Since Delius has graced this thread once again, it might be a good time to post some thoughts that I had while making a long drive to a short meeting earlier this week. Delius has criticized many of the posts in this thread as being libelous toward Geoff Kait and Machina Dynamica (MD). While rolling down I-40, I got to thinking a bit about this issue and the reasons that I personally have found myself unwilling to place any faith in MD or their products. Part of my reason does trace back to a lack of faith in Belt devices, but it goes beyond that. Let me offer a fictional series of events as an example, then I'll explain why I do not trust MD as a company.

For our analogy, I am going to look at another company. Perhaps I'll use Outlaw Audio, the company that hosts this forum. Outlaw makes well-regarded home theater equipment (receivers, surround processors, amplifiers, subwoofers, and the like) and sells that equipment directly to consumers over the internet at very competitive prices. In that regard, they share a few things in common with MD - different products, certainly, but same distribution model. They offer a 30-day money back guarantee, as does basically any internet-direct company (in fact, Outlaw was one of the first to employ this model back in 1999). They offer good products at very competitive prices, and they place a great deal of value on customer service. As a result, they have a customer base that includes a number of repeat customers and they benefit from a good deal of "word of mouth" marketing. As someone who has been using various Outlaw products since the fall of 2000, I am just such a customer. What would happen if I were to see evidence of Outlaw demonstrating a grievous lack of respect for their customers? Specifically, imagine someone who was considering or had recently purchased an Outlaw surround processor or receiver. Imagine that person calling Outlaw and getting Scott (our forum moderator and a pretty senior Outlaw employee) on the phone, then asking Scott what set Outlaw's products apart from similar products offered by companies like Rotel, Denon, Anthem, Emotiva, and the line. Imagine Scott responding by saying, "Well, dear caller, our competitors simply buy their DSP chips and DAC's from companies like Cirrus. We instead purchase the design for those chips, at which point we contract with Santa's elves to hand-craft the chips using flying reindeer antler as the substrate rather than the normal silicon. These precision-crafted, flying reindeer antler chips are far superior to their average silicon-based counterparts." Clearly, Scott would be lying to this customer. Imagine that customer believing Scott and eagerly repeating this to others in an online forum. Imagine Scott offering no explanation for this story except to tell the customer that he would have to be more careful about revealing secrets to that individual in the future. If such a series of events were to take place, I would be far from the only Outlaw customer who would no longer be willing or able to provide Outlaw with my business or to recommend Outlaw to others. Even with an excellent product at a good price, such disdain for the customers simply wouldn't deserve our business.

How does this (admittedly very crazy, if fittingly festive) analogy relate to MD? In the case of MD, we have a company with an assortment of products that provide reportedly remarkable capabilities with no clear explanation, at prices that seem excessive based on the lack of information available. The consensus opinion appears to be that these clocks (and jars of pebbles and foil) are based on Peter Belt's concepts. Cue the can opener, because that would open an all-to-familiar can of worms. But wait, there is the possibility that the clock uses Orgone energy, in which case we need that can opener to open a different can of worms. Before we open either can, though, we need to take a look at an old old post from mid-March , which provided a source for HiFiGoodSoundGuy's claim that the clock served as a time travel device. That source honestly believed that the CLC operated by minimizing the time difference between the time captured on the recording and the current time, thus adding realism to the music. Where did he get such a hair-brained notion? After all, even delius agreed that the idea was ludicrous. Well, Geoff Kait offered an answer to that question: he had disseminated the information to the poster over the phone "in confidence" that the information would remain their little secret. He told a customer this! Even worse, he simply scolded the customer for sharing this information - he didn't say, "Come on, you know I was joking around since nobody seems to be willing to accept the real story" or "Sorry you took me seriously, it is actually a Belt device not a time travel device." So we have a company that is either unwilling to admit how the device works or has so little respect for its customer base that the boss will concoct crazy stories just for the hell of it. The fact that Geoff may be be a smart, well-educated individual doesn't change anything in this case. So delius tells us that he's worked for NASA? OK, he's intelligent - just like the thousands of other engineers who have worked on projects relating to the space program (and I've known a few of those engineers, including a couple college classmates and a professor who worked for Thiokol). None of that directly correlates to whether or not he is a reliable, trustworthy businessman with a good-quality, fairly-priced product. Even leaving the Belt "can of worms" unopened (at least for the moment), I wouldn't feel comfortable giving MD my business or recommending that others give MD their business simply because the company seems to have no respect for its customer base.

I'll probably drop back into this thread later to comment on one bit of research that I am still working on, maybe shortly after Christmas...