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the solid state devices in the same digital convertor, eliminates this modulation noise problem. This explains why the MusiCoat convertor sounds more like tubes, more like real music. The MusiCoat unit sounds less bright, yet is much more revealing of music's subtle details. It sounds more musically natural, from the deepest bass of Brick House to the most delicate treble of Christy's voice on Columbus. It does not change the timbre of piano notes to a metallic clang, the timbre of a liquid nylon guitar string to glass, or the wooden body and sounding board of a large guitar or string bass to a toy plastic body. It allows musical information to be heard effortlessly, against a black background of intertransient silence, so it reveals more true musical information even while sounding less bright. The multiple reflection, modulation noise phenomenon also explains the surprising fact that MusiCoat improves the sound of music when applied to purely digital circuitry. The multiple reflections of dielectric polarization naturally occur in IC chips or other solid state devices, regardless of whether the signals they process are analog or digital. In digital circuitry, noise causes jitter, which causes distortion when the digital signal is later converted to analog. The multiple reflections in the dielectric of digital chips cause an echoing modulation noise that correlates with the music signal, thereby causing jitter that correlates with the music signal, which later gets translated into modulation distortion that correlates with the music signal. This modulation distortion thus can mimic the artificial colorations of the poor quality dielectric encasing the original digital chip, just as surely as if that chip had been handling an analog music signal. Thus, much of digital's artificiality is due to the poor dielectric casings of digital chips, not to any intrinsic flaw in the digital system. MusiCoat virtually eliminates the multiple reflections in all digital chips it's applied to, so MusiCoat can cure the artificialities of digital. MusiCoat should also help all devices in video circuitry (both digital and analog video), for similar reasons. It's worth noting that our public A-B demonstration passed some stringent double blind testing protocols. One example was related by Shannon Dickson in his Stereophile report. Though initially skeptical, he taped our demonstration (using just a lap mike and recorder), and played the A-B comparison musical selections for himself at home, presumably without knowing which was which. He reports still hearing the differences clearly, even via this indirect taping and reproduction. A yet more ironclad example is a test we intentionally conducted which was not merely double blind, nor triple blind, but rather infinitely blind. As scientists, we at TRT wanted to be absolutely sure that people could hear the sonic differences, without any possibility of the power of suggestion influencing them. Moreover, we wanted to establish something even more important, and even harder to establish. We wanted to establish that the particular nature of the sonic qualities people reported hearing was consistent, and not in any way influenced by mass suggestion, etc. Thus, we staged the following test protocol, with only one person (me) in the room (running the demo), so as to completely control the experiment. I waited until someone came into our exhibit room all alone, and had sat down in the primary listening seat by himself. I did not want anyone else in the room, to avoid suggestive contamination. I purposely did not acknowledge or make eye contact with this single visitor, so as to avoid any possibility of subliminal interpersonal communication. I stood with my back to him, and with my body blocking his view of anything I might or might not be doing to the audio equipment used in the demo. Without any word or sign to him, I simply cued up a track through the stock solid state convertor. While the music played, I pretended to still be busy doing things with the equipment with my back to him. Thus I intentionally misled him into thinking that whatever I might be doing had no effect upon the playback system or its sound, thereby psychologically masking my later changeover from his cognizance. Therefore this listener had no knowledge that anything in the playback system was about to be changed, nor indeed that there was anything which could be changed (he did not even get to see that there were two distinct convertors in the system). In fact, this CES environment would predispose this listener to expect that there was nothing to be changed, since most CES exhibits simply feature one unchanged system playing various musical selections. After the key section of the track had elapsed, I changed over to the MusiCoat convertor, still without any acknowledgement to the listener, and while still pretending to by busy with my back to him, so he would have no way of knowing if I had made any changes to the system after the first playing of the track, or what those changes might have been. I simply restarted the same track after switching to the other convertor. But for all the listener knew, I was merely replaying the same track through the same system. Thus, this listener had no expectations, and no knowledge, that any A-B comparison was even involved, let alone that anything might have been changed in the system. Soon after the same track started again, with my back still toward the sole listener, it was he who forced me to engage him for the first time. "WHAT did you just do to the system?", he shouted above the music. I turned to face him for the first time. I chose my words carefully and parsimoniously, so as to be a neutral elicitor of observational data. "Did you hear a difference?", I asked. "Incredible differences!", he said. "Describe the differences you heard," I said. "The second time it sounded much less solid state, much more like real music; it got less bright, yet I heard more detail; the background got quieter, and the stereo imaging got better, with more space." These descriptors precisely matched the descriptions given by many other listeners, under less controlled conditions. This listener's observations, collected under such a purist infinitely blind (Continued on page 15)
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