"Audiophile Rocks"

If a guy who denounces "all tweaks" as snake oil is recommending setting a free quartz rock on each of one’s transformers. Have any serious audiophiles experimented with other semiconductor crystal rocks?

People that base their brand on attacking stuff are promoting themselves as being smarter than the next guy. They are shameless self promoters. Gene Dellasalla at audioholics based his brand on attacking cable companies and of course built an audience of people who want to believe that $1 a foot cable sound just like $10 a foot cable. The guy at ASR wraps his attacks with a graph so drew in an audience of people who want to believe a $5 component with a good graph is better than a $500 component with a bad graph. It never ends and when the hysterical guys that are attacking stuff are proved wrong they never apologize, never admit it, they just turn up the volume in an attempt to dupe more people into believing their shameless self promotion.

Best to ignore them and test for your self. Good luck with the rocks and let us know how it works out.

Thanks Kota

On a lighter note...  maybe someone here whose terminal audiophilitis has advanced further than mine has (I can still function in society, more or less) will want to test each of these items out and report back to the rest of us if any are helpful.

I can only share what I have previously tested, feel free if you are thinking about something else like power treatments. I haven't tested rocks but did test "heavy hats" made of brass you set on components. Yes they work, but too much $ for the benefit to my system.

Well, after procuring a few potato-sized rose quartz rocks, I placed them on my monoblock amps, external power supplies, and source components. 

It did seem to make a difference, but not necessarily better... at least not for my system. 

I have some HeartSoundAudio devices on my gear so maybe it didn't make much of a difference because the rocks were correcting a problem that I don't have. 

If I had I enough free time to just mess around with rocks, I could remove my HeartSound Holostages and listen with or without the rocks, but frankly since it didn't do much for me I won't fiddle with it.

So, my conclusion is that yes there is something going on there, and if you can get quartz rocks for freee, I do recommend trying it unless you have holostages on your transformers.  

Halz

If you like getting SCAMED jump on it.

Holydean did say "If you can get them for free" so whear's the scam?

For me the strangest phenomena in humans' psyche is that automatic hate for everything that a person has little to no knowledge/experience of. I admit, I was a little like that before as well (just not straight-up hating, only cautiously sceptic), but still opened for my own experiments and findings. And it paid off big time for me.

Good luck if you're starting to experiment with the crystals now - that guy you despise, is developing crystal mixtures for a decade. I rather pay for a finished product, as I don't intend to spend a decade on my own research just on this. Now I'm waiting for my third batch of those Audiophile rocks and looking forward to it, since I can't achieve similar gains/effects on my fairly resolving & tuned system with anything else (and definitely not for that modest price).

@holydean: I'm also using Heartsound's Holostages as room treatments to good effect. Checkout Audiogon member gladmo's system. He gives an informative writeup on them, As stated above, they do come with a generous money back return poicy. Good listening. Jeff

In my system, solid quartz on source devices sounds way too focused on a narrow high freq range. It is harsh, shrill, edgy, and not desirable. I thought it was interesting at first, but quickly realized how imbalanced and unnatural it sounds.

Holostage devices mentioned above are, on the other hand, really excellent. They can be used acoustically and near wires/circuitry. They also clean up very high freq noise. If you get a whole bunch of them in your signal and power paths, yes, they too can be overdone resulting in too much top end energy. But then you can just add the extra device to your acoustic array application.

Koestner, he said "scamed," which must be the past tense of "to scame." So maybe EBM received a free rock and it gave him a bad case of scames. Cautionary wisdom we should all heed, and hope to avoid. 

mxpwladimir, OK... maybe I harshed on the Ebay rock guy a little too quickly. I retract my unkind words about the individual, and will reserve judgement until I hear for myself. But I will say this, he has achieved quite possibly the worst marketed product in all of Audiophiledom. So... sorry to the guy on Ebay selling Audiophile Rocks. 

The Navy used semiconductor devices to help make gear in nuclear submarines more quiet. Bybee spoke of this quite a bit. Shunyata has patents on their semiconductor filtration devices, and documented tests showing any skeptic that their devices perform well. I have Bybee and Shunyata conditioning devices as well. They present a professionally made product, in a professionally packaged presentation. Heartsound Audio’s devices are perhaps far more complicated than all of the above, with many more internal components, ingredients, and trial & error tests used to develop them into what they are today.

I could be wrong, but it appears that the numerous ingredients in Heartsound’s composites and internal components make the rock guy look like he learning about things that others mastered a decade ago. 

So, your report that his products are worth a repeat purchase sounds like a pretty hearty endorsement. Could you please describe for the rest of us what these rocks are, what they do, and why you like them?

Yoby, thanks I'll check it out. 

Gladmo, Aside from equipment, where your favorite place in the room to put them?