Vibratory or Not?


This is a discussion that for me began on the Stereophile forum which went horribly wrong in my opinion. I was wondering though if this same topic could be discussed here as it comes up a lot in one form or another. My background has been about vibratory tuning as far back as the 70's work in the recording industry and continued into home audio and beyond. The audio signal is one that can be easily tuned, I doubt there is much room there for debate, but we will see, it's Audiogon after all. This being the case I have always concluded that the audio signal is vibratory so has anyone I have ever worked with. It's a common and sometimes even daily practice for someone here to make a vibratory adjustment changing the sound which is obvious to all.

On some of these forum threads however you will see posts saying to get rid of the vibration, without any explanation as to how to remove vibration without altering the audio signal. Every vibratory move I have ever seen done changes the performance of the sound. I've also been a part of the variables of the audio signal during play in real time. If the audio signal is not vibratory how does it change?

I invite you to discuss the vibratory structure and nature of the audio signal.

thanks, lets keep trolling to a minimum please

128x128michaelgreenaudio

"Michael, let me draw your attention to my posts earlier today in response to the same and related questions."

Yes I have read your posts thanks. This is why I'm careful to ask with more specificity.

I answered your second question regarding whether I believe the audio signal is vibratory several different times. As I also stated earlier you must define your terms before any discussion can occur. Terms such as vibration, oscillation, audio signal. Otherwise, what’s the point?

As for your question regarding air bladders/tubes/springs and load I answered that specific question earlier today around sevenish.

Geoff when you were instructing with "oscillating or vibrating" memos saying that the audio signal is not either but sighting an alternating current. You do realize that AC is measured in oscillations don't you? In fact in electrical engineering you are taught that AC is vibratory current.

BTW audionuttoo "Certified Professional Engineer and Class A Master Electrician" is pretty high up on the food chain of engineers.

Sometimes I get a little kick out of you and kosst, as you both try to marginalize our teaching here at the tune without knowing our collective schooling. It's kind of a joke amongst us when we talk about "audiophile experts". We usually find that the audio internet EE's who boast the most actually have the fewest courses under their belts in reality, or the most dated.

MG

“Oscillation” not equal “vibration.” You need to define your terms. Words mean different things to different people. - Bob Dylan

Hi Geoff thanks for the reference. Here's why I ask.

 "However, in terms of sound quality the height and internal pressure can vary."

Absolute isolation does not vary. Something that varies is not isolated.

"because there are a lot of variables involved"

Again if we are speaking about "vibratory or not" variables relates to vibratory adjustables.

The reason I wanted to be very clear on your responses is to make note that the responses you gave were completely in line with the audio signal being vibratory, tunable and not isolated from the fundamental interactions.

MG

I never said isolation was absolute. Where do you come up with this stuff? It sounds eerily like Star Sound. 🤡 all these words you’re throwing around have different meanings to different people. So discussions can get bogged down rapidly. When you assume something it makes a fool out of me and Uma Thurman.

"“Oscillation” not equal “vibration.” You need to define your terms."

Now I feel we are getting somewhere as far as terms. Is your main objection that you feel "oscillations" and "vibration" should not be in the same camp?

MG

I’m not saying they can’t be in the same camp sometimes. I’m saying they are not the same thing. Their technical meaning is different. It’s like a Venn diagram. Sometimes they overlap. But this is not the real question anyway. The real question is whether vibration can interfere with the audio signal. I’m sure you agree. The oscillation/vibration issue is kind of a red herring.

LOL, the star sound card. You crack me up sometimes. You should get a list of all the employees who have been let go from RoomTune after working there for only 9 months 20 some years ago to use in your spins.

Better yet, I'm hoping you and us become friends so we can help audiophiles together and be able to talk through things when there are misunderstandings of communication.

MG


No where we stand is just like Glupson said in the first post here and audionuttoo reaffirmed.

"Sound is, in the simplest term, a vibration. No vibration, no sound."

Where we disagree with you Geoff is when you say "vibrations should be killed" or however you say that phrase. What is it "a good vibration is a dead vibration" or something like that.

Vibrations are very important because it is a word that can be used in the out of tune sense as well as the in-tune sense.

MG

Geoff - Earlier you stated how you were an early customer of Michael's.  It seems like you're no longer a believer (a tunee!?) and I'm wondering what happened?  Did you initially hear the benefits, or were they never there?  I'd really like to hear the story.
Glubson was obviously talking about acoustic waves in the room. Glubson has this knack for stating the obvious.

Well Glupson did a good job in this case, because he was correct. Remove vibratory from audio and there is no sound. The electricity to the system wouldn't work, the parts that host the signal wouldn't work, the drivers on your speakers wouldn't work nor would the hairs in your ears work.

