THIS BLOG HAS MOVED - click here for new site!

Another of you annoying readers writes:

Dan, I would love to hear your thoughts on the merits of the “Vapor Fuel Technologies” fuel-saving tech discussed here.

I think of EETimes as a fairly reputable website, but discussion of fuel-saving gadgets seem a bit out of EETimes’ area of expertise. In the article, no claim is made regarding burning fuel more completely; it seems the claim is that since combustion event occurs over a shorter period of time, that this somehow more efficient. Still, something about the claim of 30 percent better mileage just strikes me as unlikely.

Strange that the Vapor Fuel Technologies website mentions independent tests by some group called California Environmental Engineering (CEE), but they do not actually provide any formal documentation of the test procedure and results.

Matt

Yep, here we go again.

But this time I found a rabbit-hole that went a lot further than I thought it would.

The Vapor Fuel Techologies (yes, I know…) site raised its first red flag when it proudly mentioned that the company has some patents, as if that has something to do with the usefulness of the thing patented. (All a patent actually means is that the Patent Office doesn’t think your idea is excessively similar to someone else’s - and modern overworked Patent Offices don’t even manage to do that very well. They don’t check, and never have checked, to see whether a patented thing actually works, unless it’s very obviously a perpetual-motion machine.)

OK, so off we go to the “Product” page to find what this awesome patented thing is meant to be, and we discover that VFT are making pretty claims not very different from those made for various fuel vaporisation, or atomisation, gadgets.

Their central claim is a bit different, though. They say that heating the air that’s heading to the combustion chamber causes it to expand, so that less fuel-air mixture goes into the cylinder, and you use less fuel.

Well, OK, that may be true if you can get your engine-management computer to cope with it, but the fuel-injection system in a modern car is perfectly capable of doing the same thing all by itself, whenever you’re asking for less than full power. Putting a ceiling value on the mass of air that can go in to the cylinder will, at best, just give you a car that now uses less fuel at wide open throttle (WOT), because you’ve reduced the “wideness” of that throttle. Now, when you put your foot to the floor, it has the same effect that putting your foot four-fifths of the way to the floor did before. A similar effect occurs when you drive on a hot day; the air is less dense and the maximum power your engine can make is, therefore, slightly lower than it’d be on a cold day.

This does not strike me as something worth paying money for. Just let your air cleaner get filthy and it’ll do the same thing for free.

(Note, now that I think of it, that there’s no connection I can see between Vapor Fuel Technologies and Smokey Yunick’s famous-in-certain-circles “Hot Vapor” engine.)

Also from the Product page: “…improves the combustion process by increasing flame speed and creating the conditions for a chain reaction Autoignition.”

My initial reaction to that was “why the hell would you want that to happen!?”, because there is no reason to actually want fuel to “autoignite” in a petrol engine. If you do manage to substantially accelerate combustion, by for instance using low-octane fuel in a high-compression engine, your engine may indeed suffer from “autoignition”, also known as “knock” or “detonation”. That’s how diesel engines work, but it’s very bad for petrol engines.

Fuel burn time in petrol engines is a compromise, as explained in detail by Tony of the eponymous Guide to Fuel Saving Gadgets on his page about turbulence gadgets. There’s no reason to suppose that it’s just generally good to burn the fuel faster.

Elsewhere on the Vapor Fuel site they mention that the orthodox automotive industry is exploring “HCCI and Autoignition”. This is true; HCCI is “homogeneous charge compression ignition” and “autoignition”, in this case, means controlled autoignition, happening when you want it to and not all willy-nilly, possibly before the piston’s made it to top-dead-centre.

The idea here is to make engines with diesel-like ignition and fuel economy, but conventional-spark-ignition-like emissions (instead of the characteristic “diesel smoke” that’s led to some diesel cars now carrying around a little tank full of “urea-based reductant“, thus instantly spawning a million jokes from people who also make jokes whenever they see the word “methane”).

