Does coloring the edges of CD's help the sonics?

If it is true, how does it work?

If you believe something works then your mind will often trick you into thinking it did something positive.

If you can't measure a difference and demonstrate it repeatedly with measurements from independent labs - then forget it. 99.9% of the time it is just your mind playing tricks.

An audiophile sits in his basement day after day, carefully coloring the edges of his entire CD collection with a dark green olive marker.

One day his wife comes down, "What you doin' that for - does it sound better?" she asks.

"Nah, sound has nothing to do with it. Olive on the edge - that's all!"

I'll tell ya what does make a difference: trueing the runout of CDs via an Audiodesk lathe.

There may be an explanation for this - power to adjust the laser tracking will be sinusoidal/periodic if the CD wobbles and the laser is constantly readjusting - to keep tracking.

If the power supply ioslation to the DAC is less than robust/adequate then this signal may affect jitter. Ed Meitner demonstrated years ago - that if you blasted a CD player with a speaker that you can get the CD's to resonate at around 1000 HZ - which then created feedback and jitter into the clock. Random jitter is ok - but precise periodic jitter of specific nature is MUCH more likely to become audible.

On the other hand - if you place your CD player inside a cabinet with a closed door and protect it from high frequencies then you should not have too much cause to worry about what Ed Meitner discovered.

The wobbly disc is another matter - as equipment designers can and should deal with this issue as laser readjustments will be periodic and related to disc rotation speed - in essence something that would be expected to happen. A DAC completely separated from the transport with a decent PLL algorithm that reduces jitter may help and the good news is that it will probably fix everything - whereas I have my doubts whether a lathe can be precise enough - those CD tracks are awful narrow...

With improved cleaners, as for the painting of the outer edge, I found little benefit, which again suggests that it is not disc wobble.

That would make it harder to explain. The reflections then would need to be enough for the CD player to resort to interpolating some unread data. ( which does occur on badly damaged/scratched CD's but should not be the normal way of things )

For more info to see how CD players do a lot of checking on what they read see this. It is kind of like the game Mastermind board game or Cluedo - after a while you have enough redundant data to be sure what you have hidden from view (or in teh case of a CD what data was misread). For sure audio CD's do not have as much redundant data for cross checking accuracy as a CD-ROM disc(where a single error could mean that software will not run on the computer) - but it should be more than enough to weed out errors from misread bits due to odd scattered reflections of light...