Chord GroundARAY - brilliant or bollocks?

A faraday cage for pet Mosquito’s.

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Or put your whole house in one!

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Oohhh…sounds cool.

How do you cook it?

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The one on the left or on the right?

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Classic hi fi enthusiast’s response! :sunglasses:

I thought they were filter cigarettes - surely that’s a better use for them than smoking them? The price is because the pair last you years, not 20 a day, and the tobacco companies still have mouths to feed.

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So:

“The GroundARAY is a next-generation high-frequency-noise-reduction device that connects to unused sockets on hi-fi and/or audiovisual equipment providing a low-impedance route for HF noise to pass through, directly improving the noise floor of the ‘host’ product.”
"The advanced technologies provide a very low-impedance, high-bandwidth route for HF noise to pass into, effectively ‘pulling’ noise from the signal ground of the host equipment."
“Each GroundARAY cylinder is filled with a carefully chosen material to deaden noise.”

All this as stated above apart from the piece I highlighted in bold italics, can be achieved using a medium value film capacitor, bypassed by two successive lower value capacitors and a 47k resistor, then all potted into a metal case using a visco-elastic material such as silicone potting compound.
Cost (apart from the bling!) £5 AT MOST!

When connected between ground and an isolated input, the piece I highlighted in bold italics actually defies the laws of thermodynamics, so I suggest this is ‘marketing blurb’ not anything to do with the engineers.

If the rest of the description given by Chord is correct well…

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Hah yes i wrote something similar earlier in this thread. :blush:

However, i’ve been mocked and insulted by other users, as well as censored and warned by staff not to suggest anymore that it could be snake oil, so i’ll leave it there…

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Well it’s always possible that it is doing something else other than that which is given in the description, but at the moment I can’t see what that might be.

Youv’e got my order…….can i have a black/silver blingy version……money back guarantee?:wink:

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If by “staff” you’re referring to my own contribution to this thread, my point was just that this what we hear with this audio stuff is a highly subjective pursuit, so rather than immediately wade in with “all guns blazing” to dismiss something as not possibly making any difference, it’s better to find out more about it and definitely to try it first.

FWIW, I have no particular opinion on this Groundaray thingamujig as I haven’t tried it out yet for myself.

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If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt you as your technical knowledge far exceeds mine, surely there would be a copycat product at a fraction of the price that could achieve the same claims of performance enhancement and noise reduction.

Plenty of margin there for some smart cooky to seriously undercut Chord and still make a killing!

That of course assumes this ‘solution’ to noise reduction is indeed brilliant rather than bollocks.

Yes, but i never said it could not possibly make a difference, that would be arrogant or clairvoyant, which i’m neither. My point was that without testing these kinds of products blindly it’s impossible to tell whether they actually do anything, since otherwise it’s just purely anecdotal evidence and (as these kinds of threads show) often contradictory between individual reports.

Since i was asked not to mention blind testing anymore, there really is no reliable way to determine if the product has any merit, apart from the subjective reports from individual buyers which are just not reliable as evidence. 10 subjective reports are just way less useful than 1 objective report when it comes to audiophile products.

Quoting Dr. Sean Olive on loudspeaker listening tests:

In summary, the sighted and blind loudspeaker listening tests in this study produced significantly different sound quality ratings. The psychological biases in the sighted tests were sufficiently strong that listeners were largely unresponsive to real changes in sound quality caused by acoustical interactions between the loudspeaker, its position in the room, and the program material. In other words, if you want to obtain an accurate and reliable measure of how the audio product truly sounds, the listening test must be done blind. It’s time the audio industry grow up and acknowledge this fact, if it wants to retain the trust and respect of consumers.

There’s no need for “blind testing” - just to listen and decide for yourself.

The repeated call for “blind testing” whenever things like this appear falls into pressing a particular agenda, something that does breach forum AUP.

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Well that is fine ofcourse, as long as it’s clear that the research clearly shows that people hear very different things in sighted tests as opposed to blind tests, and come to different conclusions (and purchases) as a consequence.

Dr. Olive is a behemoth in the field of acoustic research so i don’t think it’s reasonable to completely reject his findings or his advice to the audio community at large when it comes to evaluating audio products.

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Without wishing to open up the blind testing debate again, I reject nothing completely, but all I will say here is that blind tests are not infallible. There are similar issues to sighted (e.g. audio memory), but blind tests can compound this with other psychological pressures that can often lead to a fallible result, so I’m not sure they can be 100% relied upon here either.

Hopefully most of us here can trust in what we hear (or cannot hear) in a relaxed and pressure-free environment in order to make a reasonably informed decision for ourselves.

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Enters debate with trepidation but here goes. I’m not an engineer, have no knowledge or interest (really) in said product blind tested or not but surely there must be millions of products in all markets at high expense where the value or effectiveness can be questioned. But for me the overriding factor is that there is no hard sell here, sales will be minimal to a very small number of well informed customers who can make their own judgments.

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True, the question then becomes if we want to promote any sort of objective testing for product claims, or if we prefer 500+ cable and peripheral threads on the forums, full with claims ranging from “Veil is lifted, night and day difference” to “Doesn’t do anything” to “I plugged it in and 2 minutes later my cat choked on a chicken bone, screw this product”.

Is there really any merit to these threads if we actively dissuade people from promoting objective testing of dubious product claims?

Almost every single one of these threads ends in infighting and moderators stepping in to shut things down.

I totally agree that blind testing is not all that, for the reasons you stated and others that I posted elsewhere.
But this does not mean that I believe every subjective claim by members with golden ears. And if I had to, I could point to posts claiming to hear differences between things that are guaranteed not to have caused the perceived changes.

It’s a considerable conundrum :slight_smile:

Brilliant or bollocks – it’s certainly bollocks to listen to the blind testing – with reference to Greta T – “blah blah blah” again and again… :scream:

One wished that the interventions by the Moderator made a difference – but apparently not. I guess we cannot avoid behaviours online that wouldn’t be tolerated in an in-person environment… I fear this is one of the “attractions” of Social Media…