There would be no pressure in your room for you to hear and we wouldn't be here talking about it cause there would be no Earth, the Earth vibrates :)

Geoff you're trying to remove too big of a part of nature to make your point. Hey an "Audio Point" :)

Folks in audio saying "kill vibrations" makes no sense because that's what audio is. If you kill vibratory interaction the whole planet goes down the drain.

MG

but of course that could be me vs 20,000 somethings or whatever that trolling was LOL

I would think so, it doesn't get easier than this Geoff. But, you believe that audio is not vibratory, is this correct? You believe the hairs in your ears don't move, nor does the cone of a speaker? If they aren't moving what are they doing to interact?

If you're concerned over a word, then go ahead and give it a shot. If vibration is being used by these billions of people incorrectly than there must be a singular better word.

Your speaker cones are_______your ear hairs are___________electricity is___________sound is the act of ___________ . You don't like the word vibrating so what word do you want, maybe "moving" maybe "forcing" maybe "interacting". Tell us what one word would you like to use in the place of vibrating and the world can entertain this. I'm not trying to be a smart "A" Geoff, just trying to use what the rest of the world uses when describing sound with a nice easy to understand set of word roots.

MG

This is becoming quite an excellent example of the Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby routine. But I can’t figure out if you’re the Tar Baby or Mr. Fox. 🦊

Just to be clear, I never said audio is not vibratory and I never said audio is not vibration. You are putting words in my mouth. This was bound to happen when you don’t define your terms. As Dylan says, words have different meaning to different people. If I say the word house we all have a different picture of what a house is. If isolation was not real as you seem to believe then LIGO would never have been able to detect and observe gravity waves. Just like the optics in LIGO the optical system must be isolated and protected from vibration that would interfere with the observation of gravity waves the optical system in CD players must be protected from vibration, especially the very low frequency seismic type vibration, otherwise the CD player will not sound as good as it could. The same logic applies to turntables since very low frequencies excite the circa 10 Hz Fn of the tonearm and cartridge. 
chazro580 posts03-27-2019 3:24pmGeoff - Earlier you stated how you were an early customer of Michael’s. It seems like you’re no longer a believer (a tunee!?) and I’m wondering what happened? Did you initially hear the benefits, or were they never there? I’d really like to hear the story.

>>>>>There is no story. Nothing happened. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t be such a drama queen.

I think it was Peter Moncrieff who many years ago in his IAR publication proposed the notion of there being vibrations both good (Brian Wilson concurs ;-) and bad. All agree the vibrations of music itself are of the good sort (though Buddy Rich hated Country music, and some Country music lovers hate Jazz), but it appears when it comes to bad vibrations there is some disagreement.

Isolation is simply intended to keep non-musical vibrations from polluting the musical ones contained in recordings. How can anyone disagree with that notion? For those agreeing with that notion, the question then becomes how best to minimize the pollution.

I’m curious what you don’t understand about what I’ve said. Say, aren’t you the guy that can’t spell the word totally?
Say, aren’t you the guy that can’t spell the word totally?


As usual Geoff goes in to his kiddy mode and start sending bad vibes lol!!!

Hi Tjbhuler

Geoff said "The audio signal in wires in an AC circuit is actually alternating, not (rpt not) oscillating or vibrating."

That's not putting words in anyone's mouth, that's someone not understanding the audio signal or AC.

So you say "Hi geoff am curious here what is it about vibratory you don't understand ?"

Which to me is the obvious question. As Geoff would say this isn't rocket science. You can't say kill all vibrations when audio is a vibration. Again that's not anyone putting words into Geoff's mouth as he has said this on many occasions on a couple of forums at least.

Geoff, no one would be raising the questions of you if you never said this. It's a matter of why say kill vibrations when that's what audio is. This makes no sense.

And why insult (again) someone you have no clue of his education. Sorry Geoff but both Tjbhuler and audionuttoo have educations way above your pay grade in the area of vibration. One in the electrical world and the other in the medical world.

MG

geoffkait,

"Glubson has this knack for stating the obvious."
Well, someone has to.

Someone, allegedly very wise, a few couples of posts above, wrote...

"You need to define your terms. Words mean different things to different people."

"...all these words you’re throwing around have different meanings to different people. So discussions can get bogged down rapidly."
I must be psychic. I knew you were going to say that.

So I stated the obvious in the first post here.

Do not go too deep into discussion about oscillation vs. vibration. Spring is coming and you are on the thin ice.
"...air leaks out through the rubber fabric, just like it does in bicycles."
The valve may be much more important leak in a bicycle. Now back to audio vibrations.
You can't say kill all vibrations when audio is a vibration. Again that's not anyone putting words into Geoff's mouth as he has said this on many occasions on a couple of forums at least.

Exactly that is what im trying to understand from Geoff the man who also promotes using springs under equipments. Which seems to go against his own words. 

