Audio stuff that is impossible to install right (or stay installed right)

@bSimpson,

This is a pretty good thread you started.  It might be quite helpful to some people.  At the very least, they will know they have company in their struggles to make things work in this pleasurable, but sometimes very aggravating hobby.

Bob

Cryogenic treatment. Frustrating because they all pretend to have some special thing they do for audiophile components that no one else does. But they never tell you what it is. Plus they charge a small fortune. Plus shipping. No thanks.

Until I track down Cryo One, less than an hours drive from home. Still not sure I throw a few likely suspects in the car and drive down to see for myself. Turns out the guy races and builds shifter karts, being a PCA track instructor we bond instantly, he shows and tells all.

Knives from custom hunting knife maker, professional musicians instruments, all kinds of auto parts from racers and builders, tubes, wire entire components from audiophiles, anything and everything goes in the same chest freezer. Yeah just an ordinary chest freezer. Ordinary except for being connected to a great big tank of liquid nitrogen.

So everything gets packed in there and in goes the liquid nitrogen. Doing just a few things isn’t economical, and it takes anywhere from several days to a few weeks to get enough to fill the freezer, plus the few days it takes for all that mass to cool down all the way. So that’s why they tell you the treatment takes a few weeks. It doesn’t. It’s the time it takes to fill the freezer.

Anyway so he cryo’d a power cord, interconnect, a few CDs and an entire CD player. Everything came back looking exactly the same but sounding quite a bit different. Biggest change, a lot more detail. Like after cleaning dirty contacts. Clear, detailed, free of grain and glare, a little more dynamic. Faster yet not in that annoying hi-fi sense of the word.

Now the most frustrating part, I just re-wired a dedicated circuit. Oh well. Pulled all that wire out and bagged it up with everything else- every interconnect, speaker cable, power cord, tube, everything but the speakers (he’s done em though!) and so now I probably got the most cryo’d system around. Worth it in the end but what a chore!

"Sound Labs 845 tube monos" with bias swings sounds like a coupling cap failure to me... a cap turns into a resistor at various times with predictable results. Using good poly caps of high voltage and low ESR ratings helps a lot. Don't forget to ask for 105 degree C versions. de KQ2E

Forsell Air Reference turntable - a long, long length of dental floss driving from a remote motor. It was a friend's system and trying to get the best pair pump and best air reservoir, plus experimenting with different floss would have exhausted anyone's patience.  And then there was the linear tracking arm with air bearing....

If you've never seen one, look at https://www.whatsbestforum.com/data/attachments/10/10567-cd62a15533b0947e5f62f4673862f156.jpg