The idea that you can make a normal spark-ignition engine into one of these new advanced pseudo-diesel designs by just bolting on an air heater strikes me as puerile.

It doesn’t matter what I think of it, of course. You can’t argue with success; if it works, it works.

But the only evidence that it does work, so far as Matt and I can see, is that single test, there on the “Independent test results” page.

This, it turns out, is where the real fun is to be found.

First, that page has an odd side-swipe at “the gasoline HCCI and Autoignition efforts currently underway by others”; those engines, the test-results page says in as many words, would find it “difficult, if not impossible”, to just do an EPA highway cycle test.

I presume what they meant to say was that their competitors would have difficulty achieving their claimed mileage improvement in an EPA test, but this sort of lack of attention to detail may be in some way related to the fact that the Vapor Fuel Technologies EPA test is stated as having happened almost two years ago now, and yet… still no sign of anybody else taking advantage of this amazing 30% MPG improvement. Or even a replication of the test.

Oh, but wait a minute - where was it that this test apparently took place, again?

At “California Environmental Engineering … an EPA recognized and California Air Resources Board (CARB) certified independent test laboratory”.

That name rings a bell.

That’s right, regular readers - that’s the same lab that said the Moletech Fuel Saver works!

California Environmental Engineering were mentioned in that mysterious disappearing Herald piece about the Moletech gizmo, and I noticed then that CEE seemed to be a bit keen on the old fuel-saving miracle products.

But I very severely underestimated how many of these talismans and potions they’ve tested, invariably with positive results.

On top of the marvellous yet mysterious Moletech molecular modifier, CEE are also said to have given their stamp of approval to “Microlon” (PDF), and something called the “CHr Fuel Improvement Device” (PDF), and this (PDF) hydrogen-injection thing, and this other “HHO” gadget, and the Nanotech Fuel Corporation “Emissions Reducing Reformulator” (PDF), and the “Rentar Fuel Catalyst“, and the “Fuelstar fuel combustion catalyst“, and the “Green Plus (liquid!) fuel catalyst“, and the “Omstar D-1280X fuel conditioner“, and some other “Fuel Saver” back in 2003, and the Advanced Fuel Technologies carburetor for two-strokes back in 2000, and the “Hydro-Cell Emissions Reducer” (PDF), and the Hiclone turbulence device, and the CHEC HFI Hydrogen Fuel Injection system (PDF), and some HyPower product or other (I’m not sure which, because the PDF links on HyPower’s Test Results page are broken), and this “Brown’s Gas” doodad, and the SV Technology “DynoValve” crankcase-ventilation thingy, and the Petrol.Net Fuel Additive (though this time CEE’s test is, amusingly, mentioned on the testimonials page…), and the Hy-Drive On-Board Electrolyzer. And it goes on, and on, and on…

And yet, not a one of ‘em’s being fitted to, poured into or waved over cars on the production line yet, bringing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars per year to their brilliant inventors. All are still being sold over the counter to individual motorists, or being offered as this year’s sure-fire investment opportunity.

People who design engines strike a balance between power, economy and driveability. An engine that lets a family car deliver 75 miles per gallon, but has power and torque curves that look like different areas of the Swiss Alps, is no use for normal automobiles.

Car companies have been tuning, balancing and refining their products for more than a hundred years. And racing engine designers have pushed pretty much every oddball modification to its screaming limits. But now we’re expected to believe that Vapor Fuel Technologies have just, for the very first time, thought of deliberately heating the intake charge - you know, like a non-intercooled turbocharger, except without the boost - and discovered that doing that is good for what ails you.

And to support their claim, they show us a report from a “laboratory” that apparently never met a mileage improver it didn’t like.

Pull the other one.

Quite a while ago, I was wondering when Gigabyte would update their i-RAM solid-state drive. The i-RAM turns ordinary memory modules into what looks to the computer like a SATA hard drive, except faster. For some tasks, way, way faster.

