Audiophile at I-Like-Jam

This is an hilarious bunch of links to unnecessary audio accessories - $1,500 for a mains lead? $30,000 for interconnects! A fool and his money are easily parted it seems.

The Intelligent Chip is a one inch square, bright orange plastic wafer that, when placed on top of a compact disc player for 2-3 seconds, upgrades the disc (CD, DVD or SACD) being played at the time. The sound of the upgraded disc has more detail and articulation, better dynamics and an absence of "digital harshness." Voices are more human-sounding and less synthetic. The upgrade is permanent. Inside the white translucent Intelligent Chip case are two ultrathin, clear polycarbonate sheets, one on each side of the Chip. The manufacturer's product brochure states, "The Intelligent Chip should be put back into the packing case after using, because the packing case can protect the quantum material of the Intelligent Chip, preventing them from leaking."

The nonesense goes on with reference to Schrodinger's cat and other quantum ideas, the summary is the best;

The Intelligent Chip works via coherent quantum superposition and quantum entanglement, in which two coherent light sources - the CD laser and the quantum dot laser in the chip - interact strongly with the atoms and molecules in the CD's polycarbonate layer to produce long-lasting, superior transparency for better optical signal to noise ratio (SNR). Laser light escapes the player via a number of small holes and gaps in the player case. The emitted light from the quantum dot laser instantly comingles with the CD laser light in the room and inside the player.

Now what has escaped these people's attention is that with some CD players you can get the CD to show the number of errors in the bitstream (the Red Book standard specifies Miller Coding so errors are easy to spot). I used to have a Sony machine in the early nineties that had a maintenance mode that would make the display show the error count rather than track number etc. I had several disks that could play end to end with no errors - so, how can improving the s/n of the bitstream signal improve the final analogue sound if the digital signal wasn't noisey enough to give errors in the first place?!
However - the $1,500 power cord really got my goat! I wrote an email to the dude;

Hi,

I just read your review of this power cable - did you write this for a joke or is it a paid-for "advertorial" for the company concerned?

If this power cable produced a measurable difference in sound reproduction why didn't you include some measurements (Total Harmonic Distortion, bandwidth figures, signal-to-noise etc.)? - Would you know how to measure these things?

"...like most other AC products, it will undergo changes in sound for three to five days after its application to a component. Judging the absolute merits of any AC product within this "settling period" will most often prove misleading. "

What, precisely, happens to a power cord during this "bedding in" period? For such a high sum you'd expect the manufacturer to burn the cable in for you!

What, in your view, makes this a good power cord? What was the impedance per metre? What about the capacitance? Do they make a different design for 50hz users? If it is so optimised the difference between 50 and 60Hz is surely significant.

Surely improvements and order of magnitude more significant than this could be achieved by hard-wiring the amp's mains input to the incoming mains feed from the street - even then they have merely used copper cabling for the mile back to the substation.

Regards,

Phil Crawley,

I'll let you know what comes back!
I really feel it's important to stand up against this pseudo-science and trickery.