AUDIO-TWEAKS from demagnetizing to varnishing （2）

Published:2011/8/19 1:15:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

By Harry Baggen

The activities the American company CyroPlus are less strange, and they also have a technical explanation. What they do is to chill interconnecting cables and speaker cables, as well as individual valves and ICs or even entire circuit boards, down to absolute zero. The idea behind this is that it restores the original crystalline structure of the materials in the cables or components. You can buy treated cables from them, but you can also place an order to have your own cables chilled. The prices are quite reasonable, aside from the cost of shipping to the US.

It used to be that tuning or tweaking hi-fi equipment was primarily something done by hobbyists, but in the meantime it has turned into a professional business. Well-known companies, such as Van Medevoort in the Netherlands and Swoboda Audio in Germany, offer modified consumer equipment with all sorts of tweaks, such as optimizing the damping of the enclosure, upgrading the power supply, or modifying subcircuits (such as using special opamps in a CD output stage). There’s no doubt that such extensive measures definitely affect the sound quality and can yield very good end results. In most cases, though, it’s a costly enterprise, since it takes a lot of work and time to modify an existing piece of equipment.





Finally we have a nice idea for the minimalists among our hi-fi enthusiasts. When you think of a hi-fi amplifier, you usually think of a big box with a hefty power supply (and just now we want to leave aside controversial issues such as how much feedback gives the best results). Under the motto ’keep the circuitry and circuit-board tracks between the input and output of the amplifier to a minimum’, the German Charles Altmann has created an amplifier stage consisting of nothing more than a power IC on a circuit board with input and output sockets and a potentiometer. It bears the suggestive name ’BYOB amplifier’, and the circuit is powered by a car battery. As Altmann finds that a metallic enclosure generates undesirable vibrations, the amplifier is supplied on a small, nicely finished wooden board. The photos on his website should inspire quite a few audio enthusiasts to make something similar on their own.




As you can see, hi-fi is truly an open-ended subject!

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