Well, Gigabyte haven’t made a bigger, better, faster, cheaper i-RAM yet, but I am indebted to a reader for the knowledge that another outfit has. And to The Tech Report for their excellent review of this new SSD, the ACard ANS-9010.

(There are a few other reviews, too. You can also download a PDF manual from the ACard site, here.)

The ANS-9010 has lots of great features, including a couple of unexpected ones. It uses dirt cheap DDR2 RAM (preferably ECC; if you use non-ECC RAM, the drive will use a ninth of the memory capacity to do its own error detection and correction). It has eight memory slots so you can populate it up to 16Gb quite cheaply (maximum capacity: 64Gb). And it also, of course, has a backup battery, so you won’t lose data if you turn the computer off.

If you leave the power off for more than a few hours the battery may go flat, though, so the ANS-9010 also has a slot for a CompactFlash card, onto which the contents of the drive can be copied when it loses power, or whenever you press a button on the front of the drive. (There’s also a button to copy the CompactFlash contents back into the RAM, overwriting whatever was there before.)

The ANS-9010 also has two SATA sockets on the back. It can pretend to be two drives, so you can plug it into a RAID controller and make a two-drive stripe-set for even faster transfer rates.

So that’s all great.

The only problem with the ANS-9010 is that it lists for $US400, empty, and doesn’t seem to have a significantly lower street price. So even if you’ve got eight 2Gb DDR2 modules just sitting around and so can populate an ANS-9010 to a good-enough-for-a-boot-drive 16Gb for free, it’ll still cost you an easy 1.5 times as much as a 300Gb Western Digital VelociRaptor. The ACard drive’s seek speed will beat any moving-parts drive by a mile, but in most other tests the VelociRaptor will at least be even with the SSD - and it’s got tons more capacity.

And then there are Flash-RAM SSDs.

When the i-RAM came out, it was very expensive per gigabyte, but it had no real competition. There were no other solid-state drives on the consumer market then, if you didn’t count slow memory cards in cheap PATA or SATA adapters.

But now, computer stores all have several flash-RAM SSDs on the shelves. And $US400 will buy you a lot more than 16Gb of SSD capacity. If you populate the ACard drive to 32Gb you’ll be paying as much as you would for a 64Gb SSD with an SLC controller.

(SLC stands for single-level cell, as opposed to the multi-level cell controller that cheaper Flash SSDs use. MLC controllers can, as I mentioned in my SSD Shootout, give you a computer that occasionally just freezes for some large fraction of a second.)

The Tech Report review compared the ANS-9010 with various moving-parts drives, including a VelociRaptor. But their comparison also included an i-RAM, a couple of cheaper Flash SSDs, and an Intel X25-E Extreme Flash SSD (which they’d reviewed before).

A “32Gb” X25-E (real formatted capacity 29.7 gibibytes) will set you back about $US600, which is also about what it’ll cost you to buy an ANS-9010 ($US400) plus eight brand-name 2Gb DDR2 modules, at current prices.

The ANS-9010 edged out the X25-E for most tests, but the difference was almost always too small to be noticeable. And for a few real-world tests, like system boot time, the fancy SSDs lost to boring old hard drives!

(If you’re wondering how this can possibly be the case, it’s because system boot speed is something that’s immensely important for consumer PCs, so there are lots of tweaks and optimisations to make it as fast as possible for a normal consumer computer to boot from its normal consumer 7200RPM hard drive. Many of those tweaks turn out to reduce performance if you’re booting from something that’s very unlike a hard drive. Note, however, that the spread from the fastest to the slowest device in The Tech Report’s boot-time test was only 15.5 seconds, so it doesn’t matter that much either way.)

The ANS-9010 did really well in the IOMeter test, but that’s irrelevant to people with normal PCs, because it measures how well a drive can handle multiple users in a server application. Old-style ultra-expensive solid-state drives often ended up doing this sort of thing, and it’s great to see that there’s now a good option for people who want that sort of server but aren’t made of money. For the tasks that people do with everyday PCs, though, IOMeter tests mean nothing.

