READER Ewan MacGregor writes to us about āhi-fi bunkum and hocus-pocusā. It seems that audiophiles who fancy they have especially sensitive ears have been upgrading the leads that connect their equipment to the mains power socket.
āAm I the only one who thinks that this fails to take into account the bog-standard wiring from the fuse box to the socket?ā MacGregor asks. āWhat good can it do to spend Ā£100 or more on the last metre of cable from the socket to the hi-fi?ā
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We have been here before. Not so long ago, hi-fi journals reported that people were buying expensive coaxial aerial cable for their TVs to tack onto the end of the long run of standard cable coming down from the rooftop aerial. Did it do any good? We doubt it.
MacGregor has also come across a company that bizarrely offers to cryogenically freeze cables and hi-fi components. This, says , will āensure the best soundā.
āCan it possibly be true?ā asks MacGregor.
Who knows? But after years of watching the audio industry peddle bunkum, Feedback has come to a number of conclusions.
The people who sell products that promise chalk-and-cheese differences in sound are as likely to say they donāt work as a waiter is to say ānoā when a diner asks if the fish on the menu is good tonight. Whatās more, audiophiles who have spent the familyās holiday money on a āmagicā hi-fi fix are hardly likely to admit that they canāt hear the difference.
Itās probably best not to believe any of the magic fixes unless the company selling them can cite a statistically significant test with a panel of people who donāt know whether theyāre listening to music with or without the fix. Itās no great surprise that such blind-test evidence is about as rare as hensā teeth.
LONDON paper The Times announced last month announced that āā. Colin Wainwright has written to point out that if it had devalued the currency by just 100 per cent, it would have been worthless. Devaluing it by 1200 per cent must leave it even less than worthless.
He wondered how a currency of negative value works and weāre not sure either. Perhaps it means that when you go into a shop to buy a bar of soap, you come out with the soap and a wheelbarrow full of currency notes as well. But The Times, with its understanding of such matters, might be able to explain it better.
LIKE so many Feedback readers, Graham Barrow has an enquiring mind and a zest for research. So when he found himself wondering how common his most frequent misspellings were, he went straight to a famous web search engine to find out. As a consultant specialising in training, he regularly miskeys that word and types ātraiingā instead. He is not alone. The FWSE tells him there are 52,700 pages on the web containing the word.
That pales into insignificance compared with the next word he tried ā ārigthā ā which appears 733,000 times (and which has often appeared in draft versions of this column). But even ārigthā is a minnow compared with the last word he checked. āBecuaseā, he points out, sounds like it ought to be a treatment for hay fever. If it was, it would be a very popular one, since it appears no fewer than 4,950,000 times in the FWSEās listing.
Barrow leaves us with a challenge. Is ābecuaseā the most common typo in the English language? Or can readers find a more popular one?
READER Michael Strawson was surprised to receive an honest error message when he was perusing the UK National Archive site : āThere was an error in the catalogue. However a user friendly version error description does not exist,ā he was told. Unfortunately, honest or not, the message was like most other error messages in that it was of no help at all.
āA sign at Eoin OāConnellās workplace reads: āNo Smoking alarms in useā. Do they go off if you donāt smoke?ā
Products that work āforeverā
THE packaging on the Jeyes Parozone Anti-Limescale Block bought by our colleague Stephen Battersby proclaims: āStops Limescale FOREVER*ā. The explanation is on the back: ā*with continuous useā.
Battersby wonders what other examples of this kind of product claim are out there. āBattery lasts forever (with continuous replacement)ā; āDoughnut satisfies appetite forever (with continuous consumption)āā¦
FINALLY, this monthās Good Housekeeping magazine contains an advert for a new CircoSteam oven. It tells us: āAttention to detail means that Neffās CircoSteam doesnāt have complicated functions ā just simple one-touch controls, including 52 cooking programmesā¦ā
Xavier Mooney, who alerted us to this, suggests this statement contradicts itself, and we agree.
