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.
There is also another product that helps @buddyboy1 and it’s the ultra bit platinum. I don’t even know if they still make it but you squirt it on the disc and polish it clean with a felt rag that’s included. Not really sure if it changes the sound all that much but it will clean the disc and has fixed discs with errors, I assume because of smudges etc. sounds like your on the right track but for a lot cheaper. |
Here is your Ultra Bit Platinum. https://www.jenalabs.com/buy-now/ultrabit_diamond-plus.html |
The way it was explained to me and it makes a lot of sense is.....the laser hits the disc and then comes back to the reader....since discs are mass produced, they are not entirely a smooth surface...they are pitted thus causing the laser going back to the reader to be scattered because of that pitted surface of the cd. The reader is only receiving about 90% of the actual information that's on the disc because of this defraction of the signal. When you treat the surface with a substance that "fills in the pits "...it creates a glassier surface that allows 100% of the information to come back to the Reader thus giving you the exact info that was originally embedded on the disc because the Pitted disc has been re- surfaced to smooth making the entire reading system more accurate. Bingo...better retrieval...better sound. |
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. |
