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Techno-quacks on the march
Do you find that, as one of the few technical persons in your
building, it has become your (perhaps self-appointed) role to be
the voice of reason against pseudoscience and all sorts of flimflammery
directed at your station and its occupants, from without and
within?
It’s nothing new but it sure seems to be getting worse. Perhaps this
is a result of bad karma from all those infomercials we broadcast over
the weekend, offering life everlasting and the prostate of a 20-year-old
if you’ll just buy these miraculous pills.
I’m sure you’ve run into the magic claims of improved audio fidelity by
virtue of “oxygen-free copper” wires to your speakers. And there are the
claims of sonic superiority from tube audio amplifiers, from solid-state
amps featuring “new, patented Class X” circuits, and from loudspeaker
designs with all sorts of weird and wonderful catacombs inside.
High fidelity audio really has generated so much of this stuff that it
could be a subject unto itself. I have an audiophile neighbour who just
had to stuff the walls of his home theatre with a particular brand of rock
wool for the potent sound muffling ability it offers.
At one time or another, your station has probably been approached by
audio consultants trying to sell some obscure audio processor distortion
box guaranteed to generate huge ratings increases.
Certainly in recent years we’ve seen a proliferation of strange microphone
brands with equally bizarre claims. You can perhaps get even more
mileage from this by combining that strange microphone with a matched
tube preamplifier. It’s even better if the tube preamplifier has a flashy
display or perhaps a fuchsia pilot light!
Then there’s all the B.S. spread around in the music recording industry.
This is sometimes similar to the audiophile variety and shares with it
the characteristic that “it just sounds better.”
Forget about trying to refute any claims from this quarter, no matter
how silly, by using logic or test instruments … these folks can hear things
that the test equipment can’t. And no amount of reasoned argument is
going to change the minds of the true believers.
It goes almost without saying that any loudspeaker will sound better
with its grille removed, although sometimes it becomes necessary to stuff
toilet paper into the resultant exposed ribbon tweeters to make them
sound a little less harsh. I have seen “scholarly” write-ups in recording
industry trade magazines go so far as to extol the virtues of particular
brands of toilet paper that can be used for this purpose.
ENG
INE
ERI
NG
by Dan Roach
BROADCAST DIALOGUE—The Voice of Broadcasting in Canada • July 12, 2011 28