So I suppose the shifting sands of the computer market have claimed another product. Us dorks were all waiting for an improved i-RAM, and now it’s finally come along, and it’s exactly what we wanted. But we might as well just get a little Flash SSD, or a VelociRaptor, which’ll give us more drive capacity and about the same performance.

15%-off at Kmart, and a bunch of the new 2009 sets have arrived.

I thus felt compelled to pick up some consecutively-numbered Lego construction vehicles:

One #7630 Front-End Loader
Two #7631 Dump Trucks (their 15%-off price is particularly good when compared with the US list price)
One #7632 Crawler Crane…

…which is a big almost-Technic set (see also, #744) whose main boom looks distressingly POOP-y. But it’s actually not so bad, since the boom is made out of these and these, both new pieces for this set.

The new crane particularly appealed to me, and not just because it’s got the nifty new chunky tracks. I’ve been re-reading J. E. Gordon’s classic Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down, and this crane provides a perfect demonstration of how real cranes stay in one piece - it has a strong-in-compression-but-weak-in-tension boom, which is kept in compression by a strong-in-tension-but-useless-in-compression cable. The result is a simple tensegrity structure which, in a sense, gets stronger the more you load it.

If I give the crane to a kid, I may require them to endure a lecture on this subject.

A reader writes:

From: John
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: re your rod magnets.
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:35:17 +0900

Dear Dan,

Amazing,!!! I was looking for what was available and came across your page, and it seems you have what I am looking for.

I am a retired engineer who has had a bee in my bonnet for years about using magnetic force to produce a reliable motor that requires no electricity.

I had a reasonable plan of how to do it but like most never quite got round to doing it.

Now I am looking at videos from YouTube showing how many people have all had the same idea.

I would like to know if you do a pack of 1/4inchx1′long high powered magnets and if so how much in total I am thinking of say twenty to start with.

There is a video under the heading of free energy by a company called Tesla comp. in the States who look like they have cracked it and it is worth watching.

if you could, I would like a price list showing the type of magnet, and the price per pack and of course the number in the pack including freight costs to Australia.

If you have more detailed information that you think would be of help please email me and let me know.

I am really very keen to go into this while I still can.

I served in the royal navy as a saturation diver and worked on the first nuclear subs.

Because they leaked badly (there was a team of eight) we all got cooked about three times and all had problems with cancer of some kind, I got cancer of the bone but am the only one of the team left, and have been on chemo for thirty years. However that is beginning to lose its effectiveness.

As you can guess like all those involved nobody owns up to what they did so no compensation for any including a lot of friends I made in the U.S. Navy.

I look at it that I am still here so you never know.

So i just get my pension for what it is.

Maybe I will come up with something that will pay better, you never know.

It was nice to find your web page and your sense of wit.

All the best and look forward to hearing from you.

John
Western Australia

My reply:

I can only urge you to find something better to do with the remainder of your retirement.

This sort of quest has, on the very very numerous times it has previously been tried, at best led to nothing but frustration and disappointment. I’ve written about it previously.

I don’t sell magnets, I just wrote about them a few times. It’s easy to get NIB magnets of all shapes and sizes, from miniscule to large and very dangerous, on eBay these days.

The two outfits that provided me with various magnets for my two big reviews were Otherpower’s Forcefield Magnets and Engineered Concepts. (There was also Amazing Magnets…

…but they’re not really what you’re looking for here.)

I’m not sure exactly which video you’re referring to, because the brilliant - but also rather deranged - Nikola Tesla is almost unavoidable in all areas of electrical “weird science”.

(And, of course, a measure of magnetic field strength is named after him. According to the units that bear their names, Nikola Tesla is worth 10,000 Carl Friedrich Gausses!)

