Shaving Compact Discs to improve the sound (?!)

[Music] i spent quite a bit of time browsing online looking for unusual audio equipment to feature on this channel now it was during one of these online searches a few years ago that i first clapped my eyes on one of these things now at first glance i thought that this was some kind of unusual compact disc player well i was kind of halfway there it isn't a compact disc player but it does use compact discs well when i say use i mean shave yeah let me give you the sales pitch okay so here's the manufacturer's official page it's been retrieved via the wayback machine there are a few dodgy german to english translations on here so i'm going to have to reword a few sections for clarity but you can read the originals on the screen it goes like this light reflections disrupt the sound even high-end equipment for the highest of demands is powerless against light scatter in cds laser beams are reflected numerous times and stray this way and that over the cd's surfaces this audibly affects the reproduction the sound loses its clarity and transparency the beam diffusion cannot be avoided by error correction okay so that's the problem now here's the solution in exhaustive tests biochemist dr eric schrott and engineer wolfgang schneider have looked for ways to eliminate the disruptive reflections they've found an amazingly simple yet highly effective tuning method they bevel the cd's outer edge which works as a trap for the light scatter and then an added black coloring is applied to the edge which absorbs additional misrooted laser light and they found that a beveled edge angle of 36 degrees brings audibly the best results tuning with the cd sound improver perfects the true running of music cd's data cds dvds and sa cds and the cd player's drive doesn't vibrate as it did before they even go on to say dvd films generally impress via sharper images yeah so the idea is that by using this you can shave the edge of a compact disc to a 36 degree angle and by doing that you improve its sound quality okay well let's let's just park that idea to one side for the moment and i'll show you how this thing works right so here it is it's got a lid on the top around the back there's a place where you can put a vacuum hose to take out any shavings that come off the cd edge power input there here's our on off switch and speed control just look for the turntable spinning there [Applause] belt driven there's our cutting blade and that is brought in towards the edge of the disc whilst this is spinning to cut that 36 degree angle now i'm going to demonstrate it on a cdr so first off take this off take that part off there both of these have a soft coating on the inside the disc is put with the label downwards that then goes back on the top this then tightens up just finger tight now the reason we've got this lid is because when we start cutting the disc there'll be bits of plastic come off and they could go everywhere so this just contains them because of all these reflections it's better if i lift the lid i'll vacuum everything up afterwards so i'll just show you a close-up now of the blade so it's just going to come in like that on the edge of the disc and it should cut this 36 degree angle into the plastic which in theory reduces light scatter okay right so turning it on maximum speed bringing it in [Music] right so you can see all the stuff that's come off there now the next stage is to color in the edge of the disc to stop the light scattering now this thing originally came with a marker pen i don't have that i do have the paint brush that came with it though but i don't have the original marker pen however i believe a sharpie should work just fine although you know who knows so what we can do here at this point the reason we've got this adjustable speed we can just have this thing running at a slow speed and we can mark the edge of this with the sharpie at least that's the idea [Music] now i've seen some people just take the marker pen like this and use these holes on the top just to spin it around manually but either way that's our disk done and now in theory this disc should be better than it was before and just for comparison on the left this is a cdr from the same batch that hasn't been treated and on the right this is the one that i've just put through the machine right so you've seen how it's operated and what it does to the edge of a compact disk now as with anything that's aimed at the high-end audiophile community these things weren't cheap back in 2003 they cost the equivalent of around about 500 us dollars but that didn't stop them from flying off the shelves apparently they sold loads of these things and that's no doubt been helped by all the positive reviews they were getting now some of those reviews can still be found online so let's have a look at them well first off it was a hi-fi plus magazine product of the year in 2006 at which point it was being sold in the uk for 320 pounds now i'm going to pick out a few key phrases from these various reviews that i've found starting with this one they state that after a cd has been treated by the system that music becomes cleaner clearer and better focused with greater separation of instruments and a greater sense of space around them now that's in the awards summary in the original review they stated that it makes your cd sound more like real music with sound stages all of a sudden become deep and wide focus and control of instruments improve greatly and the solidity of images is tremendously enhanced so they definitely liked it now techradar did too they gave it 5 out of 5 stars and stated that discs that have been improved by the system clearly have a wider dynamic range thanks to a lowered noise floor and the base is better defined and more punchy while the treble has more air and to finish off here are some other statements and claims i've found about the device online that it brings a reduction in glare and hardness associated with cd sound the the device once it's treated a disc the disc can be read more accurately employing less error correction and the sound becomes clearer and more transparent and that music is more three-dimensional and open with greater transparency and images from dvds were sharper and clearer too and finally it results in pronounced improvement in focus transient attack detail and transparency okay now full disclosure i was going into this and probably still am with the thought that this thing is just completely insane how could it possibly improve the sound of a compact disc by beveling off the edge of it i mean it just doesn't make any sense to me but there's all these reviews where people are swearing blind that it sounds better when a cd's been treated in one of these compared to a normal cd and they're saying that hundreds of people in various different tests all agree so they can't all be wrong surely i mean let's try and put some science to this well a compact disc there's about four million bits per second i believe come through one of these things and i think 75 of those are like this stuff you should be listening to and then there's 25 like error correction and the idea is the way that these things also hinge on this error correction and the fact that if a compact disk can't be properly read for some reason then the error correction is called into place so if it's contaminated in some way you've got fingerprints you've got scratches on it the laser can't read the data and it just kind of makes it up now that's what i'm not saying this is what i've read in all these different things this is what people