At what point does audio snake oil become fraud? - Page 4

Thank Goodness. It seemed out of character. Sometimes sarcasm escapes me.

Escapes me too!

Still, the point is you can't prove a negative, in this case that ET's do not exist. However if someone does have the belief that they do, and especially that they have been here, then it is incumbent upon them to provide the proof that they have, not for anyone else to prove they have not.

My own view is that the Universe is so vast that it seems massively improbable that there is not life, even intelligent sentient life out there. I'm just not convinced that they have been here.

This show brought up many things I haven't heard before.
http://www.history.com/shows/ancient-aliens

http://sciencereligiononline.com/wp-...e-Visitors.jpg
http://ancientaliens.files.wordpress...cts22_02a1.jpg
http://www.ceticismoaberto.com/imagens2/jato1.jpg

Never!!!

You owe it to yourself as a (hopefully) intelligent human being to do research. Almost any Physics II student could tell you the basics of electricity, magnetism and light...They have not changed substantially in the past...few billion years.

I bought my cables based upon looks and decent price. Not claims of superior performance. I could have re-sheathed zip cord and re-terminated it but it was not worth the effort to me. I bought them and forgot about it...They work and look good, end of story.

If you want to believe in "magic" wood or stone resonance enhancers or spacers please be my guest. Equipment measures well or it does not.

Life out "there"??? No doubt that there is. Millions of galaxies and we cannot make it out of ours. The universe is of unimagineable size to us, it is a 12+ billion year old continuously growing bubble. Take a look at the Hubble Telescopes Deep Space image, a tiny, tiny piece of space with thousands of galaxies visible.

Believing "snake oil" is not fraud...It is your own fault for not educating yourself between fact and fiction.

I am not yet a scientist (PhD) but I hope to be someday. There may be others on here with their opinions. Look at their opinins and make your own, informed decisions.

So one of the aliens left an abductee with their probe.

Hehehe!

Sort of looks like the Travelocity gnome.

I've watched a few of those Ancient Aliens shows. I find it hard to believe that aliens that made it to our planet would be riding on rocket ships and wearing space helmets . They'd have to be much more advanced than that to make it here with rocket powered machinery. Rockets are low tech space travel.

Still - it is interesting speculation.

No, it's wider than that. Here's the abstract:

"Where Did the Negative Frequencies Go?

Even a cursory read of the academic literature suggests that in audio, all that matters has been investigated and ranked accordingly. But his 40-year career in music performing, record engineering and production, audio reviewing, and editing audio magazines leads John Atkinson to believe that some things might be taken too much for granted. The title of his lecture is a metaphor: all real numbers have two roots, yet we routinely discard the negative root on the grounds that it has no significance in reality. Perhaps some of things we discard as audio engineers bear further examination when it comes to the perception of music. This lecture will offer no real answers but perhaps allow some interesting questions to develop."

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

Really? I thought he was being serious, and good on 'im I say!

HT, have you read about any of this?? If not, why the incomprehension?

By the by, Von daniken was not the 'grandfather' of this..some say the bible was haha, but go back to Sitchen or Velikovsky. Anyways, go grab a copy of some of them and have a read, fascinating stuff. Well worth reading in their own right. The conclusions? Well, that is for each, but as I say well worth a read.

Rather than blindly closing your eyes (geddit?? haha) I love seeking out this alternative stuff. At the very least it is always inventive. And as I always say, you gotta read it before you can dismiss it. Same with the good old conspiracy theory, love 'em. At the very least, you do walk away with a broader understanding of 'other think', and you start to realise you can never underestimate the power of the mind to convince themselves of any old thing.

That as an example has been evident in this thread. Ok, thee and me will no doubt think these guys are wackjobs, but hey, as I have tried to point out (and CI did a good job of illustrating) these guys DO believe it for the most part.

That alone removes it from the 'pure fraud' category in my book.

Still, I personally like the latest twist the thread has taken, it cut's straight to the heart of the divisions in these debates, and shows us that we all defend our 'religion' if you will.

Nothing more complicated than that. And, funnily enough, we defend it up to a 'point', when we suddenly 'cross over' to our own personal beliefs and we reverse! Same in audio, X, Y and Z are stupid ideas, and *Bill* is with me all the way there, yet when we get to Q...ha, Bill and I depart.

