I have never used Shakti Stones and wonder if they really work and, if so, what do they do, I have used the Shakti Holographs and found them to magically focus the sound and tighten the soundstage. From what I have heard, even from Shakti, is that the stones make a significant difference is some usage and less in other. Has anyone used these and what do they do?
The effect of shungite is very importantly dependant of the place location , as for any piece of gear ,... It can degrade or improve the sound dependant of the gear, location , and of the system specific ..
Then we must experiment to discover the best place to put it ...
Also i use quartz to balance the effect and i always use a copper tape on the external side of my homemade "golden plate" ... I created this tweak to shield my gear from EMI and improve the sound balance to improve timbre...I use them with with crystals quartz on connectors ...
When you own a low cost system , or a high end system , the mechanical, electrical and acoustical working dimensions controls matter as much as the gear design qualities... My plates are used in this way to improve the soundfield ...I never bought any tweaks by the way ... I designed my own Helmholtz resonators grid to play with acoustic concepts ... It is better to stay creative and keep our money ...
Psycho-acoustics rules the working gear and design not the reverse ..
Experimenting is science, everything else is faith especially scientism, more destructive today than past religious cults ... ...
Following @mahgister‘s advice I put slabs of Shungite on the transformers of my Wavac EC300b. Whoah, cobwebs out the window and let the sunshine in! These mineral tuning devices work,
Following @mahgister‘s advice I put slabs of Shungite on the transformers of my Wavac EC300b. Whoah, cobwebs out the window and let the sunshine in! These mineral tuning devices work, I equally apply various Akiko Audio widgets on AC cleanup with good results.
I purchased one used for a good price, so I did not give a crap if it worked in a positive way or not. Well, I put it on my amp where my 2 power transformers are. Played a disc that sounded great before and played it again with the stone on it. The results were easy to hear, darker background, more detail along with more body and weight, took it off and the loss of image tightness and depth and less and all the above was diminished. In the past, I’ve tried brass weights, etc., and even just books to add damping and none ever stayed. So, this stone is doing more than damping by its weight which is not that much. I don’t change my gear like socks, so I am very familiar with how it sounds, this stone was a surprise that is staying on top of my amp. It does what it claims it does. Best $90.00 I spent in a long while.
If s listener whacks himself on the head with the Shakti stone ( a few times before the listening session), it will open the blakkkk background like no other. If the listener whacks his head harder again with Shakti, other audiophoopheephee metrics like PRAT, transient attacks, etc would drastically improve. He may start tapping his toes and dancing like Shiva.
But because i dont buy ready made tweaks by principle and for budget , i devised my own "stone" knowing that a "stone" can affect sound by his properties located beside a transformer ...
Without knowing it i embark on a journey of fun experiments ...
My stone is composed of Shungite plate +copper tape on the external side of the application with quartz to create a balance ... It worked for me so well i make many ...😊
I purchased my first shakti stone back in 2012 because my local dealer let me try it before I made my purchase. I lived in an apartment. At that time I had a setup that I thought I was thoughtful enough to take care the power supply lines. Equitech in-wall isolation transformer with four dedicated power lines, quality cabling, receptacles, robust stack and vibration control, to serve my cdp (Soulution), amp (ASR Emitter II). Placed Shakti on top of my cdp and amp, I could immediately hear the background was darker, soundstage was more defined and clearer, less digital sounding with more flesh. The effect was quite huge and overall there was little downside (Yes, no tweak is perfect, using too much could have negative effect like image is too focus/tight and not comfortable to listen to).
Now in 2021, I no longer play serious hifi. Shakti stone, along with my many tweaks were idle for a few years already. I recently enjoyed watching Netflix on TV, my Internet's power supply chains all use LPS with vibration control (Yes, they improve both video and audio quality). Now I place Shakti on top of my LPS for router, the overly bright/dazzling light on my OLED TV is reduced greatly (I also use grounding box, it helps too), the subtitle on Netflix is very comfortable to read and look at, more natural skin tone more refine sound. I also tried EMI/RFI absorber sheet, on paper they should yield similar result but you need to find out the right range of Hz and careful placement for your device. To me, if 3M EMI/RFI absorber sheet has an effect of 1, Shakti has an effect of 3.
I just order Shakti Air recently, they have not arrived yet. Next time I will place one inside my Equitech power box to see the outcome.
I used to get Stoned while listening to the stones, but being a stone throw away I would fall down because the snake oil I used on my floor was too thick. now I sprinkle Tide on my speaker cables to CLEAN up my sound, I will have it on sale for 2k a bag, be a good sucker and get your bag!!!!
Anyway my experience is that any audio system and any listener live together in specific histories state and sensing and perceiving differences can vary much between different audio systems states and the learned sensibility of the owner relatively to S.Q.
Then the probability that a "tweak" could be a complete fraud if this tweak attract some positive reviews along decades,or more than few years of existence, is not a so high probability...
And saying like some that all audiophiles are gullible is too stupid remark for me to comment it.... :)
Then we must be cautious to gives the baby with the bath waters....
I dont know if shakti stone gives benefit or not for sure...
I am tempted to think they dont give much tough because i trust some people i read who wrote about...But....
Yes beyond any doubt and proven by my personal experience. If you take one of these and face the top side down and hurl it just right I have found I get more skips across the pond than any other stone I have used. I think the electronics help stabilize it's flight path and while I can't explain the deep science behind these I can vouch for their effective use.
How does one calculate the optimum weight for a Shakti stone? Is it the inversely exponential value of the delta of the compliance of the top cover of the CD transport? Perhaps an unabridged Shakti reference manual (hard bound, of course) could be placed on top, in lieu of a phonebook.
