Dear Dan
I purchased some modulators from Mr Orchard and had one of the units tested using a machine called a PowerMate that is made in Adelaide.
The result was a 30% reduction in power consumption. The test was done over a 3 month period.
Mr Orchard is way ahead of his time. People just on get it!
Regards
Peter
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First, no, e-mail sent to a stranger is not confidential, and no disclaimer boilerplate at the end can make it so. (I'm not sure what the "commercial" part is supposed to mean, either.)
That aside, I presume you're sincere about your statement about seeing the magical EMPower Modulator doing at least one of the numerous extraordinary things it's meant to, and I will also grant for the sake of argument that the test you saw was not rigged, or performed with a defective power meter. (The "Power Mate" is I think meant to be able to take reactive loads into account; cheap power meters like the ones I write about here cannot fully do this.)
Why is the person who has been selling this thing for so many years or, in many cases including that of Harmonic Products, DECADES, not a billionaire Nobel-Prize winner?
You demonstrate your device informally. You talk journalists and a technical college or two into testing it. With that evidence, you talk serious test labs and/or universities into testing it. And then there you are with your proven invention that, because most of the world's population will want it, is not worth millions of dollars; it's worth billions. Hell, even if an evil corporate conspiracy steals your invention, rips up your patent and robs you of your rightful reward, you will still have greatly bettered the lot of humankind. Provided, of course, that the evil conspiracy doesn't tuck your gadget away in the same vast warehouse where they keep the Ark of the Covenant and the hundred-mile-per-gallon carburettor.
All could revolutionise the world, if true. None have ever managed it. They always just sell the gadgets, or tickets to their performances, one at a time to punters like you.
(And, notably, they do not mysteriously vanish when the abovementioned giant corporate Illuminati Freemason conspiracy catches up with them. A lot of these people have been selling the samescam pretty much all their lives, without any repercussions beyond getting serially busted by the government because they keep taking people's money and running.)
The closest these miracle devices and potions get to actual success is when they manage to be bought in quantity by someone who hasn't applied any proper tests to see if they work, or who are just hoping to turn a buck on resale or shares in the company. See the ADE 651 "bomb detector" and its various relatives, for instance, and the whole miserableFirepowersaga.
If the EMPower Modulator works, it is a miraculous device, and I use that word advisedly. (The same goes for the pieces of purple aluminium jewellery that Harmonic Products told me protect the wearer from radiation, make beverages take better, make metal on your person invisible to metal detectors unless you intend to do something bad with that metal, et cetera et cetera.)
But apparently Harmonic Products are perfectly happy to frame a lottery ticket and hang it on the wall for visitors to admire.
They say it'd win a billion dollars, if they only cashed it in.
Why haven't they?
UPDATE: Peter replied to me, with the following cogent rebuttal:
Yes the world is flat and the Sun revolves around the earth.
Happy sleepwalking.
Sent from my iPhone
I'm not sure whether he's agreeing with me or not.
(There was no boilerplate confidentiality disclaimer this time. Presumably he's cool with his e-mail being published, provided he sent it from his phone.)
I can't remember whether one of the old hands at News Interactive told me this during my brief stint of working for the Dark Lord Murdoch, or whether I came up with it myself. So I won't call it My Special Law Of Current-Events Publication Photographs, or whatever. But it does seem to apply most of the time. It is:
If the subject is at a sixty-degree dutch angle and leaning out over the balustrade of a purple spiral staircase amid a frozen shower of confetti, he will be the deputy manager of Accounts Receivable for Amalgamated Water-Based Bookbinding Mucilage, Incorporated, posing for a business-section feature about how AWBBM beat earnings estimates by 1.7%.
If the subject is only partially visible through the leaves of a potted palm and bathed in rainbow prismatic sunlight passing through a faceted lead-crystal recreation of Michelangelo's David, she was this month's top fundraiser for the church steeple maintenance drive.
