Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Skiing Ninja. Anyone heard of this

Solid, as long as you keep using words like "HUGE difference!!" my mind keeps saying "bullshit".

Your type has come and gone through here and other forums. You have all the answers, you know that lots of experts agree with you, and anyone that disagrees is wrong. I'm sorry about the bracing and glue job on those M80s, but as far as I've seen, everything else you say is crap.

Test gear as fast as a human can hear is crazy expensive and is a poor substitute for mother nature. All I can say is in the end it all comes down to time and the analog realm of sounds waves and your ears/brain perceiving them. There isn't a piece of test gear on earth that can compare to the human senses. A good analogy are the mass spectrometers my brother in law engineered at Rosemount Instruments in Calgary. Sure they can pickup cocaine on 100 dollar bills but compared to a dog's nose... Forget it nature and the dog's nose wins hands down! Field testing proves and the dog wins every time. It's these truths that make electronic engineering as it pertains to sound and video a total and complete art form.

Wouldn't you think if one could simply perform an "oscilloscope scan" and quantify components or a final piece's overall performance wouldn't everybody simply end up with the same designs? Why the plethora of audio video equipment in existence? IF your supposition was reality don't you think that to save money and maximize profits all electronics outfits would simply all use the same parts, same designs etc and all be clones? If you can quantify this stuff as you guys suggest you'd think that by now there would be a be all end all way to say... make a CD player?

Solid-State

WOW nice one buddy...

Sure are some real rude people on this forum ehh?

I don't believe you guys understand the level of trial and error that is the history of electronics. The very nature of it being a technology means it's under constant change. Why this constant state of change? Well because it evolves due to the scientific principle and the method there applied. It's important to note that a significant portion of the underpinning physics going on that drives our wonderful technology is barely understood. Take for example a white LED. We use them all the time today in flashlights etc right! Do you guys realize that we don't have ANY scientific assertion that explains how it works! It's these realities that allow progress to occur. For our TVs and stereos to evolve and improve as time progresses. Technology such as this is build upon the foundation of countless forebearers many countless trial and error attempts. Sure test equipment can be used as tools to help guide us in this subjective reality but they are not the be all end all of applied scientific principle. The aliased nature of the data-sets produced by such equipment make them inherently poor at quantifying such relativistic axioms as Hydrodynamics, Acoustic Theory and Aerodynamics. All of these are THEORY and our subjective reality granularity dictates, as it pertains to the human sense hearing, that no test equipment could ever possible hope to discern what good old wet wear can do or field testing. Have we come a long way... YES bigtime... specially in acoustic theory the last 20 years using DSPs etc and recent maths but we are still no where near a complete and unified theory nor do we possess any test equipment with the granularity to do so... yet

Out of all the technological applied endeavors go, boat hull design, speaker design, mike design and even yes... transport design due to it's analogous nature dictates that test equipment will NEVER and I mean EVER discern what the human ear or field testing can do... EVER and as for components making the difference. I personally have replaced something as simple as a capacitor and notice a major sonic change. Heck even using different hook ups IE cables can produce a noticeable sonic change. Have you guys not ever change out cables and noticed a change in the sound for god's sake !?!

Listen there are two camps in this fundamental debate regarding the technology of sound equipment. Those that, for example, say lamp cord is same as expensive speaker cables and those that claim their speaker cable makes a "huge" LOL difference. All I know is I find my self using the phrases "within reason" and "law of diminishing returns" lots with people when discussing these things. Those that say you can't tell the difference what so ever either have bad hearing or... they are "tone deaf" LOL Within reason means YES any person with hearing can tell the difference between a piece of shit 18ga one conductor copper the other ALUMINUM Chinese CRAP one wold pickup in a Canadian Tire with the Belden 1313A SKU I use for my installs. Would a person discern my 1313a from a piece of silver clad boutique cable? probably not! Can I tell the difference between my 1313a and say some magnet wire with corks or cat5e Gordian knot like lunacy? YES YOU CAN! Is it worth the effort? Well that's another story!

All I know is the truth lays somewhere between both camps as it always has...