Alas! Too easy sarcasm does not always count as wit, press wood does not sustain ceiling and wall.....Next try....
: )😊
i dont know anything like i said about shakti stone efficiency in some audio system....I just dont like to accuse anybody without absolute proof of deception.... Thats all.... And i know perfectly well first hand that many device work without easy accepted or conventional explanation....
Anybody can take the conventional road .... I prefer sometimes not.....
When i go to movie, seeing a part where someone is deceived or fooled by some gimmick and is mocked by a third party, my despise go toward those who mock the victim almost on par with those who consciouly have deceived it....
I dont know for the shakti stone, some sense audible effects others not.... It is clear that it is not "snake oil" in the original meaning of the expression...
I know for a fact that device controls even simple one gives astounding results in some context.....
The common denominators among the Naysayer Doctrine preachers and adherents = Mental Constipation (Sprinkled with a healthy dose of Dunning-Kruger Effect, in some cases), complicated by Verbal Diarrhea, OCD and a fevered, religious fervor.
I am starting my expedition to bring some stones from the other side of the galaxy to improve the sound. Will anyone finance me with about $200 billion ? It is really worth the improvement to the sound quality :-)
Great misunderstanding comes from the conflating of disparate "tweaks" good or not with the methodical way to control the mechanical, electrical and acoustical dimensions or like i name it embeddings...
Disinformation do not only comes from those who alledgely sells what is or is not "snake oil" but comes from those who think good electronic is the ONLY way to increase S.Q.
Ignorance may comes from sellers who pitch their product with false claims sometimes perhaps but also from those self proclaimed expert who think that any good electronic design is the beginning and the end of the story...
Sorry but for example, gives me some relatively good speakers and i will makes it with some embeddings controls on par or better than a 10 times more costly one which would be put in a room out of the box without any embeddings controls....
is this difficult to understand? :)
Consult any acoustical engineer....They know that speakers cannot sound better than the room where they are working....
Add to the acoustical control embedding, the mechanical control, and the electrical grid control and you will have audiophile top experience with any "relatively" good speakers....
Suppress all these embeddings controls and the only way to increase S.Q. will be great, very great expanse for a lesser result most of the times...
Audio experience is not reducible to quality electronic design.....
I think the best test of whether anything is "snake oil" which likely relies on confirmation bias with often unproven or made up benefits ("Quantum Tunneling?"), is the general acceptance in the audio community including manufacturers. If there’s a market to be exploited it will be, but the utter lack of popularity of most "magic" audio tweaks says it all...for example, most amp designers don’t care at all about "premium fuses" and you can bet they would if those fuses performed even a small fraction of the benefits hyperbole suggests. Better IC and speaker cables are accepted as an actual improvement over otherwise, and higher performance parts with closer tolerances are everywhere...but Shakti Stones, Mpingo discs, special clocks, pricey fuses, cable risers, etc., don’t get much traction because they obviously aren’t actually useful to the vast majority of careful listeners, and those listeners are often dismissed by self appointed experts as lacking hearing ability since they might not buy into the silliness.
Oh please, @cleeds , At least attempt to be honest. Your pulling a comment I made out of context is disgusting behavior.
I understand that having your religious zeal exposed makes you uncomfortable, but that's a price fundamental evangelists face. When you preach here, it's only fair for non-believers to be able to quote you and respond. If you truly think that's "disgusting," I suggest you alert the moderators. As you well know, those who abuse this forum can have their accounts deleted, requiring you to register under another username.
"So those companies recruit very carefully so they are not implicated for fraud with their snake oil, that why you NEVER see them or their staff spruiking their voodoo snake oil rubbish to the gullible here on these pages."
Care to identify "those companies"? Who are "they" who have enlisted me to sell "snake oil"? I somehow missed out on the "spruiking". Sounds like fun! Missed out on the financial incentives too. What’s up with that? Sorry. Deniers are wrapped in their self-denial tighter than a mad cat at the vet's.
Alleged knowledge cannot replace common sense experiments and listening experiments...
And dogmatically affirming that hearing capabilities are biased is ridiculous.... We live each one of us with a unique singular structural hearing capacity with his own specific limitation.... And with this all the same we learn or not to arrange our audio system on an optimal way FOR OURSELF....
I will repeat also this: electronic design tech. cannot replace the method and measures of control we must implement, mechanically, electrically, and acoustically to optimize ALL audio system and often put it on another level completely...
Not knowing that is knowing nothing.....Costly upgrade is often half truth , often unnecessary, on the road to improvement....What is lacking is the RIGHT way to embed the audio system....
Audio experience is not reducible to the electronic aspect of the component, even the newer hyped one, sorry.....
Far as, "harm": the incessant, unfortunate presentation of their beliefs as categorical imperative, or- TRUTH, rather than as the misinformed, uneducated and (largely) untested OPINIONS they are, is what I believe contrary to (what used to be) the spirit of this website. The thought that they could succeed in dissuading a new audio enthusiast from experimenting for themselves (regardless of the topic or component) and being robbed of potential listening pleasure, is what dismays me.
At the risk of splitting hairs with you, @rodman99999 it is actually much worse than that. Not only do the measurementalists discourage experimentation, but they will dismiss wholesale the result. Check out this thread:
No, you think it sounds better to you. That is completely meaningless to other people
Even the report of a sonic preference can be dismissed with the wave of the hand. Which prompts the question: Of what value is this website if we can’t report our experiences and preferences?
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