Shakti Hallographs..

DaveyF

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SHUN MOOKS ARE THE BEST!

They are my favorite product in hifi, because that is one product category I have 100% certainty about. Every time I do a local audiophile visit I take them along (easily portable) and they just slaughter everything else.

Are you talking about their Stones or the Hallographs??
 

bonzo75

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Are you talking about their Stones or the Hallographs??

You are confusing Shakti with Shun Mook. I replied to ddk's comment on Shun Mook, which does footers, and small discs to be kept around the room and on components.
 

bonzo75

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Argonaut

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SHUN MOOKS ARE THE BEST!

They are my favorite product in hifi, because that is one product category I have 100% certainty about. Every time I do a local audiophile visit I take them along (easily portable) and they just slaughter everything else.

With an 100% approval rating bonzo ?
 

Ronm1

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It depends on your taste but Shakti is a very power tweak and what that means is that like all tweaks it imposes a very strong character i.e. COLOR, on the system. My experience, they seem to subdue some frequencies and give the illusion of better focus and detail, the effect compounds with each additional Shakti component. I don't like everything sounding the same why I dislike tweaks of any kind and the more powerful the tweak the worse it is for me. Tweaks introduce colorations, period.
david
Agreed. Proper positioning per device is key to achieve a positive vs nulled or negative result. After a fair amount of careful to & fro one can get the room/hall ambiance, if it's their to start with, on live recordings that had previously been masked. When successful, without question, the effort is worth it.
 

maxima95

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May 13, 2015
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Shakti Hallographs

..I'm a skeptic when it comes to tweak voodoo but having read several positive reviews of these thingamajigs curiosity has gotten the best of me. $1500 seems pretty ridiculous but I suppose if they really improve the soundstage as claimed...oh what the heck. Any comments by folks who've actually had experience with them would be much appreciated....thx in advance..

Yes, they do influence the sound. Getting them dialed in can be tedious.

I have not used similar products and have no basis for comparison.

I paid $1000 a while back. At the time I didn't think they were "worth" that amount. I contemplated making a set. By the time you get a sheet of good plywood, some ebony and some ? (I was never sure what the other wood(s) was in the curved sections), you then have some labor ahead. Cutting and rounding over the serpentine sections, stands, hardware, finish etc. By the time you do all that, they cost something.

I had read where someone made a set from particle board and stated that they were very effective - though I don't think they were compared to a retail set.
 

microstrip

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(...) There's nothing wrong with tweaks if one enjoys their effect, just be aware that a black or velvety background as brought up here is a strong coloration, it replaces the ambience of the recording. A live recording in a club has noise and a very different ambience, sound stage, imaging, etc., from one in a concert hall which is in turn very different from a studio recording. Its a coloration when everything thing you play has exactly the same type of "Black, Quiet?" background and instruments get highlighted in the soundstage similarly on every recording and in their own confined and defined space and not removal of noise as claimed by the manufacturers/vendors of such devices. Goes for cables, conditioners, etc. too. In the real world there's always some kind of noise and ambience present, maybe more palpable on some recordings than others but its always there. I have never in my life experienced this kind of applied "Blackness" even in the quietest and most remote places I've visited, no less a man made structure of any kind, everything has its own ambience, environment or whatever else you like to call it.

david

David,

Just to add that it seems me you are using the words "blackness"and "velvet" in a sense that is different from the usual practice in high-end subjective appreciation. They are more often used in the sense that the electronic and electromechanical mechanical background is so low that it is replaced by a natural background, the ambiance that is hidden in the recording. In these conditions the instruments and players are highlighted by the audience. This effect is very clear in chamber music - the small number of instruments and the music are highlighted by the feeling of having musicians that move facing you and sometimes an audience.

IMHO your point about tweaks is very true - most of them artificially enhance detail and dynamics, breaking the natural decays of instruments in the ambiance. Some footers are particularly violent in this aspect - it is why they always get successful "wow's" in public demos.
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
David,

Just to add that it seems me you are using the words "blackness"and "velvet" in a sense that is different from the usual practice in high-end subjective appreciation. They are more often used in the sense that the electronic and electromechanical mechanical background is so low that it is replaced by a natural background, the ambiance that is hidden in the recording. In these conditions the instruments and players are highlighted by the audience. This effect is very clear in chamber music - the small number of instruments and the music are highlighted by the feeling of having musicians that move facing you and sometimes an audience.