It would be nice if one could go along and make this thread more productive by engaging in to a conversation based on thier experiences and learn more from others who have been doing it on a daily basis for years and to Op for decades :). Approaches may differ but learning them is where the fun is. 
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glupson1,860 posts03-27-2019 9:57pm
"...air leaks out through the rubber fabric, just like it does in bicycles."
The valve may be much more important leak in a bicycle. Now back to audio vibrations.

>>>>>>When you don’t know, guess. That’s your strategy? 

The Vibratory Foundation

In HEA we sometimes get stuck in myth building and from time to time need to make our way back to the real world. If you wanted to you could spend your entire hobby life reading or being a part of audiophile theory creating and to go with this product categories that are there to take your hard earned money and leave you with something a little less than "the absolute sound". In the Tunee world our view is a little different. We take what is and build from there. We know that audio is vibration and don’t try to disguise it as any thing but what it is. We do our best to keep up on the studies of vibration scientifically and how it relates to the fundamental interactions that are at the core of Earth’s function.

If there is one thing you can bank on with Tunees it would be, we use the proven technologies that have come before us as our ongoing template of truth. Creating a make believe audio world is not high on our list of things to do. HEA is a creation that in some ways was a good thing but in many ways has failed. "killing vibrations" for example was a major screw up the way it was introduced to the hobbyist and implemented in the components we bought. From the 1990’s forward a mythical audio chapter was implemented that took us off course and all kinds of "Fix It’s" were suddenly needed to be designed to help keep us from falling off the edge of the flat planet. Yep audio tweaks are a huge industry all on it’s own, but it was always going to be the case that the hobby and industry would need to get back to it’s roundness.

I don’t blame the guy who is down on "tweaks" at all. From my point of view components should have been made variable to start with and this whole sidetrack of heavy over built components and speakers and the overbuilt tweaks that have been made to fix them could have never existed at all. It was a big expensive waste of time and could have been avoided if we understood one thing, audio is vibratory. Audio is part of the Earth and the Earth vibrates. Researchers now measure our moving Earth’s hum from 3 variable points of view that ranged from ocean currents to atmospheric turbulence. You have the ocean bed, the surface crust and the atmosphere. Three different types of vibratory structures all interacting and all affecting your sound. Can you isolate yourself from these with audio tweaks? Absolutely, positively, unequivocally No. Attempts at audio isolation existing within Earth’s forces is not going to happen no matter how many HEA myth makers spin theories. We learn this in 3rd grade but were bent on recreating the world regardless when we laid our eyes on our first audio boat anchor.

Now that we have gone through that era we can return to where we were back in the 80’s and move forward as if that misleading chapter was never there. Sure we’re still going to feel the pain of investing so much and then trying to fix it but all will be forgotten as we listen to our variable audio systems of today and the future.

MG


taken from the TuneLand article "The Vibratory Foundation"
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One must differentiate between the acoustic waves in the room or the sound of acoustic instruments 🎻 and the audio signal in wires. So far I’m sensing a lot of denial. God gave you one mouth and two ears for a reason. 😳 😳 😳 

geoffkait,

>>>>When you don’t know, guess. That’s your strategy?
Not quite. My strategy is "when not completely and verifiably sure, do not make absolute statements". Learn, geoffkait, learn.

Audio signal in wires is electrical. Audio signal in your head is, for the large part, electrical, too. Stating the obvious, at least obvious to some of us.


Extremely lame. No offense. Breakdown of the education system, obviously
The last person who used "lame" around here is verifiably clueless. You are in the bad company.
It is not fair. I used to tell you that you should get your money back from your school. Come on, no matter how good I am, think of something yourself.

I thought we were past audio being vibratory. Geoff if you are still not sure we appreciate your point of view and we can review but I don’t think any of us want to go in a continual circle. And I can’t image physics is in denial.

In physics, sound is a vibration that typically propagates as an audible wave of pressure, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.

As we covered previously Audio is Vibratory and Electricity is Vibratory. Now we have covered Sound is Vibratory. 

Geoff if you disagree we are all perfectly fine with this, but lets not troll the thread. Thank you Glupson for keeping an eye on Geoff. I hope we can have fun here.

MG

With electricity being such an important part of our systems lets define.

"Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. In early days, electricity was considered as being not related to magnetism. Later on, many experimental results and the development of Maxwell’s equations indicated that both electricity and magnetism are from a single phenomenon: electromagnetism."

Electromagnetism is one of the Four Fundamental Interactions.

For a quick review

"Fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces, are the interactions in physical systems that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four conventionally accepted fundamental interactions—gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. Each one is understood as the dynamics of a field."