Application of this rule of thumb can get you through business and trade publications, in particular, a great deal faster, without missing a damn thing.
Here's a little Photoshop trick that I occasionally find very handy.
Suppose you've got two or more photos of a given thing, none of which are properly lit. The right side is nicely illuminated in Photo One, but the left side is too dark. And the left side's OK in Photo Two, but in that one the right side is too dark.
You don't want to, or physically can't, go back and photograph the thing again.
Or perhaps the light there is never going to be any good, for reasons of geography, geometry or just the fact that you can't afford six flashes.
(In brief: It's a Noontec N5, and m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market are selling it for only $AU25 if you buy it along with a drive. And no, the drives are not overpriced to compensate. So all this thing is going to have to do to get a good review from me is, one, function, and, two, not send death threats to Barack Obama with my signature on them.)
One of my pictures of the shiny white box - which, of course, immediately tractor-beamed some cat fluff onto itself - looked like this:
Right side too dark.
Another looked like this:
This time the front was too dark.
I could have reshot the image easily enough, but the Photoshop fix is faster. It's easy, too, as long as the images are pretty much identical except for the lighting. I'll talk about how to do it in Photoshop, but any imaging program with some equivalent of Photoshop's layers and blend modes can do it.
First, paste one image over the other, and set the opacity of the top image's layer to 50% or something, so you can see through it to line the two images up exactly.
(Lousiness of alignment exaggerated for illustrative purposes.)
You may not need to do this at all, but even when you're shooting with a tripod, it's common for successive images to be misaligned by a pixel or two. It may be impossible to perfectly align the images if they're off by some fraction of a pixel, or if perspective means they're off by different amounts in different locations. Just try to get the important parts of the overlapping image combination to look as sharp as possible.
Now, set the opacity of the top image back to 100%, and set its blend mode to "lighten".
And you're done!
"Lighten" simply makes any pixel in the top layer opaque if, and only if, it's brighter than pixels in lower layers. So if you're combining images of the same object lit in different ways, you get a result that looks as if everything that illuminated the object in all of the images was illuminating it for just one photo.
I seldom set out to use this technique, but it's definitely not just a bad-photo-salvaging trick. If all you've got is one flash, for instance, you could take a string of pictures with the flash aimed and reflected and diffused in different ways, and then combine some or all of them to get the same effect as a bunch of simultaneous flashes, or a beauty-dish reflector, or a big studio flash with a large soft box, or J.J. Abrams and his Travelling Lens-Flare Circus.
You could also use this technique on video frames, sequential light-painting photos, and perhaps for astrophotography too. Any series of images you can shift and warp to pretty much line up with each other will work.
You could even use it to vanish dirt, dust or even insects on a thing you're photographing but can't properly clean. Take a shot, blow the dust around a bit, take another, combine with Lighten if the dust is darker than the object or with Darken if it's lighter.
Commenter Fallingwater pointed out here that it's now rather hard to find CardTXT, the simple word processor that uses the whole width of an AlphaSmartDana's screen. He recreated it and put it here; I've taken the liberty of mirroring it here.
I use the built-in AlphaWord application instead of CardTXT, because if all you need is plain-text note-taking, AlphaWord does the job fine. You don't have to install antiquated syncing software on your computer, or fool around with memory cards and weird old-PDA text formats. Just plug the Dana in via USB, from which it can also charge its batteries if it's running from rechargeables. The computer will detect the Dana as a USB keyboard, and then you just poke a button on the Dana screen to get the Dana to "type" the contents of a document into any text-accepting program on the computer. Any computer that can accept a USB keyboard should work with a Dana in this mode.
I thought I could help users of these strange hypertrophied Palm doodads with some more software, though, so I've zipped up the Dana files I have sitting around, too.
Here (5Mb Zip archive) is a collection of third-party software, including the plain (I think) version of CardTXT, which is in the "wp" subdirectory.
