Why Do Schumann Resonators Work?

No need to apologize mahgister, especially not when so rudely insulted by jerryg123 who is after all only jumping to conclusions.

I tried three times to start a discussion about how it is that we learn to hear things we are not accustomed to hearing. A few really are interested but it seems a lot more are offended to think they are not already the last word in listening skills and so they made like jerryg123 here throwing insults instead of trying to maybe learn something new.

Most everyone is able to hear volume. If the claim is one is louder than another pretty much everyone is able to judge. Frequency response is really just volume, but now it gets a little bit harder because we are trying to judge volume not just overall but at different frequencies. This takes a bit of practice but eventually a lot of us are able to do it.

From here on out though it gets a lot harder- and fast. Lots of things resonate and this alters frequency response but in a more subtle harder to discern kind of way. All instruments and voices have their own resonances, as do rooms and microphones, etc, and this all makes it a real challenge to differentiate and discern what is doing what. Awful lot of audiophiles never do get this one down. It is shocking how much of this resonant coloration there is, but maybe not so shocking in light of how few audiophiles are even aware it is going on. 

We haven't even gotten to how we learn to listen for these things, still just putting labels on a few of them.

One of these someone was asking about recently is grain. Grain is a little harder to describe. Nothing changes in terms of tone or frequency response, the sound just gets a little bit smoother and more natural when there is less grain. Most all components have a lot more grain when new or cold than after burning in or warming up. So one way to learn to hear grain is learn to hear the difference between your amp (DAC, phono stage, etc) when cold vs some hours later. 

Part of what I hear with SG is a reduction in grain. 

Another one is hash or grunge or noise floor, whatever you want to call it. This one is probably some combination of RFI and EMI, but who knows? Doesn't matter. What it is, that is a different subject. One thing audiophiles are good at, switching subjects. Real serious obstacle to learning. Ditch it. Back to the subject: how this, whatever we call it, sounds.

Here the simplest test is to turn off some circuit breakers. Do this and you will hear a noticeable reduction in hash or grunge, a blacker background, with more air around images. 

Part of what I hear with SG is a reduction in grunge, a bit blacker background, and a bit more palpable imaging. 

I would not say the improvement is huge. To me it is obvious, but then I am an exceptionally discerning listener. Sorry if my being good offends those who are not, but this is in no way a zero sum game. Nothing will make me happier than you read and learn and become a better listener than me. Because I want a better system. If you can hear things I can't I want to know about it, so I can maybe learn and become better myself.

Now that we have us some labels, to put SG in perspective, I would say the 9 I have makes an improvement roughly about as good as the improvement in my system from when it is first turned on to how much better it is an hour or so later. That is all. For me that is more than enough to justify the $90 they cost me. 

If for you it is not, oh well. 

Between Chuxpona and Chuctoberfest we have had personal direct experience with a number of audiophiles. Some of them frankly admit to not being able to hear things that are obvious to others. This goes both ways. I am supposedly deaf to gross harmonic defects. Whatever. Would like to know what that is all about. Which notice, is a completely different response than calling the other guy names.

Oh, we don’t need to wait. That would be illogical anyway. Because you are right, the people who supposedly have the "expertise" to answer don’t exist. This is always the problem any time you are on the sharp end of the spear, pushing the envelope, as they say in The Right Stuff. We are on the frontier, the territory ahead every bit as unknown as any Lewis and Clark encountered. That the frontier is understanding sound and listening really is not fundamentally any different than the unknown of the territory ahead.

Why more don’t get this I will never understand. Especially since their "wait for the experts" is diminishing and self-defeating. Where do experts come from anyway? Another planet? Solar system? Universe? Pretty sure they come from right next door. Instead of helplessly waiting for one to beam in, the guy who thinks experts are so great could go to work and become one himself. Why not? Isn’t that what the expert did? Either that or there was some magic wand involved. I think he did it himself. Which means you can too.

Heck mahgister you already are one, if you ask me. Now if you can just get a few more to follow in your footsteps.....

Did I not answer this? Coulda sworn .... Somewhere. Oh well.  

Start with the fact they do work. As mahgister said it is not placebo, it is real. Okay so then what is going on?    

It can't be acoustic. SG is radio waves not sound. Scratch that.  

There is a psychological/mental effect. Lots of people say so, that is their experience, and just as with the sound effect we have no good reason to discount their reports and have to believe them. Plus there is Krissy's cat, no matter where she puts the SG the cat finds it curls up and sleeps next to it. Plus the first thing I noticed when I got mine was a slight headache. So they definitely do something.  

But it doesn't make things sound better, or I would notice all sounds being better, which they aren't, only the stereo, so scratch that.  

SG are radio waves. Radio waves crossing wires induce a current in the wire. This is why RFI is such a problem, and why eliminating it improves sound quality so much. The SG by adding RFI would seem to only be able to make things worse. Scratch that one.    

Not so fast! Dither is noise added to a signal that improves the perceived resolution of the signal! Dither is used extensively in video, has been for decades. Dither is randomized, but in a very particular way. Just as there is white noise and pink noise, both random yet different, so there are different forms or types of dither.  

This is kind of a big one, people might want to look into it. Synergistic HFT seem to work based on some sort of dither principle.    

Okay, so what if the particular RFI produced with SG just happens to be of a sort that helps us perceive greater resolution in the signal? If that were the case then we might expect to hear improvement similar in nature to what we hear when RFI is reduced.    

Turns out this is exactly what I am hearing. If this theory is right then just as video dither can be tuned for effect so this one could be as well. Lo and behold, Synergistic has different settings on their FEQ that have this very effect.  

Not quite good enough to be sure this is how it works, but for sure we found one not so easily crossed off the list.  

Ssshhh! Don't go giving away my secrets! A lot of them still haven't figured it out.

The idea came from a study of our atmosphere. The ionosphere is a high layer of the atmosphere that because it is charged reflects a certain range of electromagnetic radiation back to earth, where it bounces back again. Since the Earth is round this layer is spherical and so like anything else if you hit it with some energy that will excite it and the whole thing will vibrate or ring. 

So your lightning or volcanic eruption puts energy in, triggering the so-called Schumann resonances. There are a number of them. I don't know if 6.5Hz is any more representative or not. Where the 7.83 came from, for all I know it is easy to make them that way, it falls within the range, and more numbers to the right of the decimal point makes any number sound a whole lot more sciency and precise whether it is or not.

Physics. Not the high point of a public school education, I'm guessing.

In order to even begin to answer the question it helps to first understand the question. Which really is, "How could broadcasting 7.83 Hz radio waves improve the sound of your system?"

Well, I don't know for sure how it works, but its pretty easy to think of how it COULD work. In a word: dither.

Dither is a sort of randomized input that when added to a signal subjectively improves the output. Dither is used all the time in video. Do a search, see what I mean. It sounds weird, but adding the right sort of noise actually improves things.

Ted Denney III is tight with his secrets but he did mention somewhere once that his HFT, ECT and PHT devices work on dither. They are tiny, but when it comes to dither it doesn't take much to produce a very noticeable effect. They work, as far as I can tell, acoustically.

But there's no reason to think the same principle (dither) wouldn't apply electronically. RFI is noise and our systems sound better with less of it. Flip off some breakers in your panel and hear for yourself. This simple experiment proves two things- radio waves do get into our wires, and they do affect the sound we hear.

So while I can't prove it, it seems pretty obvious to me that if you put a 7.83 (or whatever) Hz radio wave generator in a room, that the signal is going to get into your system. One way or another. Every single wire is after all an antenna. The only question is whether this can actually make your system sound better? The answer would seem to be yes.