So it all depends on our own personal lines in the sand. Yet how many of us truly recognise that?

Very few, we are all happy (especially when hunting as a pack) to go for the jugular of those stoopid sunjectivists, all the while convinced of out own superior knowledge and lack of biases or beliefs...until we hit our own line in the sand. And if it was true that giz did feel these things then here is a perfect example fo that, it is fine to 'attack' the subjectivists for silly cable beliefs, you'all agree with him, till he suddenly comes up with a departure point, then the whole thing flips eh? (as I said, good onya giz if it is true, if not let us know. either way it was a great fork in the road)

These debates would be a lot more harmonious and productive if a few more realised we are all exactly the same deep down.

Have I ever told you what I love about forums?? The individual raw human nature on display. THAT is the fascination! Forget IMD and THD blah blahblah hahaha, give me the eternal hypocrisies and emotions!!

I mean, take the betrand russel example from earlier...in any case OTHER where our prejudices did not align, we'd be crying 'strawman' would we not?

So, simply because we do not agree with 'von daniken', heck, lets just make up some silly example of a flying teapot (he's wrong BTW, it is a frickin coffe cup, he could not even get THAT right!), and from the inability to disprove that he (and 'you all') take that as proof that this alternative hypothesis is wrong?

Give me strength. I mean for sure, argue your point solidly and strenuously, but by crikey be honest and have integrity whilst you do so!

Negative waves eh? Far out.


Hmmm. My take on something as encompassing as Toole's "Sound Reproduction" book, was lots of questions remain, further investigation is warranted, etc, etc.
What literature are you referring to?


Isn't there an entire industry built from the scrapheap of audio engineering discard? Not sure if many would want further examination. If any at all.
Wouldn't you be barking up the wrong tree here? I thought the AES cabal is comprised almost entirely of deaf robot engineer/science types, conspiring to suppress the real audio breakthroughs?
Audio you say??? I'd rather stare at a meter...

cheers,

AJ

We called it rocket based on what our ancestors carved onto stone per their understanding of it. It could have been different kind of propulsion system to get from and to the mother ship in the orbit. If the visitors require different air or mixture of air to breath, they may very well need some kind of apparatus or there may be a need to isolate themselves to avoid contamination.

What, AES couldn't afford a professional stand-up comic?

They can but I heard some of the folks posting here were busy at other gigs.

Thank heavens professionals review who gets to present and who doesn't....

Since UFOs have been seen all over the world LONG before humans ever considered the possibility of powered flight, and by the very definition of UFO- Unidentified Flying Object- something that is flying that we cannot identify as a balloon, plane, etc, that alone indicates they MUST be real in some physical sense.

Ever see the pictographs inside the tombs of egypt showing electric bulbs with a wire coming out of it?Explain how there is no soot at all anywhere in any tomb even though supposedly the workers/artisans had only torches soaked in tallow for illumination.

Explain the Nazca lines. They can only be seen from the air. Explain how ebntire mountain tops were shaved clean of millions of tons of granite and there are no debris piles. Explain how these plains are perfectly flat after maching yet graders and laser levels were not around.

Calculate the time in man-hours and manpower needed to carve, transport and elevate over 2 million 20+ton stones to build the pyramids with seams so accurate that a dollar bill cannot be squeezed between them. Explain the hyper accurate load calculations that allowed such huge internal unsupported galleries.

Explain 100 ton stones with layered, laser-straight grooves cut with a hyper accurate depth of 1/8". Explain stones that are rhombus and trapezoid shaped that are hyper accurate and without machining flaws that fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle with tolerances of less than half a millimeter over a distance of 200 ft built over 5,000 years ago.

No one can accurately explain the actual physical origin of life and how a human brain actually process data, sensory input of emotions. All we do is try to measure gross electrical activity and temperature changes.

Please explain why, if we cannot explain what we see and use every day why some refuse to accept the POSSIBILITY that there are realms of consciousness and existence we have not discovered or explored.

Explain the non-hoaxed (easy to tell the real deal from hoaxed) crop circles that now entail digital coding and three dimensional representations.

and why the babylonians (?) had batteries.

the balbeck monoliths

The dumbing down of America is alive and well and on full display in this site with the last few posts.