The original software package that came with the Dana is about 57Mb, here. It contains a lot of cruft, and I haven't tested all of these programs; if they don't work or they set your Dana on fire, don't complain to me.
Oh, and the Getting Started Guide and User Guide PDFs are only a couple of megabytes, here.
Soverain Software, who pretend to sell software but actually do nothing but sue people, wanted substantial cash payments plus one per cent of all US online sales involving online shopping-cart systems.
Thanks to the patents they bought when dot-com Open Market went bankrupt, they were quite successful in this.
It's built around an Intel DN2800MT Marshalltown Mini-ITX motherboard which accepts anything from 8 to 19V DC.
They recommend a battery power source as that clean power helps give better sound. Whether or not you believe in that is another thing. The battery source they suggest is the Red Wine Audio Black Lightning High-Current Battery Power Supply which is $900, costing as much as the entire rest of the system.
I have a problem paying $900 for a battery and charger.
Here's my question. Do you think a standard laptop battery extender (lithium battery plus charger) or similar would work as well? They are a lot cheaper. See for example:
Anker® Astro3 10000mAh Multi-voltage 5V / 9V / 12V 2A External Battery Pack, $US59.99, or HyperJuice 2 External Battery for MacBook/iPad/USB (100Wh), $US299.95. Red Wine Audio specify the battery they use to be "One 12.8V, 10Ah LiFePO4 battery pack". I can get one here with charger for $US159.99. Does that look like a viable solution to you?
I am not an expert in your area so I can't tell whether these provide clean DC power. For example do they use a components that add noise or is it clean DC? I've done a lot of searching and cannot find the answer.
All the best,
Chris
Right off the top: Yes, any other battery with an appropriate voltage and current capacity will work as well as the super-special audiophile one.
Many modern batteries have some circuitry on board to, for instance, cut the battery off before it runs dead flat, or protect against short-circuits. But in normal use, they all deliver DC electricity that's clean as a whistle.
However.
Anybody who seriously claims that running hi-fi gear from a battery instead of wall power will give you...
* Improved dynamics
* Blacker backgrounds
* More natural sounding highs
* Better defined bass
* A larger soundstage
* More holographic imaging
...does not deserve your money, for that battery or for any of their other products.
I would go so far as to say that they do not even deserve the money of Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, or a professional puppy-drowner.
The Computer Audiophile forums could be better, too. This wizard manages to list several ways in which uncontrolled observations cause us to see and hear things that aren't there... and then turns around and say that that's why blind tests are useless!
'Cos the reason why people think audio voodoo works, and then don't think it does on the rare occasions when someone takes the trouble to do a blinded test, is because audio placebos don't stop working just because you've discovered that they don't do anything real. And because blinded tests encourage you to give up those placebos that you previously thought made stuff sound better, you'll then be listening to music through less ridiculously expensive gear that doesn't have those wonderful placebos, and this will make you unhappy.
Or something.
Here's another parade of forum-post explanations for why blinded tests tend not to say what audiophiles want them to.
But the Audiophile himself chimes in further down that first thread, and doesn't really disagree. And he also posted in this thread, to say that in his experience audio bits read from a solid-state drive sound better than the same bits read from a spinning drive.
And here a Computer Audiophile blogger explains that the stress of a blinded test "makes it harder to remain objective".
I now choose my words carefully when I say:
For fuck's sake, people.
As I've written before, these attitudes on my part are not just knee-jerk "scientism" that assumes that empirical testing always beats personal experience. A hard-core attitude like this is foolish, when you're talking about unquantifiable things like "how good that painting is" or "how good that music sounds".
My opinion, rather, arises from the large number of tests done in the course of, for instance, developing lossy compression algorithms, investigating the neurology of hearing, and actually testing weird audiophile claims.
Over and over and over it has been shown that the ear is, if anything, even easier to fool than the eye, and that those who claim a special ability to detect differences in stimuli better than mere modern instrumentation and the scientific method can identify, are mistaken.
