Read This Facing
North: The Strange Audio World Of
Peter W. Belt
For maximum understanding,
please read this article with your nose
pointed at Oslo: I’m a quarter Norwegian
and make more sense when you do this….
Right, then. That’s
the silliness out of the way for the
moment and everything that follows now
is perfectly serious, though perhaps
just as hard to credit. In the last
week I have frozen CDs to make them
sound better and have improved a £25
DVD player considerably by smearing
a thin white cream on the inside of
its cover. Oh yes, and when I wrapped
a small spiral of white plastic tubing
round all of my audio and power cables,
the sound of my primary system perked
up no end. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,
to the audio world of Peter Belt’s Leeds
based company, PWB Electronics.
Although Peter Belt
is a highly qualified electronics engineer
who manufactured well- rated electrostatic
headphones and a variant on the electrostatic
speaker in the 70s and 80s, he’s neither
orthodox nor part of the hi-fi establishment.
In the late 80s he caused a stir in
the audio equipment press (Hi Fi News,
Hi Fi Answers, Hi Fi Review and Audiophile
for instance) by demonstrating beyond
reasonable doubt that small and usually
overlooked ambient electromagnetic fields
in most rooms could seriously detract
from the perceived performance of the
most expensive audio equipment. Worse
than that, he developed relatively cheap
ways of combating these problems, sometimes
with the curious and highly unpopular
result that cheaper kit sounded magnitudes
better than higher-end stuff – which
made him less than welcome with everyone
of course, manufacturers and their customers
alike.
Now while it’s fairly
obvious that big fields coming from
power cables, ranks of computing equipment,
large amplifiers and so on might well
affect working sound equipment nearby,
this wasn’t what Peter Belt was concerned
by. Instead, he believed that small
fields from things like the spinning
platter of an LP turntable (or worse
still a spinning CD itself) affected
the way we hear the sounds from
our beloved systems. There were also,
Belt said, unnoticed (and unfortunately
unmeasurable) fields unwittingly built
into the designs of most electronic
equipment, but because these failed
the falsification test for scientific
hypotheses (if you can’t disprove
a proposition then it’s not science
as we know it) experts wrote off his
fixes as Snake Oil. ‘Mere self-deception’
they said, ‘Auto-suggestion for the
gullible,’ to anyone who claimed to
hear Belt’s improvements.
For a while however,
some audio writers were thoroughly persuaded.
Paul Benson for instance, writing in
the July 1989 edition of Hi Fi Review
said that a Belt treated loudspeaker
actually improved the sound of the working
speakers when brought into the listening
room - in diametrical contrast to the
more usual deterioration that happened
when any other passive speaker was introduced.
‘Peter and May Belt,’ he wrote, ‘have
ways of treating all electromagnetic
pollution. Ways that are incredible
–literally incredible. But they work…..The
beauty of it is that the products and
free applications (see below - BK )
clear up the electromagnetic smog in
the room (which) allows us to hear what
equipment is capable of doing.’ The
really odd thing about this ‘smog clearing’
though, was that according to Benson
it made the listening room and the listeners
feel better. The improved listening
environment, he added, is far more important
than expensive equipment upgrades.
And it’s at this point
that everything goes pear-shaped when
it comes to everyday logic. Peter Belt’s
1989 free ‘treatments’ included pinning
up one of the corners of curtains with
a safety pin and placing plain pieces
of unprinted paper under one of the
feet of anything fitted with four feet.
Preposterous, surely? Well, try it and
see - and if that whets your appetite,
then try out this new one. Make a small
rectangle of plain paper – the size
doesn’t matter (no, honestly) but the
corners should be right angles, and
then pin prick a hole in each corner
and another where the diagonals intersect.
If you then Sellotape the pin-pricked
rectangle to the wood of one of your
speakers the sound will change. It’s
completely impossible of course, but
my wife (a supremely logical woman with
a Ph D and hearing that makes bats envious)
asked me immediately what I’d done to
the system when I tried it.
Small wonder then,
to discover that Peter and May Belt
were dropped relatively quickly by the
audio press. After a flurry of interest
and glowing reports from such worthies
as Jimmy Hughes, Benson and Keith Howard,
most press coverage dried up from 1993
onwards, and next to nothing was printed
about their subsequent developments
until 1999. Then however, when Soundstage
Audio Online and Audio Musings began
to review their products, a new wave
of interest developed and is still going
on. The Belts are still in business
and their products now run to some fifty
odd all told.
