Yes, let’s say they’re chocolate chips. 😬
How I tamed digital glare.
For months I have been trying to eliminate digital glare in the my system, which showed up most noticably in the upper middle frequency vocal range, especially female vocals. I tamed some by replacing the stock fuse in my dac with HifiTuning Supreme Cu
on the sage advice of Chris Van Haus of VH Audio, resulting in a significant improvement in tonal density, detail and clarity. So far, so good. Today I lightly dusted the laser lens in my CEC transport with a microfiber cloth and was astonished to discover a substantial improvement! And the laser lens and drive compartment appeared clean to begin with (in a smoke free environment). I tried cleaning contacts, swapping power cords and interconnects, rolling the tube in my MHDT dac, and so forth, but this simple protocol was more effective than any of those experiments. I suppose results may vary as every system is unique, but for me this simple tweak was revelatory: greater clarity and a signifcant reducton of hash. Wish I had thought of tt in the beginning; it would have saved me considerable time and frustration.
Showing 15 responses by geoffkait
There is no simple answer. There are a great many reasons why someone hears glare, or thinks the sound is too hot, or too grainy, or too lean, or lacks air or sweetness. I’ve already given my top 2 reasons nobody ever heard of - the inherent vibration of the CD whilst spinning and scattered laser light. It’s like night and day. That’s kind of why advanced audiophiles have taken to the streets and developed all manner of room treatments, resonators, CD treatments, cd transport dampers, Tube dampers, isolation stands, green pens, purple pens, dampers for printed circuit boards, graphene fuses, Quantum this and quantum that, directional fuses and cables. The whole nine yards, it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. |
stringreen I have an Ayre C5xemp....ain’t no digital glare Are we to assume all of your previous ones did? 😬 |
Just to clarify, by the time the digital data arrives at the DAC it’s too late. The data has already been corrupted. Reed and Solomon were just two older gentlemen they told to do the best they could with errors and their error codes do pretty well with scratches and fingerprints. But that about the extent of it. The damage occurs as soon as the laser touches the pits and lands. Within a picosecond or so. The CD laser and detector simply read and record STOP and START of pits and lands. It doesn’t become meaningful digital data until later downstream. |
Buffering doesn’t help with the issues I referred to because the buffered data contains the distorted data. Buffering does help with shock, to prevent gross errors (skipping) but doesn’t stop more subtle degradation of the sound. Playing a CD without a cover on the CD may or may not help or exacerbate the scattered light problem. The photodetector bandwidth is rather narrow, but not monochromatic. All CD players are improved by isolating them, I don’t think that’s a big secret. |
We know that glare and other types of noise and distortion in CD playback are produced by a number of problems inherent in CD players generally - you know, susceptibility to vibration, the vibration of the CD itself even when the player is isolated, and distortion produced by background scattered laser light getting into the photodetector. I use the word we editorially. |
You may think you’ve tamed distortion and noise in digital playback but you haven’t. Everything is relative. Until you’ve stopped the CD from vibrating and fluttering and have put the kibosh on stray laser light getting into the photodetector you’ve haven’t got more than around 75% of the way there, even after taking many steps. You simply would not believe the information on the disc that you cannot hear. |
Coloring the edge of CDs is so old school. As fate would have it colors affect only the visible part of the spectrum. However, the CD laser wavelength of 780 Nanometers is solidly in the near infrared part of the spectrum - the invisible portion of the spectrum where colors are not (rpt not) effective in absorbing stray scattered laser light. Ironic, huh? |
Playing untreated CDs on untreated CD players is like peeing up a rope. If you think you’re hearing all of what’s actually on the disc, believe me, you aren’t. Maybe 50%. That’s if you’re lucky. An ordinary man has no means of deliverance. Most people cant think out of the box. They don’t even know there is a box. |