SOtM SMS-200

[f1eng]

I really think we should ask f1eng if he could spare the time and would be willing to shed some extra light on these matters and his views. He told us many times he worked as an engineer in F1 and while I don't know if he was an electrical, mechanical, telecommunications, digital systems engineer (or had some other specialism) we all know that in F1 they only hire the best of the best.

Also I know engineers usually have open minds, are curious as to how things work/could be improved so they experiment quite a bit. He must have plenty of hands on experience since he's been quite active in this hobby for a long time.

Ooh very snide!
I was too busy most of the time, and had plenty of money so ended up buying cables recommended by dealers or which had been reviewed well. 
There is no mechanism by which I could see a properly engineered cable could differ from another, except the connection so when I was on a period of gardening leave I decided to do a test myself. My daughter did the changes (she is a scientist and musician who thinks hifi is daft) and I listened. We tried speaker cables and interconnects, I had loads by then from giveaways to expensive stuff.
All the cables sounded the same except those with filters built in (MIT and Goldmund) all non filtered cables were the same regardless of price.
I told another hifi enthusiast I know of my experience and he had a similar story, involving a relative who was doing a University project. He was absolutely convinced he could tell the difference (unlike me who was not expecting to) and was totally amazed that he actually couldn't in controlled conditions.
My extensive test was in 1997 and nothing new has been invented since so I am completely comfortable that all differences heard between all non-eccentric or filtered cables is due to the placebo effect.

I have not experimented with these "blind" so called grounding boxes (which are not grounded), but, as an engineer who worked on record players before going into Formula 1 full time, and have been making amateur sound recordings since I was 11, was always intrigued why LPs sound so nice despite the whole technology being quite weak, from recording, through cutting and then replaying them. There are frequency response, noise and distortion shortcomings at every stage.
Here we tried adding noise to the output of a CD player to make it as noisy as an LP and this gave a clear impression of a wider and deeper sound stage. A friend of mine did a more complex test which involved the noise related to the music being played (don't ask details, I don't know how) with a similar result. My, possibly wrong, deduction from this is that the effect of something like Entec boxes with lengths of wire inside and cables with bits of wire  added which are connected at one end, pick up noise from the electrical environment around them, mainly from speaker cables which is both music related and added to the output have a similar effect, ie they add noise which gives a pleasant effect rather than remove it.

I have been making sound and data recordings for decades (I was the first engineer to use a digital data recorder on a F1 car) so am aware what is accurate and what is not from (a great deal of) first hand personal experience.

FWIW I came into F1 at a time when one had to do everything but my experience there was things like being the first to use computing for motor racing, being the first to use extensive data recording (back then I had to design and make lots of the transducers and signal conditioning electronics) I was the first to use CAD and CAE in F1.

I have been a hifi enthusiast for over 45 years now and been recording music for longer but my opinion is just that, though maybe based on more engineering knowledge than most hifi fans, so take it or leave it - I just put it in as a bit of a counter to what I see as the loony fringe of the hobby - somebody has to

I do not dispute that some people hear differences in things but I became fairly sure that for some things it is a placebo effect, which is no less real to them for that, and nothing I have learned over the last 20 years has done anything but confirm it.