My own interest was
sparked off recently by finding a couple
of Belt devices in a box of audio junk
in the attic. I had used them with some
satisfaction in the 90s but meanwhile
my audio system had become like my grandfather’s
knife (four new blades and two new handles,
so to speak) and I had moved house a
couple of times in the interim. Would
they do anything to the sound now, I
wondered? On finding that they did,
I looked the Belts up again on their
website
and discovered that their thinking had
moved on considerably.
The sound system is
pretty good these days, if I say so
myself. It’s not as good as the Music
Web reference system of course,
but at its heart is a Chord SPM 1000
power amplifier, driven by John Curle’s
Parasound PL/D 1200 Line Drive Pre-Amp.
Until recently the sources were a Linn
LP12 turntable with an Ekos arm, a not
terrific but seriously tweaked CD player
with an outboard DAC and for the last
couple of years, I have used the Sky
Digital satellite as the radio source.
The speakers are stand mounted Audio
Spectrum Axxias (great for voices since
I listen to a lot of opera) and there
are decent cables, interconnects and
power cords throughout. At its best
it sounds musical, is low on distortion
and can be listened to for hours without
fatigue. When I swapped the Linn last
Christmas for the Primare DVD30 universal
disc player, I thought that the overall
sound was as near as I could get to
a real performance and was very pleased
with it. I was wrong though.
May Belt kindly sent
me some Spiratube for my cabling, a
sample of something called Silver Rainbow
Foil for treating CDs and a small amount
of a compound called Cream Electret
which has a lot of applications. She
also sent a heap of information about
the firm’s history, copies of reviews
and printed versions of a news letter
that a Belt enthusiast called Dr. Richard
Graham maintains for the benefit of
all product users. There was a set of
instructions on using the products included
in the package and some new information
on free tweaks, one of which is about
freezing CDs. I started experiments
with that before making other changes.
As it turns out, the
idea of freezing CDs has been around
for a while. The UK’s Sunday Times (ST
10.10.93) carried an article by Mark
Skipworth describing a controlled and
blind-tested comparison between identical
frozen and normal CDs in which the judging
panel invariably preferred the frozen
samples. The technique is simple enough:
the CDs are placed in a sealed polythene
bag to prevent condensation and left
in the freezer compartment of a domestic
fridge overnight. After freezing is
completed, the CDs should be allowed
to thaw to room temperature extremely
slowly. (I wrapped mine in a towel,
transferred them to the cool compartment
of the fridge for some hours and then
left them -still in the towel - to reach
room temperature in my living room.)
The result was startling in all cases
but can best be described with one particular
example.
The BIS disc of the
complete Sibelius ‘Karelia’ music (Lahti
Sinfonia / Osmo Vänskä BIS
–CD - 915) has two male folk singers
at Track 2 performing Finnish runo
singing with its rocking 5/4 rhythm,
while accompanied by the orchestra.
Since the voices are reasonably similar
in sound, it has always been difficult
to tell them apart (even with the new
player) or to locate them spatially
as they toss the melody back and forth
between them. Not any more: after freezing,
it’s quite clear which singer is which
and the physical distance between them
is extremely precise. Better than that
though, the perceived depth of the stereo
image has increased too, so that the
singers are now surrounded by the airy
ambience of a live performance and the
gap between them and the orchestra is
almost tangibly real. Similar effects
are heard on the whole disc.
The effect is enhanced
with rather more subtlety by freezing
the disc a second time after which the
three dimensionality of the sound (on
every disc tested) seemed even greater.
Instruments and voices were even more
precisely located – it’s possible to
spot the position of different horn
players for example - and generally
the overall sound is characterised by
a greater sense of easy relaxation.
Everything feels.. well, pleasanter
as well as more realistic, closer (as
Quad used to say) to the original sound.
Why this should be,
is more than mysterious. Similar beneficial
cryogenic treatment to brass musical
instruments was reported by New York
Times On The Web, November 2nd,
1999 and attributed the improvement
to changes in the grain structures of
the metals involved. Since Peter Belt
says that freezing is beneficial to
audio cables (and actually, though it’s
hard to believe, to entire CD players,
amplifiers etc) the restructuring of
grains within metals does seem plausible.