IMHO your point about tweaks is very true - most of them artificially enhance detail and dynamics, breaking the natural decays of instruments in the ambiance. Some footers are particularly violent in this aspect - it is why they always get successful "wow's" in public demos.

I am in complete agreement with you Francisco as I found myself
 

ddk

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May 18, 2013
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David,

Just to add that it seems me you are using the words "blackness"and "velvet" in a sense that is different from the usual practice in high-end subjective appreciation. They are more often used in the sense that the electronic and electromechanical mechanical background is so low that it is replaced by a natural background, the ambiance that is hidden in the recording. In these conditions the instruments and players are highlighted by the audience. This effect is very clear in chamber music - the small number of instruments and the music are highlighted by the feeling of having musicians that move facing you and sometimes an audience.

IMHO your point about tweaks is very true - most of them artificially enhance detail and dynamics, breaking the natural decays of instruments in the ambiance. Some footers are particularly violent in this aspect - it is why they always get successful "wow's" in public demos.

Might be that those adjectives have been associated with absence of noise as generally claimed by the manufacturer of the product but in every case I only encountered a layer color masking the noise instead of removing it. Removing noise doesn't lead to "black or velvet" nor does it make every recording sound the same, pretty un-natural. I don't think anyone would be calling it black if it was Natural, if you can point to it and name it, it's there.
david
 

Mike Lavigne

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Might be that those adjectives have been associated with absence of noise as generally claimed by the manufacturer of the product but in every case I only encountered a layer color masking the noise instead of removing it. Removing noise doesn't lead to "black or velvet" nor does it make every recording sound the same, pretty un-natural. I don't think anyone would be calling it black if it was Natural, if you can point to it and name it, it's there.
david

I think assuming that calling something 'black' indicates some sort of coloration is silly. just like more than 500 posts discussing what is meant by 'natural'. the words themselves mean nothing until the user tells us what that means. and mostly unless you really know that person and understand where they are coming from or especially if you have listened a few times with them it's hard to exactly get it. music cannot be so easily defined.

maybe low noise is a less ambiguous term, but that can be twisted around too to say that the ambience is missing.

words are seldom definitive.
 

ddk

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I think assuming that calling something 'black' indicates some sort of coloration is silly. just like more than 500 posts discussing what is meant by 'natural'. the words themselves mean nothing until the user tells us what that means. and mostly unless you really know that person and understand where they are coming from or especially if you have listened a few times with them it's hard to exactly get it. music cannot be so easily defined.

maybe low noise is a less ambiguous term, but that can be twisted around too to say that the ambience is missing.

words are seldom definitive.

To the contrary Mike, black is a pretty clear descriptor, the issue with natural was that some didn't accept it as a descriptor, there was no confusion among those who did. Black is a presence, not absence of something. My comment regarding ambience was that the natural one was replaced with this black, not that it was missing. Of course we can argue this until pigs fly but I fall back to if you name it, its there...

david
 

ddk

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May 18, 2013
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I think assuming that calling something 'black' indicates some sort of coloration is silly. just like more than 500 posts discussing what is meant by 'natural'. the words themselves mean nothing until the user tells us what that means. and mostly unless you really know that person and understand where they are coming from or especially if you have listened a few times with them it's hard to exactly get it. music cannot be so easily defined.

maybe low noise is a less ambiguous term, but that can be twisted around too to say that the ambience is missing.

words are seldom definitive.

Actually Mike, reading your post again I don't disagree with what you say, I never claimed to know what's in every man's mind just mentioned the systems I heard described as black had that quality. Wether one likes it or not isn't the point, black is a color and has always had the same meaning since biblical days.

david
 

Fitzcaraldo215

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Nov 3, 2014
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I think assuming that calling something 'black' indicates some sort of coloration is silly. just like more than 500 posts discussing what is meant by 'natural'. the words themselves mean nothing until the user tells us what that means. and mostly unless you really know that person and understand where they are coming from or especially if you have listened a few times with them it's hard to exactly get it. music cannot be so easily defined.

maybe low noise is a less ambiguous term, but that can be twisted around too to say that the ambience is missing.

words are seldom definitive.