Solid-State

Don't let a loose gander spoil the beginning of your relationship.

That's simply untrue in the realm of audio, and that is most often claimed by people wanting to sell you an "upgrade" of questionable value. It's not voodoo.

Much like your comment about how test gear cannot compete with the human senses, this statement is also wrong. The human realm of sense is severely limited, and easily fooled. Test equipment can measure, distortion, amplitude, frequency, and phase variation with more accuracy and consistency than a human who can't directly compare two passages separated by five seconds of time, and is often fooled into thinking something sounds better simply by increasing the volume. Think too of optical and aural illusions as an example of how easily our senses can be mislead.

That's not the point of this post. I don't know where you go the idea that the designers of "white" LEDs don't know how they work, but they do. I put "white" in quotes, because white LEDs generally do not emit white light. The most common kind are actually blue, in the 10000 Kelvin range, which fool our limited sense of vision into seeing white. Others which actually do have a more complete spectrum use a phosphor mix, similar to that used in (cheap) fluorescent lights, and the diode emits UV light which is used to excite this phosphor. The third style combines 3 diode junctions which each emitting coherent light centered at red, green, and blue respectively; the combined light appears white.

Also not true in LED technology, which I have dona a fair amount of reading on. You white LED is a fluorescent emitter. you have a mix of compounds which absorb energy in one spectrum and emit it in another. Thats been known for a very long time.

The dogs nose is i nice selective example. We have no senses that are anywhere near as acute as a dogs nose. Whats more, we understand exactly how the sense of smell, and hearing works, down to the atomic level.

If it were so darned easy to improve the sound of a given design by substituting a few components, companies would do it themselves. Why? Profit. If you could switch in $10/20/40 and effect a night and day difference, you could then charge hundreds or thousands of dollars more for that huge difference.

If the Ninja can so easily improve other peoples products, why is he not building his own and mopping up? In fact, if you look at the history of Axiom, that is exactly what Ian Calhoun did.

As far as the Ninja goes, there are easily available, independant measurements of both the M80ti and the M80v2 that are significantly different than what the Ninja posted. They were done at a lab, the NRC, in an anechoic chamber by people that do this sort of thing professionally for a living in an institution that has been doing this for a very, very long time.

The Ninja is full of it. He got, IMO, poorly treated here, lost it and had a very public hissy fit.

Its time to move on.

I think you just lost us dude. Should have stopped a few posts back.

I was under the impression that the underpinning physics of YAGs (Ce-doped yttrium aluminum garnets) was not fully understood. Sure they understand what materials to use and how to dope it correctly. This doesn't mean they understand the why or how it works on the quantum level. I was under the impression they are not certain why (Y 1-aGd a) 3(Al 1-bGa b) 5O 12:Ce [2] does what it does. They have theory. If it was as simple as placing a phosphor in the P-type as you suggest why then the 80 plus years to come to a, for all intensive purposes, white LED? Again this took trial and error by material scientists to find the right stuff. The reason it took so very long to find the right material? Because all we have is theory as to why certain material works the way they do. It's only by lab testing various materials to discover what do what. If the math and theory was fully understood as you suggest it wouldn't have taken 80 years to discover. From my understanding, and I could be wrong, that on a fundamental physics level we are not certain why YAGs do what they do. IT doesn't work like phosphorescence as you sorta assert but scintillation. Scintillation as it pertains to anomalous materials such as YAGs used in white LEDs is not fully understood. Yes we know what materials do what. Yes we know how arrange said materials to produce the desired affect but do we known the underpinning atomic/quantum reasons the material behaves the way it does, I was under the impression not. I know a physics prof at UBC I'll ask him and get back to you. Why is this so hard to believe? We take advantage of gravity the "week force" via hydroelectric all the time yet we simple have no why as to gravity. Yes we take take scientific advantage of it's properties BUT do we really understand the underlying forces/principals governing it... NO

Solid-State

PS WTF do you think the field is called anomalous materials research if we understand 100% what's going on! Anomalous phenomena is what led to the discoveries in the friggin first place man!