Isolation Ward

Posted by David-L. (A) on October 15, 2018 at 13:23:10

In Reply to: RE: Will those edge treatments work .... posted by emailtim on October 14, 2018 at 22:26:20

***David, hope you enjoyed your vacation.***

Thanks Tim. I honestly can't recommend that anyone visit North Korea, and spend time in a North Korean prison for 7 years. But at least I was fed better than the average citizen of the country. Who knew that pissing on a poster of Kim Jong Un would land me in prison? It's not like I did so on purpose. Nature called, I responded, and his damn pudgy face is everywhere in Pyongyang! Anyway.


***I don't know if you are being serious or not for some of the following reasons.***

Well I said I was being serious, and I was serious about being serious! I wasn't completely sure if you were being facetious myself, since I don't recognize your name from way back when I was on this board. I read a few more of your posts later, and that confirmed it. No matter. I felt I needed to set the record straight on greening, and the like. Not just for your edification, but for the internet's. There is so much misinformation about this on the audio boards, I'm sick of it. Thirty years is enough! Also, this place is like Tumbleweed Junction. I don't think post titles are going to do it, to get a good debate going.

If skeptics want to ridicule these practices, I can't stop that. And I wouldn't want to, because as far as I can see, it's the only thing they live for. It would be a sad sad world for many such audio geeks, if they had nothing and no one to ridicule. But all I ask is they practice intellectual honesty, and at least attempt to understand the principles behind the tweaks and attack those, instead of propping up strawmen! Unfortunately, I'm one of the few people in the world, who at least has some fundamental understanding of how edge treatment actually works. And that's sad in itself.


***1) You can open a hard drive and mark the edges without ruining the data on the drive.***

And I quote: "To clean the hard drive platters, it's not as easy as some people think: just need to open the hard drives and get the platters out and then clean them. ".
https://www.dolphindatalab.com/how-to-clean-hard-drive-platters-and-recover-lost-data/

Data recovery labs may be able to get away with it, but the average user, short of building a special "clean room" in his home, should not even be thinking about doing this. Even if you can get into the hard drive, which are usually permanently sealed, you're not likely going to be able to remove the platters from the drive mechanism, without breaking something. I have repaired HD's when my data was at risk; but only by replacing the circuit board from an identical unit. But if you've actually removed an HD platter without destroying anything, feel free to detail here how you did that!

Even if you could do that, it's still a fool move in my opinion, because you simply don't need to, to tweak the HD. You're speaking to someone who actually -did- tweak his hard drive (years ago), to improve the sound of his audio. Successfully, so. In fact, I may be the only person who did, as I haven't read of anyone else doing it. Obviously not with edge treatment tweaks, but with a nifty little tweak called "Silver Rainbow Foil", from "P.W.B. Electronics Inc.". It was a lot easier than grabbing a chisel and a hammer and praying to the data Gods to help me not destroy 2 terabytes of data with my latest foray into follydom. It was just a matter of sticking a piece of this adhesive foil on to a certain location on the drive.

"But that's foolish! That can't have any effect on the spinning of the platters or the bits being read off of them! Don't you know anything about how hard drives work?!!".

Again, it's not supposed to. It's supposed to have an advantageous effect on the drive's energy patterns. Before you consider that's nonsense, consider this: Professional audio critics who were at least as skeptical as -you- are on this board, heard the effects of Silver Rainbow Foil. I haven't compared the two, but academically, I would argue that this would be more effective than greening the edge of the drive's platter. Because if you "treat" an object successfully, it's energy patterns transmit to everything it contains. This means you've treated all platters at once within the drive, by treating its exterior. That's why I consider your platter treatment idea (even if it wasn't meant to be serious), an amateur move.

So what's stopping you from not being facetious, and messing with advanced audio concepts? I know you're not going to buy $80k tweaks (nor am I...- I think $3k is my cut-off point...-.), but are you open minded, or afraid to include unverified science in your library of knowledge of the world we live in? If this world really did adhere to everything that the relatively small Western scientific community researched and eventually agreed upon...- you know, it would look very different than what it does now. But that's just not how science works.


*** 2) You do know that hard drives do not use a laser (light) for read/write heads like optical drives do ? ***

Uh, yeah, and I mentioned that the green pen tweak has no effect on data (whether read by optical lasers or magnetic heads); ergo, not relevant.

*** 3) Do you really understand how binary data works (e.g. CRCs and parity checks)? There are no fractions of a bit, the data is either read correctly or is isn't (no extra special sauce). A bit perfect-rip is a bit-perfect rip. If it wasn't, no mass produced software would ever work the same. ***

Aka the "Bits is bits" argument. Which I've been debating online with people like you for about 3 decades now. But I can see that I wasn't clear when I laughed at your idea that you can make CD rips that sound exactly the same. There are a lot of years and hundreds of tests in the digital domain behind that scoff, and you're not going to understand it from where I'm sitting. Trust me, it would suit me just fine if that were true. But it's not been my experience. Not when ripping CD's, not when playing them, not when even copying mp3 files. In fact, in years past, I posted examples of this on boards and my website, for people to make up their own minds by seeing if they hear differences between the files. When I started working with music files, I observed how every ripping program produced a different sounding result; all else being equal. How every software music player sounded different. How copies of CD's sounded different (I have -never- copied a commercial CD with both sounding equal). And yes, I've already heard the "software won't work argument" you gave, many times.

Later experiments showed how changes could be heard in copies of mp3 files; and still later experiments, included showing how just naming the files (with specific names), might change their sound. So there's things going on here well beyond "bits", or the usual theories of self-delusion to explain what doesn't fit in a skeptic's ideology. It's the same debates around reproducing music. Those who hear differences not explained by those who argue you can't hear anything beyond what they can measure, can only point to the limitations of technical measures. IOW, just because you can look at the data on a bit level, does not mean that's the only thing responsible for the very complex process (as in more complex than you know), of listening to music from a digital source.

For example...-. I know for a fact that when I make any improvements to my home audio system, whether the mods are based on advanced audio concepts or traditional ones, those improvements show up on my computer, my cell phone, and all other systems that play music. Am I going to flip through my old science texts, see if what I was taught includes that possibility, not find any answers there, and then go "Oh, then the fallback placebo theory must explain this??". No. Because I know my sound -very well-. And I can hear the very same characteristics that were improved on the home stereo, show up on all other devices in my home. The bits remain the same, the sound changes nevertheless. So what's really changing? To start with, the -ability to perceive sound- has changed.

Skeptics always try to understand this in direct terms, because obviously, that's easier for them. If you even want to understand advanced concepts in audio, then you should know t's much more difficult to try to understand what causal effects there may be to consider (without resorting to banal cop-outs like Occam's Razor). ie. The energy fields I was talking about having an effect on -everything-, does include the digital domain. I've experienced this in many ways. If I could measure them, the discussion about its effects would be over. But I don't know how to measure them with instruments, only by careful listening evaluations. I know from years past, that whenever I upload mp3 files to a website for later download, the sound has degraded - every damn time. The website isn't compressing the file or anything. And if I was prone to deluding myself, then it stands to reason my delusion would be to have the sound improve. Because I need it to not change in quality, if I'm going to use it to demonstrate 'energy field effects' to people.

This is one of many reasons why I laugh and roll my eyes when I still hear people arguing "bits is bits!".