Mike, I am with you 100%. Like audio, language is never perfect.
 

ddk

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May 18, 2013
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wow...all this adjective/word dissection. I am glad I don't have to write stereo reviews for a living. ;)

Can't figure out since when Black means anything else but what its always meant as an adjective except on this forum, soon we won't be able to communicate anything because English vocabulary isn't accepted here.

black.jpg

david
 

Fitzcaraldo215

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Nov 3, 2014
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Can't figure out since when Black means anything else but what its always meant as an adjective except on this forum, soon we won't be able to communicate anything because English vocabulary isn't accepted here.

View attachment 23520

david

Ok, David, let's do a little bit more linguistic dissection and analysis. Black is a color, something that has a clear, simple and direct meaning in visual terms. When applied to audio, it becomes a metaphor derived from that common word. So, its meaning in audio is indirect and inexact. You can look up "black" in 100 dictionaries, starting with the OED, and you will not find a definition of exactly, succinctly and concretely what it means when applied to audio. It may have a clear, unambiguous audio meaning in your mind, but understandably, it just does not have that same crystalline clarity to others. Our individual interpretations of it are likely to vary all over the place, just as our perceptions of sound and music do.

I am not saying "black" cannot and should not be used as an audio descriptor. But, given its ambiguity in an audio context, the word by itself alone is insufficient to convey fully (or nearly so) what it is you are hearing. Additional descriptive language accompanying it might make your meaning clearer to others.

Sorry to digress into this long winded version of "I don't quite understand what you are trying to say." But, yes, trying to communicate what one hears clearly and sufficiently to others in words in English or any other language is, unfortunately, never simple. And, this is not just a problem with describing sound.
 

PeterA

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I had thought that by "black" background we mean a lower noise floor, but I think David is pointing out that there is a distinction and difference between the two. In live events, the background is almost never "black". It can be very quiet accentuating the contrast between sound and silence which increases the sense of dynamics and clarity/detail. I hear this at Boston Symphony Hall and in most studio recordings. But I also think I understand what David means when he writes that there is a background atmosphere or ambiance which one does not want to obscure with a veil that covers over these subtle spacial cues and sense of atmosphere - that which defines the performance space. A quality or black background that a component or tweak imposes universally on all recordings is not good if one wants to understand what the recording actually sounds like. And in this sense, since there is a unique quality to each recording venue, if a tweak or system makes them all sound the same or similar, the system has moved away from sounding natural and or transparent.

So, if I understand David correctly, a system can not sound both transparent to the recording or source and also have a similar black velvety background on every recording. A system can have a lower noise floor with the introduction of a new component, but that is not the same as a blacker background. Most tweaks add a coloration of some kind, so they can make a system sound as if it has a blacker background but not more natural or transparent to the recording. And more natural is not a coloration which makes every recording sound the same but a transparency that makes the best recordings sound very real.

Since this is a thread about a tweak, I presume those who use such tweaks are trying to get a sound which is more pleasing to them. What if some of these tweaks make a system sound more natural to the listener? Is that not a good thing, or do all tweaks add a coloration to the sound which prevent the system from sounding natural, or more real?

The question I have though is does a natural sounding system impose a universal character on all recordings or is it another way of saying that the system is transparent, imposes very little on the recording, and therefore resembles the sound of real instruments in real spaces on the best recordings?

At least this is how I understand David's posts. If I am mistaken, I welcome David's corrections and input.
 

es347

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..as the vaunted OP not quite sure what a discussion regarding black has to do with a Hallograph but hey, knock yourselves out navel gazing fellas
 

PeterA

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..as the vaunted OP not quite sure what a discussion regarding black has to do with a Hallograph but hey, knock yourselves out navel gazing fellas

I think it has to do with the general effect of adding tweaks to a system and coloration in general. It has to do with what these devices are doing to the sound of the system. I read that these device can shape the soundstage and create a more palpable image and sense of dimension. Do they not resonate at certain frequencies and thus emphasize some over others?

If I am mistaken, please disregard my posts and I apologize for being off topic.
 

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