The first “TESLA free energy generator” video I found on YouTube/Google Video when I just did a search was this one:

The fact that this video obviously comes from a well-played VHS tape, yet the company responsible still hasn’t managed to “reinvent the electric power companies in America”, may tip you off to the fact that the product on offer is not quite as valuable as the video makes out. This company is in fact “Better World Technologies”, run by one Dennis Lee, who I have also written about previously. There are a number of other outfits doing essentially the same thing Dennis is doing.

I apologise if this isn’t the video you were talking about, but I think you’ll find that most, if not all, other such works on YouTube, etc, fall into two categories.

The first category is hobbyists who’re barking up much the same tree that you’re considering, and who may or may not think they’re making progress. Often, measurement mistakes like not correctly reading the RMS output of a device make it look as if it’s doing something; the poor hobbyist in this situation may spend years trying to find the “minor bug” that must be the only reason why his contraption can’t charge its batteries faster than it empties them.

(At this juncture, allow me to recommend the Pure Energy Systems Wiki, PESWiki, which is all about “breakthrough clean energy technologies”. It has articles about just about every currently popular free-energy scheme, plus equivalents like “run your car on water” systems. Most of the things documented on PESWiki are utterly preposterous and, in my opinion, not considered nearly critically enough, but it’s a great reference source, to see if even True Believers think they’ve made Device X work, or if they find the claims of Promoter Y plausible. PESWiki has a whole directory page about Dennis Lee.)

The second category of YouTube free-energy videos is entirely made, so far as I can determine, by scam artists, who may be deliberately doing what the hobbyists do by accident, or may have any number of other tricks up their sleeves.

Here in Australia, “Lutec” are a big name in the “press releases about free energy” business. They haven’t, to my knowledge, been as successful at the “actually MAKING free energy” aspect of their business.

And then, as we come back toward things that could actually work in the real world, there are outfits like Thermogen, which aren’t selling perpetual motion machines at all, but whose numbers still don’t quite add up.

There are many “free energy” ideas - in the sense of “power that you don’t have to pay for”, not “energy from nowhere” - that really are very promising. High-efficiency solar collectors that’ll fit on a suburban roof, for instance.

Evacuated-tube thermal collectors are very effective, and can be used for simple water heating or to power a heat engine. There’s also considerable promise in photovoltaic concentrator designs, that let you use fewer, higher-quality solar cells - provided you can keep the cells from burning up, and track the sun accurately enough.

(Note also the next letter on that page.)

In closing, I really must urge you in the strongest possible terms to use your remaining years on this planet to do something other than become a footnote, to a footnote, to a footnote, in the Big Book Of Failed Free Energy Ideas.

I am aware that the man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the man who is doing it, but when “it” appears to have many things in common with both finding the Loch Ness Monster and travelling faster than light, I cannot in good conscience advise anybody to invest any time at all in such a miserably hopeless activity.

There was this totally awesome MetaFilter post about the FM3 Buddha Machine. It’s a small plastic device inspired by previous “chant-boxes” - little plastic doodads that look like a small transistor radio, but are only able to emit a small selection of Bhuddish mantras.

As soon as I saw the post, I mentioned that m’notparticularlygoodfriends at DealExtreme offer some of the original chant-boxes for sale.

And then I found some even cheaper ones, and somehow managed to say something about them which a MeFi enthusiast considered at least +2 Insightful. I presume he’s right, because I’ve got no bloody idea what this Buddhist lark’s about.

Which, in itself, probably makes me the number-one global expert on the subject, given the way in which Bhudularity usually seems to work.

Yes, I really have bought one of the very cheapest, four-dollar, DealExtreme chant boxes.

If it turns out to alert me to the Möbius-strip nature of consciousness and midrange immediacy, I will make sure to tell you all.

This is the Arc-AAA LED flashlight I reviewed back in 2001. It’s been in my pocket pretty much constantly since then, which is why it’s now more silver than black. I suppose it now qualifies as a “vintage” LED flashlight.

