When modding goes off the rails...

[spritzer]

Edit:  

 

Edited April 20 by spritzer

[Pars]

Someone had a massive snake oil OD... good god. Must be a vibration damping freak.

[Grahame]

When your audiophile OCD has OCD?

[spritzer]

This is something special as none of this actually does anything.  Ferrites work at certain frequencies but the wire has to pass through it... not just have it vaguely in the same area.  Lumps of aluminum tape and felt on the cables... yeah nothing at all.  It seems like a bad DIY project but I have a sneaking suspicion that somebody is doing this as a service and charging a boatload for it.  

[kevin gilmore]

viva does the same shit wrapping various capacitors with wool of some kind.

[skullguise]

Holy shitballs, that's like conspiracy theory level of mods!  Ric Shultz at EVS does some pretty crazy things at times, but I will say I have always heard improvements with his work.  But yeah, what the actual fuck was that modder thinking?! 

[spritzer]

Viva are indeed a special kind of stupid as well.  I think they use felt adhesive pads for furniture (to protect hardwood floors) to help their crap circuits filled with some of the worst parts available sound better?  Yup makes sense....  Seriously, they use those Rifa PSU caps that are known to crack and short circuit in the audio path.  If only there were any better parts out there...  🙄

[willsw]

I watched a factory tour of some company that made DACs, maybe it was PS Audio, and they had a wall of shame by the repair bench that featured one that had been caked in a similar damping paint. Applying a sealant over a PCB that hasn't been cleaned is also a great way to make it much more likely that it will fail much sooner.

Maybe this guy is a rogue employee from Acoustic Revive:

 

Probably because of their glossy casework, seeing the inside of a Viva amplifier for the first time was the worst kind of surprising.