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No need for the personal attacks and name calling. Let's discuss the issues, not the people.

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Yes it does. I think the use of placebo and nocebo in medicine is slightly different from the cognitive issues at stake here in audio.


In simple terms, we do have drugs that cause a statistically significant positive effect on people, with certain secondary (usually undesired) effects. Research has also observed that people's inner beliefs affect their responses (e.g. the placebo and nocebo effects) even though the drugs administered are known to be completely inert.

I think the scenario is slightly different in audio.

We can't really measure the response on people with respect to audio. In medicine you can measure better health by several means (blood presure, white cell levels, cholesterol levels, immune system response levels, and thousands more). Plus you get the actual patients' verbal accounts on their response, how they feel. In audio, usually you just get what people tell you about what they hear, nothing else; except what you hear yourself. There is no objetive measure on their response (on our responses) to the audio signals.

Also, in medicine you do carry out very precise experiments, even DBTs, with active drugs vs. inert drugs and tested vs. control groups etc., very carefully designed experimental tests, usually on a large scale, and large investments involved. This is not done in the audio world in any comparable way.

In both scenarios, however, there are commonalities. The brain has been observed to play tricks on us in spite of ourselves. With same inputs, it has been observed that the brain tells us there are differences (e.g. Moon illusion), or the brain and body somehow actually cause changes in our responses (e.g. placebo and nocebo responses to inert drugs) despite the fact that the inputs are known to be the same, or known to be inert and not cause those different responses.

With different cables that allegedly cause perceived audible differences, it is not clear where we stand. Measurements might say there are no differences in the cables, yet our brains (ears) might suggest they sound different. It is unclear where the cause of that perceived audible difference stands, whether in the cable or in our cognitive machinery, or partially on both.

Anyway, just paraphrasing and thinking aloud.

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If one needs to bang one's head and get dizzy to hear music differently then one is already greatly desensitized, and relies on only the strongest stimuli and therefore needs to go to great lengths... I'm a very practical person and that always seemed like a very unpractical approach to me

So my question is why do we need to rely solely on tweaking our equipment, when something like tweaking our own bodies, and by this I also mean what we subjectively, perhaps even creatively, bring to the enjoyment of music and audio equipment, is also possible?

Because I'm so sick of saying both minor changes and placebo at the same time. For me, placebo is in terms of "attacking" saying something that is good is just illusion. They even admitted it that it has difference but keep saying placebo really makes me sick so badly.

Please pardon my out-bursted. I'm into high pressure situations a lot lately.

Placebo is just a fact of life. It is nothing to be ashamed of.

The fact is it's not placebo but some people are trying to claim it even though they admitted they found difference (probably little for them).

I agree with the OP, that this attitude needs to stop. It's the same thing with the way I refuse to stop using my MDR-V700's, but people always clown on them and say they are garbage, and when I attempt to improve something about the systems I use, they won't help, but will instead just tell me my headphones are crap and to get something else. That's not fair.

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You dont understand it... maybe cuz u've been here for too short a time.

The reason people treat Patrick like the idiot that he is, is not because of the cables he purchases. It's because the guy is a complete nut who has long lost whatever credibility he has had with all his weird experiments, out-of-this-world ratings of like 1,000,000,000 TIMES better... only to realize that putting a book ontop of a marble rock makes it 1,000,000,000,000 TIMES better than before and so on...

He has nothing to add to any forum he visits. Ask him why he is completely ridiculed on AVS forum, in addition to headfi.

The guy is just plain odd.

It's not his cables, it's his approach to audio that bothers people.

YOU have to understand this fact before carrying on with your tirade.

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There's always bias in every community... the 700 just aren't headphones that are looked at kindly here at headfi. How is that unfair? We can't be allowed to have our opinions so we need to stop?

You come here for our opinions, we tell you what it is and it's up to you to take it or not.

There's nothing "not fair" about it.

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Here is my old improvement score list, I don't update it anymore because the improvements are too huge to fit into it.