(I’ve still got the Arc-AAA Limited Edition somewhere, too. I hardly used that one at all - it might be worth something to some nut enthusiast on eBay. The Arc-LS still works A-OK, too, though its rubber switch-boot perished some time ago. It’s happy as a clam with a rechargeable CR123 cells, just like the Mr Bulk LionCub that came out when “RCR123s” were still a bit exotic.)

There’s nothing to break in an Arc-AAA. The only maintenance it needs is an occasional dab of fresh solder on the contact on the back of the lamp assembly. Its on/off “switch” is of the simple turn-the-lamp-head type; you might think that the screw threads might wear out, on a flashlight like this one that’s made of aluminium. But it still seems fine to me. (I’ve cleaned and oiled the threads pretty often, to keep abrasive crud off the threads; an unmaintained Arc-AAA would probably be pretty dodgy by now.)

The LED itself should just very slowly dim as its hours of use mount up. Extremely slowly, actually, for an LED like this that isn’t on for more than a few minutes a day, and isn’t even driven particularly hard except when the battery’s brand new.

So my Arc may still work when it’s as old as my genuinely elderly flashlight.

In the years since I reviewed the Arc-AAA, Arc Flashlight went broke and were, a while later, reborn under new management. They now sell an updated Arc-AAA, plus an excitingly expensive light called the Arc6.

The current Arc-AAA is probably quite a lot brighter than my old one, with the same or better battery life. White-LED lumens-per-watt have improved very fast over the last ten years. I bet you don’t even need a soldering iron to keep the lamp contact shiny any more.

You no longer have to buy an Arc or a Peak if you want a single-AAA-cell LED flashlight, either. There are umpteen other on- and off-brand options in the 1xAAA size. A lot of them have a “one watt” super-LED instead of a 0.1-watt-ish 5mm unit, too. A one-watter in a 1xAAA light will probably be running at a fraction of its rated power, or else it’ll frighten the battery to death in no time. But single-AAA “one watt” lights will probably still give you a lot more light than even a modern 5mm LED is likely to manage.

But I still like my old Arc.

I just saw a Make Money Fast ad on some site or other that promised a “multiple six figure income”.

Now there’s a phrase to conjure with, eh? And as I write this, Google gives an imposing “about 17,600″ results if you search for it.

If you take “multiple” to mean “at least two times”, then I suppose it’s possible that they’re promising you a six-figure income and… another six-figure income.

I prefer to think, though, that all of those pages, in between their misspellings and unpredictable capital letters, are actually offering punters a twelve-figure income.

If the value of “multiple” is three, then there could be an eighteen-figure income going begging!

The Gross Domestic Product of all the nations of the world put together is either about fifty-five trillion or about sixty-five trillion US dollars, depending on how you measure it. That’s only 14 figures. So those 17,600 get-rich-quick pages may, I like to think, be promising that you, by yourself, will be making at least one six-hundred-and-fiftieth of the entire world’s aggregate gross income. Or around one per cent of the GDP of the USA.

Even if “twelve figures” includes two for the cents, you’d still be doing pretty bleeding well.

Or, of course, the promise might only be 12 figures of income in the worthless currency of some collapsing African dictatorship. An eighteen-figure income in Zimbabwe dollars would only be worth a few tens of thousands of US dollars, as I write this. (They announced 100-trillion-dollar - fifteen-digit - banknotes just the other day, not that they’ve got much of a way to pay anybody to print them.)

This reminds me of an old scam that promises to make you money via a mystic series of international currency conversions. The actual promise the scammer makes, though, is that he’ll turn the $1000 you send him into “One Million In Legal Tender Currency!!”, or something similar. Dumb-enough marks presumably don’t notice this, or mistake it for some sort of technical term used by the great Jewish Mercantile Conspiracy whose secret wealth-creation system the scammer claims he’s making available to honest Christian folk. But, of course, the promise actually means that in return for $US1000, you and your fellow suckers are going to get back one million People’s Democratic Socialist Utopia of East Umbopoland Glorified Pfennig-Rands, worth $US7.61.