I hope you were sitting down a couple posts ago.

EDIT: Oops, too late.


People are quick to assign supernatural solutions when they cannot begin to fathom how something could have been accomplished otherwise. When you do not have any significant practical or "common sense" experience specific to a seemingly incomprehensible subject at hand, the most extreme answers tend to appear to be the most plausible.

I assume you have already seen a couple of those NOVA specials about the building of the pyramids and the Sphinx and have been left unsatisfied by their much more pragmatic answers to some of these questions?

Like others have stated here, it seems more likely than unlikely that some form of alien life exists somewhere else in the vast universe and maybe many different forms. However, I think one of the largest obstacles to the theories of alien life intervention here would be the incredibly vast distances that would need to be traveled to get here. Unless you argue for the possibility that these alien life forms have found a way to break the laws of physics? And if you are, then aren't you making the same sort of argument that you take issue with the subjectivists for?


I know the place well . I was drinking the koolaid there for a while before I learned what really goes on at that site. I maintain a "make nice" demeanor there. At least long enough until I sell back some of the nonsense purchases I made because it had the "Hoffman" name on it. Actually, there is a smaller percentage of decent and reasonable folks there. I count you among them, for sure.

1) Babylonian babes needed something for their vibes.
2) Baalbeck megaliths (I had to look that up ) No idea how they were made. Too bad there apparently aren't any records that survived or were made on the techniques used. One thing we can be sure of if there were aliens. They took people into the mother ship to have sex with them.

Did you buy Grover silver cables, CI?

No. Fortunately, never fell prey to the voodoo endorsements. I only got suckered into purchasing some random, obscurely oddball music releases which is about the only kind of work he can get. Perhaps we can all chip in for Giz's birthday?


Either that sort of thing, or a few mainstream popular titles which have been so overplayed in the popular media culture that I would very rarely if ever want listen to them again anyway.

Just over a hundred years ago, the idea of men walking on the moon would have had you in a straight jacket or making baskets. Remember the Dick Tracy cartoons? They had wrist watch sized communicators LONG before Star Trek was even an idea, Today, cell phones with more computing power than the UNIVAC of only 50 years ago which BTW, took 10 operators using rotary switches to enter strictly numerical data was vacuum tube-based and weighed 150 tons and ate up power at an incredible rate.

Today we can grow skin, bone, ears and noses on a biological scaffold. Cochlear implants allow people to hear, and occular implants are beginning to allow the blind to see. Computer-operated exo-skeletons allow people to walk and lift hundreds of pounds without breaking a sweat.

We can control a missile fired from a submarine 9,000 miles away and from an easy chair in Pasadena,California, fly it through the center of a window.

With all that, we BARELY have the capability today to perform the engineering feats that we see that were performed thousands of years ago.

The Encyclopedia Brittanica was used for years as an indicator of the largest collection of knowledge available to anyone and weighed a couple hundred pounds. Today that and thousands of times MORE data is at your fingertips from your cell phone/dictionary/ calculator/GPS/ camera/ game collection in your shirt pocket. Just 20 years ago a cell phone the size of a brick was common.

Why does anyone make the assumption (based on zero actual proof), that humans are the only life form in existence and /or capable of building such devices or traveling to other planets?

Just because you don't want to accept the possibility that there is MUCH more to human history and the history of events on this planet does NOT mean that extraordinary things have not happened.

Why is there such a hesitance to accept the POSSIBILITY of things we cannot explain using the understanding we have today?

I cannot say conclusively WHAT happened and how we lost the technology. Likewise, NO ONE on the face of the planet can PROVE such events did NOT occur. Remember, it will only take ONE small piece of evidence to prove they have been here. That evidence will be found.

I accept the POSSIBILITY; some do not and resort to mildly tempered insults and sarcasm. Please explain rationally -and using scientifically vetted methodologies to PROVE (this will require physical evidence)- that such events involving intelligent and sentient beings from other than Earth were NOT involved.

Please explain the thousands of carvings and pictures the world over from every culture depicting craft flying in the sky and millennia-old texts describing craft flying through the sky with accompanying flames and "thunder". Why does every culture the world over refer to the "star men/gods"?

