Beware Bedini Ultra Clarifier Quad Beam Total Snake Oil Rip Off

[hershon]

I bet you guys were all thinking that I'd post how wrong you all were and that the Bedini Clarifier Quad Beam & Sound information Disc did in fact improve my CD sound qualty! Wrong!
I just got these products today & as you guys predicted (& I honestly thought there would be slight minor improvement but not enough to warrant spending a few hundred on this), there was no noticeable improvement in my CD sound quality based on my hearing tastes & biases. In fact, if you can believe it, both the Clarifier & Sound Information Disc actually to me made my CD's sound worse as they seemed to rob them of their warmth, sweetness, vitality & richness, if that makes any sense & the CD's sounded sterile with less tone. For my testing I again used the Beatles Revolver & Rubber Soul CD's. What is equally bizarre, and maybe this is from a bias on how I hear things, when I tried out a highend Marantz CD player to my JVC RX-DV31SL progressive scan DVD 500 watt receiver 2 weeks ago, the sound quality was similar to the sound I heard on the Bedini Clarifier & Sound information discs which was significantly worse than from the JVC DVD receiver. I also tried an Onkyo CD player & while the sound was alot better than the Marantz it still wasn't as good as my JVC.
I'm going to return this stuff this weekend to get my money back. It looks like Music Direct forgot to include & didn't charge the the Bright Star Audio ISOROCK 4 PLATFORM
vibration control unit & I'm not even going to reorder that based on my results.
To make a long story short, you don't get something for nothing in this world unless your an illegal alien with a winning lottery ticket!

[Lensman]

I bet you guys were all thinking that I'd post how wrong you all were and that the Bedini Clarifier Quad Beam & Sound information Disc did in fact improve my CD sound qualty! Wrong!...

Sorry the experiment didn't work out, but I'm glad to hear you maintained your objectivity. I must confess surprise, however, that you were able to hear any difference at all.

From the adjectives you use to describe the aspects of sound you treasure most, I can't help but believe you'd be happiest hearing these recordings analog (vinyl on a turntable through a tube amp). As you've mentioned a desire to stay away from albums, perhaps you might give thought to tube amplification. Perhaps you can get a local dealer to let you A/B a tube amp against a HT receiver with your CDs.

[hershon]

It seems I actually prefer digital sound to analogue because when I connected the Marantz CD player & then the Onkyo player as an experiment to my system, I connect them first by analogue and then digital by optical cable & the digital connection in both cases produced much better sound. What I'm curious about, and maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but the built in progressive scan DVD player on my 500 watt JVC receiver, may for that receiver, be so integrated, as to produce a better CD sound then connecting a CD player via auxullary to the same receiver. What do you think?

What receiver do you have? The funny thing is Music Direct sent me their large catalogue and the prices for things were astonomical- cables for the price I would buy a receiver for, etc., and it seems one can spend a fortune getting obsessed over this stuff.






Sorry the experiment didn't work out, but I'm glad to hear you maintained your objectivity. I must confess surprise, however, that you were able to hear any difference at all.

From the adjectives you use to describe the aspects of sound you treasure most, I can't help but believe you'd be happiest hearing these recordings analog (vinyl on a turntable through a tube amp). As you've mentioned a desire to stay away from albums, perhaps you might give thought to tube amplification. Perhaps you can get a local dealer to let you A/B a tube amp against a HT receiver with your CDs.

[Lensman]

It seems I actually prefer digital sound to analogue because when I connected the Marantz CD player & then the Onkyo player as an experiment to my system, I connect them first by analogue and then digital by optical cable & the digital connection in both cases produced much better sound. What I'm curious about, and maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but the built in progressive scan DVD player on my 500 watt JVC receiver, may for that receiver, be so integrated, as to produce a better CD sound then connecting a CD player via auxullary to the same receiver. What do you think?

What receiver do you have? The funny thing is Music Direct sent me their large catalogue and the prices for things were astonomical- cables for the price I would buy a receiver for, etc., and it seems one can spend a fortune getting obsessed over this stuff.

I mentioned a tube amp because you're hoping for a significant change in your sound and the two items you can change in an audio system that will have the most dramatic effect on the way things sound are the speakers and the amplifier, in that order. The changes anything else will make are comparatively minor. For example, no amount of money spent on cables (such as you mention) will ever come remotely close to providing the same impact changing your amplifier will. Many will even argue expensive cabling is just more audio snake oil. So since you're happy with your Orbs, this leaves the amp.