The idea is that this isn’t a scam, see, on account of how the scammer never promised you anything other than a million units of some currency or other. I think this “loophole” is the same as those of a lot of other scams; it’s utterly worthless in the eyes of the law, but it sounds vaguely-plausible-enough to stop some of the ripped-off suckers from calling the police.

(The people who fall for this sort of thing usually don’t twig to the fact that if there’s some rapid sequence of financial transactions that’s guaranteed to turn $100 into $110, you could just do it over and over until all of the currency in the world resided in your bank account. If your system guarantees a 10% return and you reinvest the gain every time, then if you start with $100 and run the system only 200 times, you’ll have $18,990,527,646.)

I think I know what the real explanation for the “multiple six figure income” thing is, though. It’s just that the people running these scams are, if anything, even dumber than the people who fall for them.

(I await with interest the Google ads this post will attract. How many “figures” do you think will be on offer?)

This MAKE: Blog piece is about this page on the subject of making holes in panels which are, and here’s the tricky bit, both where, and how big, you want them to be. This is a task for which a step drill is, indeed, very helpful.

I don’t actually own any step drills. I cannot imagine why this is, so I just added a set to my eBay sniping list. I do, however, own a couple of tapered reamers, which can achieve much the same thing. They give slightly countersunk hole-sides, which you may not want. But because they’re 100% hand operated, they offer finer hole size control, and a much greater risk of repetitive strain injury.

(I used the reamers a lot when getting 80% through construction of my Thing-a-ma-kit, during our holiday.)

The Make piece says “I also sense a nibbler in his future”. OK, maybe, for panel work. But I’ve got a genuine Adel nibbler, and it’s almost never been useful for anything at all.

Oh, I’ve often found myself thinking “Aha! The nibbler will, at last, pay its way!”… but almost every single bloody time, whatever it was I wanted to cut little rectangular bite after little rectangular bite out of was 0.002mm too thick (I believe that’s 7.87 RCH, in Imperial units) to fit in the nibbler’s jaws.

So back I go to the Dremel or the coping saw or the club-hammer and cold-chisel, again.

Apropos of this, I was just looking through the review-site article announcements that constantly pitter-pat into my Dan’s Data mailbox (I only do announcements via RSS these days, but plenty of sites still have a mailing list as well).

And lo, I found an announcement for a piece called “Do Expensive Home Audio/Video Cables Matter?“, from Digital Trends.

Apparently - imagine my surprise - some guy who sells hi-fi gear says that customers should buy the more expensive cables!

Oh, and you should keep all of your cables “at least four inches off the floor” - there’s a picture of a shiny little cable stand - for some reason.

The reason is not explained. Neither is anything else. Usually articles like this can summon up some BS about the skin effect or jitter or something - for cable stands, I think it’s usually something about the dielectric constant of your carpet. Sometimes you get something quite impressively deranged.

But this article doesn’t bother.

(Cable stands are, by the way, one of the things mentioned on that I Like Jam audiophile page I linked to the other day. Apparently it’s now common knowledge among a certain class of audiophile that badness can leak from the floor into any cable, including optical cables and power cables. I’m not sure whether this is still a problem if you don’t live on the ground floor of a building.)

Digital and analogue? What’s the difference? Spend big bucks - and whatever you do, keep those wires off the carpet!

Even if you don’t have a single analogue interconnect except for your speaker cables, Digital Trends are here to tell you, on behalf of that guy who sells hi-fi gear, that if you’re not spending “20 percent of the entire worth of your system on cable and wire”, you’re doing it wrong.

(Fortunately, it was quite easy for me to unsubscribe from the Digital Trends mailing list.)

If it is, you should probably send it back to the manufacturer.

(Via.)