BTW, I am sure they don't need cable lifters made from 100yr old power line insulators either.

It would have been interesting to hear some of you try to explain the idea of music or video being encoded with just 1's and 0's thirty years ago and sent thousands of miles over a twisted par phone cable to the top engineers of the day.

Simple. Because Star Trek movies tell us that once these pointed ear people come here and we show them the right hand signal, they stay and help us forever with logical arguments. Of course it is possible someone used the wrong finger salute and they left after they built us a few buildings.


How would that not occurred had Aliens not existed?

What is all this prove a negative stuff? I think the support for proof that extra-terestials have visited earth is weak. Could of it have happened, sure, but I tend to be on the skeptic side. At this point in our development, I don't see getting much out of our solar system much less to distant stars and planets. Anyone who has watched Brian Cox's recent shows on the Science channel realize the absolutely enormous distances involved. It boggles the imagination and is fascinating at the same time. I beleive that other intelligent life is in the universe but I don't think the rules of physics are going to be broken and without speed of light or near speed of light travel, the distances are just too vast not to mention why do humans think that being smart increases the chances you will last longer than any other life form (and man there is a lot of extinct life on this planet).

In addition, as far as space travel, it sure hasn't kept up with all the advancements GIZ has mentioned. Heck, we can't even afford to go back to the moon and a manned Mars mission I think will not happen even in this century (my prediction). It is just hop, skip, and a jump in astrological distances and the challenges are extremenly daunting. By the way, we are still driving cars based on the combustible engine and I would have expected something better after all these years....refined yes, replaced, no not yet.

Besides, we are all dead in the end anyway....and I don't beleive in ghosts:-)

Just MAYBE, the "laws of physics" (as we humans understand them) ONLY apply to this area of the universe.

We just had an experimental aircraft flying in atmosphere at over 13,000mph.

I space, the craft we use travel at 17,000+ mph and yet humans inside survive.

In 1903 we were amazed at a flight of 250 ft and an elevation of 20ft.

We have been to the moon, sent robots to Mars and we are exploring farther.

You acknowledged the possibility of ET life so that is a start.

Just maybe, they have perfected something we have yet to discover.

I think the probability of alien life is almost certain, but "intelligent life" is probably rarer. I would not be surprised at all to find some kind of primitive life on Mars or some of the moons of the planets. That said, we have no evidence that the rules of physics are different in other places in the Universe other than in black holes were everything goes to hell. That said, I am a big proponent of pushing out further and think space and space travel, aliens, etc is fascinating.

Just MAYBE, the "laws of physics" (as we humans understand them) are incomplete and there are things which we haven't discovered yet that will one day explain the things we can hear in audio that cannot be measured.

Are these two different in any significant way, Giz? I assume you would disagree with the second.


Have you seen those NOVA episodes I made reference to earlier, btw?

Yeah, I agree that it's fascinating. Perhaps out of place for this site, but discussions of this sort are always interesting. But Giz seems to suggest that unless you believe that aliens built the pyramids, your somehow dismissing the possibility of any sort of life existing anywhere else in the entire freakin universe. What I find fascinating is that despite the fact that we have shared the earth with other intelligent creatures since we crawled out of the slime, we haven't even been able to really understand the language of any other earth based life form. But somehow we would be able to fathom how to communicate with creatures that would have completly different genetic, social, and evolutionary, backgrounds. Hey, speaking with them would present no problem at all but speaking and understanding another, mammalian life form evolved on the same planet under the same stresses...that we find difficult.

Thanks, htcritic. There has been something lodged in the back of my mind that I couldn't recall ever since this whole tangent started. That's it! The communication issue. It is truly a massive one. But I'm sure it will be brushed aside by the "just look how much incredible progress we have made as a species in a relatively very short period of time. Alien life forms may have been around a lot longer than us, are a lot smarter than us, therefore, it's entirely plausible they can bridge any colossal communication gap".

Maybe so, but it adds another monumental logistical issue to overcome, along with several others. Occam's Razor would suggest simpler answers. And Giz would likely agree, if this were audio we were talking about. Humanity, thy name is inconsistency.