"Rob" wrote in message
om...
Jim Lesurf wrote:
I got my latest copy of 'Stereophile' yesterday and started to read it. I
came across comments by Paul Messenger about some work that Russ
Andrews and Ben Duncan have recently put onto the web. This seems to be
taken by Paul Messenger as showing that Russ's claims re some of his
products are "now supported by proper scientific analysis". But having
looked at

http://www.russandrews.com/downloads...estPremRes.pdf

[above file size 700K]

I can't say I agree with that belief simply on the basis of what the
above
contains. But that may in part be because I've examined a past set of
measurements by Ben Duncan and come to rather different conclusions to
the
ones he and a co-author asserted about them at the time.[1] I would
therefore like to know all the measurement systems/proceedure details
that
are sadly omitted from the above. I thought others here might be
interested to read the above pdf and
consider it for themself.


It's difficult for me to tell. Everything Ben Duncan claims on his web
site is not substantiated or qualified (international reputation, unique,
expanding, holistic, world class and so on) and his qualifications appear
worthless in the sense I think I could get them by filling out a form and
paying. Following the link to his publications leads me to a shop.
Searching the shop for his name brings up electronic things to buy and a
series of collections of articles.

He may well be a jolly good bloke but I simply wouldn't trust anything he
has to say from the impression I get from his web site. Maybe poor
self-publicity is a characteristic of scientific types, present company
excepted :-)

So, from a lay point of view, it means very little to me. I wouldn't buy
anything off the back of it, put it that way. Or at least I'd hope I
wouldn't . . .


:-)

Also from the 'lay POV', I would like to say that the trouble with these
'snake oil bashing' sessions is that they are never cut and dried conclusive
and it always falls back to individual, subjective decisions about what
'works' and what doesn't, once you get past the obvious 'the light is on,
the light is off' stage when making comparisons. It was probably over 50
years ago now, I said here that the only two things that matter when it
comes to 'hifi tweaks' are a) you are positive you can hear an improvement
or, at least, think you are and b) you can afford to buy them without
starving the kids!

OK, that's power leads all nicely sorted and we all know where we stand on
them, don't we? As it's easier to make my point with them, let's do speaker
cables now....

Take a squint at this:

http://www.moirac.adsl24.co.uk/Strand.jpg

Right now I am listening to perfectly fine ('normal') sound from the radio
on a *single strand* of copper wire - all the way up to heap plenty loud and
down again! (Pucci's milkman isn't due here for ages so I asked Swim to
comment on the sound without telling her what I was up to and, like me, she
found nothing out of the ordinary!) In this situation, I wonder what
'science' would support the 'conventional wisdom' of using more than the one
strand of wire - provided of course it don't break!

Or 'oxygen free copper' wire....??

Or silver-plated copper wires....??

Hollow copper tubing?

Solid silver wire???

Gold wires...???

Wet string...???

??

Answers on a postcard....

:-)