Clever Little Clock - high-end audio insanity?

I don't understand why people are so keen on trashing this particular product. It has no less scientific legitimacy than any number of tweaks that you wouldn't dare criticize unless you were prepared to weather a storm--green pens, cable lifts, many high-priced cables themselves, isolation devices for electronics, etc. If we start doubting clocks, where will it end?

(When I first saw the Intelligent Chip, I thought it was a spoof. Then I found out they were really selling the thing. Now I think Machina Dynamica is actually a performance art project.)

I wouldn't be so sure that these guys fall under the legal definition of consumer fraud. All they claim is that if you put the clock in your listening room, your system will sound better. And they have testimonials from customers confirming this. That would seem to put them in the clear.

Double4w: You sound entirely too sensible to be hanging out here. To be an audiophile, apparently, you must be obsessively interested in a highly technical hobby while remaining willfully ignorant of the science behind that hobby. I don't know how long you've been away from audio, but it is now overrun with silly products which only survive in the marketplace because of that willful ignorance. The Clever Little Clock is interesting only to the extent that even many audiophiles can't swallow it. But it's no more absurd than so many other things that are accepted as having a legitimate place here in Audioland.

No, Mootsdude, it's actually a great example. Science had an answer--you just didn't know it. And when you were told it, you started speculating without any basis in fact, instead of just accepting the answer. That's exactly what too many audiophiles do when presented with something absurd like the CLC. The problem isn't what scientists don't know. It's what audiophiles don't know about science.

If as Eldartford suggests, Pabelson is correct that science knows but audiophiles don't, then why is there not just one best cable, one best speaker, one best amp.

Because science doesn't tell us that there is only one best anything. Thanks for proving my point about what audiophiles know about science.

For example, the "best" cable, in the technical sense, is the one that distorts the signal the least. (Although some audiophiles may actually prefer a cable that distorts more!) But which cable that is depends on the impedances of the amp and speaker it's connecting. As a practical matter, many cables distort the signal so minutely--a fractional roll-off in the top octave--that the differences aren't audible (assuming you do a meaningful comparison). But when the differences are audible, a few measurements will suffice to explain why.