And it doesn't matter much what those stimuli are. Dowsers, wineexperts, "intuitivehealers", audiophiles; they're obviously very different in their scope of activity and the likelihood that their activities will cause misery and disaster, but presuming they're sincere, they're all making analogous mistakes for analogous reasons.
Getting back to audio gear that's alleged to sound better when running from a battery than when running from the mains: The makers of this gear may somehow have managed to screw up their power-supply design so badly that the thing really does run better from battery. But that is the only reason why I am not comfortable in betting my life that they are completely wrong.
In this respect, the choice of battery or mains power is rather like the choice between valve or transistor hi-fi amplifiers. A properly-designed transistor amp should be, and as many blinded tests have demonstrated definitely is, audibly indistinguishable from a properly-designed valve amp.
Valve amps sound better when overdriven into distortion, which is why the "valve sound" is such a big deal for guitar, and other musical-instrument, amplifiers.
But a hi-fi amp should not ever be driven that hard.
Show some golden-eared types a badly-designed valve amp that really does sound different from a transistor one (though not necessarily very different from a badly-designed transistor amp...), however, and at least some of them are sure to want to throw money at you.
This sort of thing happens over and over in the audiophile world. Never mind the pure frauds like expensive audiophile cables that turn out to be made from garden hoses and hot glue. Look, for instance, at this highly-regarded little amplifier, which is actually very badly designed, and atrocious in every way.
I suppose some of this stuff may come from people's memories of early versions of new technologies, which often genuinely were inferior to the highly-developed versions of older technologies available at the same time. Early transistor amplifiers could sound quite audibly lousy, for instance, because early transistors were quantifiably unable to amplify audio as cleanly and linearly as vacuum tubes. See also early audio CDs, many of which sounded if not unarguably worse than top-quality vinyl or reel-to-reel tape, then certainly not as good as you'd expect from the slogan of "perfect sound, forever" and the alarming price of a CD player in 1983.
The lousy sound of transistor amps in 1958 and CDs in 1983, though, have nothing to do with how they sound today.
Let me make perfectly clear, however, that I've got no problem at all with the notion that sound quality can be compromised on the digital side of your DAC - particularly when you're using a general-purpose computer as your audio source. There are plenty of possible software and hardware issues that can cause clearly audible problems with the sound.
To give only one example: If you're running an operating system like Windows that has multiple sound sources, not all of them may even show up in the "mixer" control panel. So even if you mute everything but the source you want and set every relevant volume control to maximum (as the Computer Audiophile FAQ sensibly suggests), there may still be obvious scratchy interference noises from sources that for whatever reason refuse to mute, and for whatever reason are very noisy. Like, say, a microphone input with no mic plugged into it.
And then there's the analogue side of the audio chain, which for the vast majority of PCs and Macs today is the audio hardware built into the motherboard. That hardware is almost certainly going to be built down to a price and thus, in the very cheapest versions, may have gross distortion on the level of this stair-step alias-tastic output:
Onboard audio hardware is also often not very well shielded from the numerous high-frequency RF sources with which it shares the inside of the PC.
But if you're using a quality internal sound card or any sort of half-decent outboard USB DAC, and if there's nothing on the software side on the PC polluting the bits the DAC, then the notion that the signal coming out will be in any way detectable in a blinded test different between different computers, let alone between one computer running from the mains and an identical one running from a battery, is demented.
Yes, it is possible for an audio system to sound better from battery power than from mains, but only if it's got a badly-designed power supply. If "dirty power from a computer motherboard can result in very audible noise and decreased sound quality", so you need to run even your add-on USB card from battery, never mind the DAC, then there is something severely wrong with that USB card, to the degree that it just won't work properly. Anything that can corrupt digital audio data - remember, this is before the signal even gets to the DAC - in an audible way will also corrupt every other kind of data, and this effect will be noticeable in things as simple as sustained data transfer rates.
