Synergistic Research: SCAM

[Jud]

5 hours ago, danadam said:

You could audition non-blind and hear it differently than any subsequent audition, if you can't recreate the psychological factors from that initial audition 🙂

 

You can't hear a component again for the first time, so I suppose re-creating the psychology of an initial audition would never be possible.

[semente]

On 6/16/2022 at 1:08 AM, DrT said:

My opinion of Ted Denney is solely based upon his thinking out of the box and inventing products that others have never thought of. His products work in the real world, but unfortunately are difficult to appreciate via Youtube videos and scientific explanation.

 

As you've so eloquently pointed out, the bit in bold is not more than an/your opinion.

It reminds me of a famous Carl Sagan quote:

 

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”

[Jud]

From the Synergistic Research website:

 

Quote

Revive your music by plugging your components into a QLS, (Quantum Line Strip). The QLS features 6 or 9 (5 or 7 in the Schuko version) generously spaced, individual TESLA Power outlets guaranteed to improve your system's performance. These AC line strips are Quantum Tunneled, passing 1'000'000 volts of electricity, pulse modulated at extreme high frequencies through each of the outlets. This creates a path on the conductor's surface that allows electrons to flow more freely, opening up the music and giving uncompressed, realistic live sound.

 

A million volts sounds like a heck of a lot, but this is static electricity from a van der Graaf generator, and you can get a toy one that outputs over 200,000 volts for a couple hundred bucks on Amazon.

 

Now about quantum tunneling: Quantum mechanics is the physics of how our universe works on small scales. One of the fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics that I imagine nearly all of you have heard of is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This tells us that it's impossible to definitively know both (1) where a particle is located, and (2) information such as where it's headed and how fast. As a result of this fundamental uncertainty in the way nature behaves, sometimes we find a particle on "the other side" of some energy "barrier" when it should not have had enough energy to clear that barrier. (Picture a hippo suddenly appearing on the outside of its zoo enclosure. It doesn't happen with hippos, but it happens all the time at subatomic scales.) Because of uncertainty, there was a small but non-zero chance the particle would actually be located on the less probable rather than the more probable side of the energy barrier. We describe this as the particle "tunneling" through the barrier, though no physical tunneling is taking place.

 

The first point to take away from this is that quantum tunneling is happening in every smallest part of the universe (including inside you - some DNA mutations are the result of protons quantum tunneling) trillions upon trillions upon trillions of times every smallest fraction of a second, and shooting sparks at a wire isn't going to make a dime's worth of difference to that.

 

This should be obvious from the very nature of quantum tunneling. Let's look at the definition from Wikipedia:

 

Quote

In physics, quantum tunneling, barrier penetration, or simply tunneling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which an object such as an electron or atom passes through a potential energy barrier that, according to classical mechanics, should not be passable due to the object not having sufficient energy to pass or surmount the barrier.

[Emphasis added.]

 

Look at the words in bold. This is a phenomenon where an object does something it shouldn't have sufficient energy to do. So how is adding energy going to change that? The answer is, it doesn't.

 

So Synergistic Research is using the inapplicable, fancy, science-y sounding term "quantum tunneling" to describe shooting static electricity into copper from a spark generator.

 

Is this simply a problem of terminology? Using Google Scholar, I tried to find any scientific papers dealing with changing the conductive properties of copper by passing static electricity through it, and came up empty. Stuff like changing temperature, even something as simple as mechanical strain (pulling on a wire), yes, but nothing about permanent effects from static electricity.

 

So is quantum tunneling to change electrical properties just entirely hokum? Interestingly, Wikipedia says this:

 

Quote

A European research project demonstrated field effect transistors in which the gate (channel) is controlled via quantum tunnelling rather than by thermal injection, reducing gate voltage from ≈1 volt to 0.2 volts and reducing power consumption by up to 100×. If these transistors can be scaled up into VLSI chips, they would improve the performance per power of integrated circuits.

 

If the folks at Synergistic have actually hit upon a way of changing the properties of electrical circuits via quantum tunneling, we are indeed fortunate they are not making themselves billionaires by getting into the chip business, but instead are humbly using this knowledge that has been the subject of at least one international research project to produce stereo equipment for us audiophiles.

[Superdad]

6 hours ago, Jud said:

If the folks at Synergistic have actually hit upon a way of changing the properties of electrical circuits via quantum tunneling, we are indeed fortunate they are not making themselves billionaires by getting into the chip business, but instead are humbly using this knowledge that has been the subject of at least one international research project to produce stereo equipment for us audiophiles.

!

[yamamoto2002]

10 hours ago, Jud said:

sometimes we find a particle on "the other side" of some energy "barrier" when it should not have had enough energy to clear that barrier. (Picture a hippo suddenly appearing on the outside of its zoo enclosure. It doesn't happen with hippos, but it happens all the time at subatomic scales.)

 

It do happen on hippo sized object with very small probability, which can be calculated applying hippo mass onto Schrödinger equation. IIRC the probability is something like this:

I think, to date, no hippo experienced it, imagine part of hippo body leaked from the zoo barrier caused by tunneling effect :)

[mike1127]

On 6/1/2024 at 7:40 PM, Jud said:

 

You can't hear a component again for the first time, so I suppose re-creating the psychology of an initial audition would never be possible.

 

I find, a lot of people report, that initial impressions aren't very important anyway, but that our perception of a component settles in over time. As I said previously, I think this is because after getting used to something we start to listen without expectations (or such moments happen spontaneously). Whereas first listens often have a lot of expectations or imagination attached. I think blind quick switching can also have a lot of conceptualization or imagination attached to it. It depends on what the listener is doing.