MG

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Advertising disguised as discussion. This is marketing. Why can’t the moderators stop this. 
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On this thread and others I talk about getting the sound you want as being more simple than you think. If you don't complicate or try to add to basic physics audio isn't all that hard to get right, here's why. The all of audio is tied together by interacting. If you study the fundamental interactions and apply them to audio and the different parts that make up audio you will find that they are all meant to work together. Vibratory!

Fields

Each of the known fundamental interactions can be described mathematically as a field. The gravitational force is attributed to the curvature of spacetime, described by the general theory of relativity. The other three are quantum fields, and their interactions are mediated by elementary particles described by the Standard Model of particle physics.

Sounds tough? It's not, and all you really need to know how to do is make the interactions adjustable, so they work together in tune.

Michael Green

MG - I concur.  I have never heard two isolated systems sound the same - only different from an non isolated system.  Regarding Geoff's continuing problem with the word vibratory in this context, I offer the Merriam-Webster definition:1 : consisting of, capable of, or causing vibration or oscillation 2 : characterized by vibrationWe all know that the pressure waves in the room coming from the speakers are a result of the amplifications of the audio signal, which oscillates over a range of frequencies and changes in amplitude. The pressure waves produce vibrations. Therefore, we are dealing with a variety of vibrations/oscillations/vibratory signals and waves.  Choose the wording you prefer - it's just different ways of saying the same thing.   

With everything audio being Vibratory and Interactive we can get down to business with Vibrations.

Vibratory structures are at the heart of how our systems sound. We get marketed into thinking of brands and models but when you break an audio system down to it's vibratory core many of the physical parts and pieces can actually be obstructions to allowing the audio signal to flow without contamination, resulting in distorting the signal. Keep in mind you can play part of the audio signal and it still be distortion free. That's why all of our systems sound different. Every system plays back part of the audio signal but rarely the whole signal. The conditions you need to play the whole signal is not difficult but it does require more than an audio playback system sitting in a living room.

I'll get into the tuning of the interactions but first want to say, sometimes in this hobby folks come in and give negative spins on sound, your sound. Your sound is uniquely yours and belongs to you and no one else. This hobby can get as involved as you want it to be, skies the limit (I'm not talking about money). Learning about audio is your own personal journey and as you travel it you are going to go through periods of successful listening and other times when things don't quite sound right. I don't care how much of an expert one is every recording type can offer up bliss or disaster. My goal is to help you play as much of your collection as possible, but that never means I'm telling you what you should be hearing, what you want to hear and that any of you should be listening the way I do or any of your friends here on Agon do. The fun of this hobby is that it is yours and you are the master of your own sound. That's why I do and promote the variables.

MG

OK, Class, settle down. Put your listening ears on. This is how the big boys do it.

Sneak preview:
“To operate effectively, the lengths of LIGO's arm cavities (i.e. the distance between the test masses at the ends of each arm) must not vary by more than a fraction of a picometer (one-trillionth of a meter). To hold the masses in place, we need to push on them–but very carefully, and we use the reaction chain (see figure above) for that. Simple motors made of permanent magnets and electrical coils push on the upper masses; these 'voice coils' work like audio loudspeakers, with the coil producing a magnetic field which attracts or repels the magnets. On the test masses themselves, we use more gentle electrostatic forces, like that which attracts a balloon rubbed on a sweater to a wall (or hair to a comb on a dry day). The goal is to keep our hands off the masses as much as possible so they will move only due to gravitational waves.”

The entire article,

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration-isolation




michaelgreenaudio OP
With electricity being such an important part of our systems lets define.

"Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. In early days, electricity was considered as being not related to magnetism. Later on, many experimental results and the development of Maxwell’s equations indicated that both electricity and magnetism are from a single phenomenon: electromagnetism."

Electromagnetism is one of the Four Fundamental Interactions.

For a quick review

"Fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces, are the interactions in physical systems that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four conventionally accepted fundamental interactions—gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. Each one is understood as the dynamics of a field."

MG

>>>>>>What is that supposed to be? I suspect you were searching cyberspace for a connection between electricity and vibration. Better keep looking. 

Speaking of definitions,

fool’s par·a·dis noun:
  1. a state of happiness based on a person’s not knowing about or denying the existence of potential trouble.
I know it may seem like a stretch, and it practically is, but when talking about vibrations and sound and regardless if you prefer them extra/modified/unadulterated, vibrations inside your head are very important part of the equation. However, they practically never get mentioned. It may be much harder to control them than placing a tube under the CD player, but maybe someone really dedicated can take them into consideration when tuning/tweaking sounds. Stick a helmet on the head (what material?), use Afrin before listening session, or something more innovative. That would be a really thorough approach to addressing vibrations. Hairstyles are another very important component of vibration management, yet they are also rarely mentioned.

As far as influence of vibrations on electrical signal in the head go, it may be much less pertinent than in other electrical applications.
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