Though there are differences in the way solid state amps from different manufacturers sound, those differences tend to be slight. Thus I suggested tube amps because they tend to sound both noticeably brighter and warmer than their solid-state counterparts, offering amplification that I believe may match your desire for "warmth, sweetness, vitality & richness."

But you may not need to resort to tubes. You say your DVD player is built into your JVC receiver, and this may be another reason to look at your amplification. Typically all-in-one components produce a higher level of distortion in their audio channels. For example, JVC's best current built-together unit, the 700 Watt TH-M603, is rated at 10% total harmonic distortion in all channels. Compare this to the $300 Yamaha RX-V450's rating of .06%. Though measurements are a tricky thing to attempt comparison with, these do give you an idea of the scale of the difference between typical amps in all-in-one units and amps in dedicated HT receivers. Thus the expense of a new reciever could be similar to what you were willing to spend for the stuff you're sending back, but the result will be much more noticeable. To answer to your question, I run a Denon receiver, as I find their receivers sound just a tad warmer than their competitors. But as I mentioned earlier, this is slight in comparison to similar non-Denon HT receivers.

As for digital vs. analog, all music is encoded digtially on CDs but this must be converted at some point to an analog signal before the speakers can reproduce it. When you connect a CD player using analog outputs, you are relying on the CD player's built-in Digital-to-Audio Converters (DACs) to convert the signal to analog before it gets to your receiver. When you connect the CD player using the digital optical cable, you are bypassing the DACs inside CD player and sending the digital signal to the the DACs built into your receiver for conversion instead.

This is why a lot of people have cheap DVD and CD players hooked to their more expensive systems and why you don't see them often getting into deep forum discussions over which ones sound better like they do with speakers and receivers. These people simply connect their players digitally and use them purely as transport mechanisms to get the ones and zeros to their better equipment for analog conversion. In the case of your unit, the DACs are being shared. For this reason, your built in DVD player and any cheap or expensive CD/DVD players hooked up digitally are likely to sound similar.

Your receiver could also explain why the CD players you tried sounded significantly worse when you hooked them up with analog connectors. Many all-in-one units digitize all their auxilliary inputs. If this is the case with your unit, using the analog connection could sound worse because it actually adds another digital to analog conversion stage to the process..

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

Hershon,
I am not surprised at all at your results, I however give you kudos for your experimental nature. Somethings you just don't know until you try them out. I was real curious about the differences in cables. My colleagues told me I was wasting my time sitting down listening to different speaker wire and interconnects. Well it was a real ear opening experience for me. Most of the cables sounded exactly alike, and the ones that didn't had some kind of frequency alterating device on them. The wires I really liked sounded like nothing at all, they were transparent, invisible, not there at all. That is what wires should sound like.

[RobotCzar]

Revolver and Rubber Soul are among my most favorite recordings, they may actually be my favorite albums of all.

But, they absolutely positively cannot be used to judge the quality of an audio system. Nobody knows how they are supposed to sound, so how can you use them to judge the accuracy of your system? What you are really doing is just judging sound that you like, which is fine but has nothing to do the the quality or transparancy of your equipment.

Like almost all pop/rock albums these recordings are mixdowns from several separately recorded tracks that were recorded in different acoustical spaces (or in a space that essentially doesn't have any acoustics). They were recorded from diiffering perspectivea and probably with different equipment and then mix down by ear with all kinds of processing done by the mixer. Hence, they have no accurate representation of an acoustic space and cannot be used to judge things like soundstage or multidementionality. You have no way to judge how the recording engineer intended these recordings to sound. Again, are simply judging your own taste in sound, not system accuracy.

The case of Rubber Soul is particularly bad as it was recorded in some goofy (and quickly abandoned) idea that the singers should be in one channel and the music in the other. Rubber Soul is much much better if you listen in mono.

I don't say this to insult. I honestly want you to be able to judge home audio system quality and you can't do it the way your are trying to do it. Note, I absolutely do not believe that a sonic clarifyier or any other item of foolishness has a chance of making your system sound "better" (whatever that is) or more accurate.