two boxes of pens had more of an effect on the sound of the system than the clock!). Obviously, there were plenty of flaws in the test. I do think that many of the people were not taking the test as seriously as they might have in an individual testing environment, and as one person noted, you could probably hear a change every time I played the disc due to other factors, as much as we tried to eliminate the variables. Had I played a different piece of music, or perhaps used a CD source, maybe changes would have been more noticeable. But that will be for another day.
