I had a friend that worked at a Sony disc manufacturing plant here in Eugene years ago. They had a listening room with Dunlavy speakers and someone got paid to listen to CDs to make sure there weren't gross errors like mixed up track order, incomplete songs, AC hum that somehow got recorded, obvious stuff like that. He pointed out to me that the error correction method on the CD and the CD players had been tested to be quite good, and they saw no improvement from green markers. Data that was intended to go on the CD from their ram stacks was what was reaching the DAC. Of course they didn't try all CD players and there could be individual CDs with problems that a little treatment would be just enough to fix.
CDs And Green Markers. Please Don’t Laugh.
I’m sorry. I apologize. If anything has been done to death, it’s this. And yet . . .
I was pulling “Darkness On The Edge Of Town” out of my CD player the other day and wondering if Bruce had really made peace with his father when I noticed the edge of the disc was green. Looking through my collection, I found a bunch of them so marked. “Let It Be” by The Replacements. “Murmur.” Stuff that came out during the brief period after the introduction of the CD and before the green pen became an embarrassment.
I should give a quick kudos to the albums that have survived countless culling that keeps my active collection at about 500 discs. Discs that are easily stored because I always take the discs and printed media out of the ridiculous plastic “jewel” cases and put them in DiscSox, an invention I can’t believe has been overlooked by the Nobel committee. 500 discs fits into five trays from Office Depot and the whole collection takes up about 16x30 inches and the height of a CD. I can’t imagine living with the original packaging.
I never A/B’ed any of the albums with the green marking. Never looked into the science of the green pen. Back in the day, it was cheap, it was easy, and it was supposed to work. Why not try it? When it became a laughingstock, I stopped.
But like skinny ties, I assume that green markers have come in and out of vogue many times since 1982. I love a good tweak and wonder if anyone has justified the use of the green marker. I’m not looking far a scientific explanation. Herbie’s Super Black Hole actually works but without anything close to a reason for doing so. I’d be thrilled if the same was true if green pens.
Besides, those looking for science in audio forums should familiarize themselves with a priori reasoning, and the problems attendant upon it.
Where have I gone? Why so much wandering? Is it because the initial question is so stupid? Still, I’d like to know: Has anything happened since, say, 1985, that would make greening the edge of CDs sensible?
If not, I promise to apologize and slink quietly back into the darkness.