Keith G wrote:

"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


Nice photo!

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!


Dunno :-)