My upgrades


1 = Noticeable improvement
10 = Night and day
1 000 000+ = Unreal

July 2005

Valhalla power cord for Krell KAV-500i = 15
High Current Ultimate Outlet between wall and Power Plants = 5
QuickSilver on everything = 15?
QuickSilver on fuses = 2
MultiWave II+ for source = 5
xStream Statement between wall and Power Plants = 60
44.1 kHz to 768 kHz = 5
MultiWave II and II+ for amp = 20
Solid-Tech isolation = 100
QuickSilver GOLD upgrade = 5
Valhalla between wall and Power Plants + hardwired = 60
Hifi-Tuning Gold fuse = 1
Nordost Solar Wind 1 conductor + remove PCB = 220
Nordost Valkyrja 1 conductor = 140 (360 compared to Stefan AudioArt)
PS Audio GCC-100 = 200?
Cary 303/300 to DAC-1 = 500
Modded Valhalla power cord (2+2+1) for DAC1, and computer as transport (Valhalla and Power Plant) = [size=small]5000[/size]
Computer to Cary transport. From 2 to 1 Power Plant. 2 conductor Valhalla power cord for amp. Extra isolation step. Cary from 3 to 0 isolation = -200 (less detail but more neutral?)
Valhalla digital XLR = 5?
Valhalla power cord 2 to 1 conductor for DAC1 = 100
Valhalla power cord 3 to 2 conductors for Cary = 5
Valkyrja internal wiring for CD player = 5
Valkyrja speaker cable hardwire into PCB = 380
Valkyrja input signal wire for amp, from 24 AWG to 22 AWG = -3
Modded Valhalla interconnect 1 conductor = [size=medium]1 000 000[/size]
Brilliant Pebbles Mini = 0.05
Bypass fuses amp = 80
Bypass fuses Cary transport = 2?
Shortening Valhalla power cords = 1
Disconnecting ground of DAC1 = 0.5?
Valhalla power cord 2 to 1 conductors for Cary = 5
Valhalla power cord 3 to 2 conductors for wall = 1
4step to 5step isolation for DAC1 = [size=small]1200[/size]
Hardwired into Power Plant = 5?
ERS Paper full coverage = [size=medium]2 000 000+[/size]
Valhalla interconnect XLR + hardwire = [size=medium]1 300 000[/size]
Valhalla interconnect dedicated shield ground = [size=medium]3 000 000[/size]
Noise Harvester + tweaks to compensate = [size=medium]10 000 000[/size]
Power Plant Premier + Magix = [size=x-large]1 000 000 000 000 000[/size]
2nd batch of ERS Paper, 1 conductor Valhalla mod for computer, Magix = [size=xx-large]40 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000[/size]

February 2007




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At least I don't want to strangle other audiophiles. http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45979

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The actual value of name calling in discussions has been already thoroughly debated in this thread.

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How the hell can anyone not understand why patrick gets flak? Posting dumb useless crap like this for attention.

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So you are saying input has no bearing on output?

well..technically the input shouldn't matter because you should have atleast the isolation transformer to decouple input from output; But IIRC isolation transformer doesn't mess with the actual AC signal. So now you have now you have some input that's not just a simple Ae^jwt, but something else in the exponential. So does that extra thing matter in the AC-DC circuit?

hehe..someone help me out here, it has been a long time since I did circuit analysis this complex.

Mr. Kevin Gilmore, please show us the derivation of Vo from Vi in a simple AC-DC converter with isolation transformer assuming Vin is a sawtooth wave of 60htz.

The other thing I have trouble calculating (on paper) is the harmonic component of a sawtooth wave and how that is translated from Vi to Vo.

<this is what happens to you when you had slept through most of your circuit classes thinking you are gonna be a digital designer>

In retrospect, I wish I had discovered this site when I was studying...I would be godly at analog circuit analysis and design by now

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You need to know to read between the lines, so you are not obviously one of them. But i agree, those numbers are a bit exaggerated; he just tries to tell us that the tweaks with those huge figures made the biggest difference in his sytem. If he didn't do that and ony used 1 or 2%, then the sceptics would say anyway, you see, it's sooo small. So, his figures just show there is a clearly audible difference.

There are still people in the middle. Not at both extremes!

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Smoothing caps in the powersection of an amp have huge impact on sound quality! The better the filtering, the cleaner the DC is for use in the amp itself.