There may be I suppose,
a parallel physical explanation for
CDs, if freezing realigns the crystal
/ grain structure in their metal coatings
although why that would enhance the
detection of the digitised dimples read
by the average CD laser is distinctly
less than clear. There may be an explanation
of course, but so far as I’m aware nothing
agreed is to hand. And if all this seems
to defy simple physics, the next Belt
CD treatment is much, much odder. Step
forward Silver Rainbow Foils.
After continuing to
experiment by wrapping short lengths
of the helical white plastic Spiratube
to all my non-white audio leads and
power cords – yes, it’s the colour that’s
stressed as important - with a generally
greater sense of control over the sound,
I added small pieces of Silver Rainbow
Foils to the labelled side of a couple
of CDs, frozen and unfrozen, one of
each. The foil has those pseudo-holographic
circles imprinted on it that change
colour when lit from different directions,
hence its name. Two 15mm by 5mm strips
are placed on a CD, one of which has
to cover the Compact disc Digital Audio
logo that appears on all of them. The
other piece of foil can be placed anywhere
else but on most discs, positioning
the strips at about 45 and 270 degrees
(where the logo often is) seems to work
nicely. While an improvement appears
on all discs treated, there is a definite
cumulative effect when the foil is applied
to frozen discs and this goes a step
further to increasing the life-like
qualities of orchestral and vocal music,
often as not revealing even more of
the inner parts than formerly. Mrs.
Belt is happy to provide a sample of
the foil to anyone who contacts her
by email or by surface mail (see below
for addresses.) It’s certainly worth
trying in my opinion and I’m told that
the foil is one of the most popular
devices that PWB Electronics provides
since it costs only £20 for three lengths
of 170mm by 15mm.
By far the most startling
result of any of the Belt treatments
however, came from using the sample
of ‘Cream Electret’ on a £25 white goods
store DVD player that I bought a while
ago when my Primare DVD30 had to be
sent for repair. Among the many uses
for the cream (it’s a white, water and
oil based emulsion) such as coating
it sparingly on cartridge fuses in power
outlet plug tops, on audio leads in
conjunction with Spiratube and so on,
is the claim that it can be usefully
coated on the inside surfaces of audio
equipment’s cases, amplifiers, players
and so on. Not willing to risk taking
the restored Primare to bits lightly,
I applied it to the cheap player with
dramatic results.
For all its cheapness,
the sound and picture quality of the
budget machine was really quite good
to begin with. It was just about ‘hi-fi’
and a bit bass light, but it gave a
very decent two dimensional stereo image
when playing CDs and was an object lesson
in how manufacturers of budget electronics
can buy up slightly outdated technology
to mass-market advantage. I couldn’t
have lived with it as a main player
of course, at least not for long, but
as a stand-by it was better than expected.
After applying the cream though, all
that changed and I began to understand
the claims that properly treated budget
equipment can give higher-end kit a
run for its money. The immediate effect
was that of buying a fairly expensive
upgrade – imaging was actually three
dimensional now with almost all of the
ease and control of the Primare, particular
on the treated discs. It was still rather
bass light and yes, the Primare was
still better. Whether it was 84 times
better (the price differential between
the two machines) or even 50 times better
became highly debatable however and
if I had been sceptical before about
Peter and May Belt’s claims I was certainly
won over. I could live with the
cheap player now, even as a CD source
which is not its main purpose.
In a future article
I’d like to experiment further, perhaps
with a few other devices and with not
a little trepidation, I’ll also attempt
to summarise a bit of the theorising
behind these products. Since one of
theories involves Rupert Sheldrake’s
ideas about ‘morphic resonances’ a definitely
New-Agey notion about hidden and unrecorded
energy fields, that’s clearly going
to be no easy task. Meanwhile, I’d recommend
that you try some of these experiments
yourselves, especially the free ones
perhaps after reading this article again
- while facing Oslo. With morphic resonances
around apparently, even that suggestion
might just work.
Bill Kenny
Contact Mrs May Belt
for more information or a sample of
Silver Rainbow CD Foil either by emailing
foil@belt.demon.co.uk
or by surface mail at PWB Electronics,
18 Pasture Crescent, Leeds, LS7 4QS,
UK Please enclose your name and postal
address in your communications.
The PWB Product Users
Group is at http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/PWB
The PWB Web Site is
at http://www.belt.demon.co.uk
Note:
This is not one of MusicWeb's
justly famous April Fools - Len M
PART
TWO Hunting the Snark