And then the Computer Audiophile dude goes and uses a "PCIe riser cable" so he can cram a USB controller card into his tiny computer case - but such a cable is completely unshielded!!1!one! You're running the card from battery power but transferring all of the data to and from it through an antenna?!
UPDATE: Damn, a perfectly good snark ruined - Chris pointed out to me almost immediately that the Computer Audiophile picked a riser cable that already does have shielding!
(I'm sure that if he ever thinks of this, he'll immediately hear the difference and wrap the riser cable with earthed foil, or something.)
Sometimes you strike something that's beloved by audiophiles, inexpensive and functional, like the Tripath "class T" amplifiers (which are their trademarked version of a Class D amp). Built amps of this type, and modules from which you can build your own, are all over eBayandotheronlinevendors. The specs of the cheapest ones aren't very good, but just stick a valve up though the casing, decorate your description of the hardware with some real scientific terms that don't actually apply, keep a wall of pseudo-postmodernist babble in reserve in case of hard questions, and the audiophile market will be fine with it.
Usually, though, audiophile snake oil is expensive, and all you get for your money is a placebo.
This woolly-headedness is for some reason acceptable for audiophile hardware, but not for other technology.
"Well, this is where the GPS says I am, but I think the satellites it's looking at right now lack a certain positional air and musicality. Look, you can see the fix jittering. Well, I can, at least; perhaps your eyes aren't as good. I'll wait until it gets dark so I can try some other satellites when the intervening molecules are cooler."
"I'm pretty sure I play Counter-Strike better when my chair's facing east."
"Water boiled from English 230-volt mains power makes better tea than water boiled from US 120-volt. Everyone agrees 120-volt at 50Hz is almost as good, though."
"My calculator's more accurate when I press the keys more firmly."
Most people would consider statements like these as possible symptoms of a formal thought disorder.
But believing some talisman improves your car's power and mileage, or that a magnetic or copper bracelet helps with your arthritis, or that one should always visit one's astrologer before investing any money, or that water has memory, or that bits and electrons have special properties depending on where they came from?
That's fine, according to a lot of people.
We've gotten past this crap. We no longer believe you can revive a drowned person by blowing tobacco smoke up their arse, we no longer believe the brain's only purpose is cooling the blood, and most of us no longer believe planets whistle around in ludicrous epicycles in order to place humanity at the centre of the universe. And no matter what certain alternative-medicine practitioners say, bleach is not a fucking cure-all.
For pity's sake, we have actually achieved the transmutation of base metals into gold. (Though not the way the ancient alchemists or their rather peculiar modern heirs wanted to do it, which is probably just as well.)
If I were you, I'd forget about taking advice from people who insist, in the face of a world of astonishing technology, that it's reasonable to spend large amounts of money on devices that only make sense if the science and engineering that led to all that amazing technology is actually invalid. I find it particularly galling to see this counterfactual thinking applied to powering of a computer; the people who designed and built the hardware in there, including literally billions of transistors operating at billions of clock ticks per second, have not found any mystic benefit to powering the thing from batteries instead of wall power. But when it comes to the handful of transistors and thousands of cycles per second of a piddling audio output, suddenly some occult force arises that's not amenable to the science that puts supercomputers in your pocket and robot probes on distant planets.
Happily, getting superb audio quality out of a PC is a completely solved problem, thanks to boring old science and engineering. It's not even expensive.
3: Plug in your headphones and/or ordinary inexpensive hi-fi amplifier and decent speakers.
...and that's it.
If you absolutely must spend more money than that, I suggest you buy from an engineering-first, low-bullshit manufacturer like Headroom or Practical Devices. Those people usually have a bit of audiophile tinsel on offer, like expensive capacitor-upgrade kits that don't fare well in blinded tests, but they also have plenty of claptrap-free products.