are hinging a lot of these things on and they're saying that if your cd wasn't quite perfectly cut out and i've had some cds in the past that felt really quite uneven that they would wobble in your cd player the laser would have difficulty reading the data because it has to follow it around and the error correction is called into play more often so this thing trues your cd it takes it all down perfectly all the way around so not only is this 36 degree angle there but also you see these down perfectly round now the 36 degree thing well that's supposed to be something to do with laser light scatter and somehow it shines out the edge of here and reflects back and again the laser has difficulty seeing the disc through all this reflective laser light and uh by cutting this to a certain angle the laser light doesn't get back to the laser and because you're putting that black mark around the outside and therefore we're not calling in to use this error correction all the time so we're hearing the proper sound that you should be listening to that's the theory i mean i can understand in a way where some of that is coming from at least it kind of sounds plausible i mean we've all seen what happens when you try and fix something with error correction or restoration and it doesn't really do a very good job of it okay so for argument's sake i'm just gonna have to go along with this idea let's let's just for the moment i'm a believer that this thing is a device that can improve the sound quality of your cds by shaving off the edge of it after all there's hundreds of people that are swearing blind that this thing will make your cd sound better so they can't all be completely delusional can they well let me try and find out for myself i'm going to get a cd we're going to put it in here and we're going to treat it they call it tuning your cd so we're going to tune a cd in here then we're going to have an identical cd i'm going to compare the two and see if i can hear any difference between them of course i won't be able to let's keep an open mind okay so to perform this test i bought two of the same cd still sealed in the plastic wrap at the moment we'll take one of these out put it under here and trim a new edge into it the reason i got this particular title is because it was recommended in some lists of audiophile quality cds there's no point starting off with a bad quality recording because it's never going to sound good so we might as well start off with a good one and hopefully make it better so let's have a go i suppose if everything goes wrong at least i'll have one of these cds that i can play when it's all over and done with there has been some concern raised about the idea of cutting the edge of a cd might lead to future failure the layers could separate the sandwich of different layers in here of course are currently sealed in with the plastic but by cutting the edge you do risk the chance of damaging the structure of the disc although people seem to have had these for years after they've treated them and they haven't reported any issues so maybe it's not something to be concerned about right let's have a go okay now this is a good point for me to mention you might have noticed these are actually hybrid sacds i've got here a bit of a bargain only cost me 8.50 each they weren't listed as sa cds but a hybrid sacd is a cd layer and an sacd layer sandwiched together all the same issues according to these people apply to sa cds as to cds and this thing can still improve those issues at least that's what they claim so it doesn't make any difference okay well that's that one done so let's just take this off and have a listen i'll just pop it to on the side though because i've got to get the other one out of the packet so i can do a proper comparison so officially now this one shouldn't sound as good as the other one because i can determine which one i'm playing because i can see it just looking at the edge of them that one's got a silver edge and that one's got a black edge so i'm not going to mix them up okay for the comparison i'm using this cd player and we'll just see if the cd text comes up first this is the disc that are treated so yeah that's showing up on the screen there i do have this album on vinyl but this is the first time i bought it on compact disc so i'm going to plug my headphones into the front here and i suppose i should probably listen to the untreated one first and then put the other one in and see if i notice some massive improvement so let me get my headphones and i'll get on with that okay so here's the best headphones i've got in the house the fidelio x2s i'm going to plug them in here and i'm going to listen to the first track and the last track on the cd our cds are read from the inside out the first track's the one furthest away from the edge i've cut and of course the last track is towards the outside there's a total of seven tracks on this disc so i'll be listening to tracks one and seven and i'm gonna get on with that now okay well not entirely unexpectedly both discs sounded the same to me i even tried putting them in the two different disk drives and jumping back and forth between them and then swapping them over trying it the other way around but they just sounded identical whatever i did i didn't notice anything that was better or worse from one compared to the other but of course there are too many points of failure in this test i mean the first one is my ears would i be able to determine the difference between them even on the very best quality of equipment i doubt it but it could be these headphones as well then what about this thing has it got a really poor digital to analog converter is the headphone amplifier rubbish i mean there's just loads of things that you could point out and say well the discs do sound very much different to one another it's just your equipment andy is they're not picking up on it so let me try and take out as many points of failure of this test as i can and we'll do something different right so this is the best thing that i can come up with with the equipment that i've got by the way these aren't on a scratchy surface this is nice and soft so i'm not damaging the discs but we've got both this there and i'm going to record both of them into my pcm recorder now this has an optical input on the side there so i could get a cd player with an optical output and i've only got one of those so it's this one most of them have a coax out but this has got an optical output on the back there and i'm going to take the audio from that and put it straight into the sony pcm recorder so what we're getting here is we're getting the digital stream of audio from there to there so we're not doing any analog digital digital analog conversions until we've got into this device and then we're just going to record it as a pcm wav file and i'm going to record both of the disks into this i'm going to put the files into audacity and we're going to compare the waveforms of both of those files against each other to see what the difference is now i'm sure someone can point out flaws in this test but honestly it's the best thing that i think i can come up with with what i've got here so again i think we'll just record the one track i might as well record the last one here because that's the one there is to this edge so if anything's getting affected by light scatter and goodness knows what else it would be track seven so i'm going to go for that one okay so i've copied my two recordings one for each disc across into the computer and to make things easier i'm going to give them more memorable names treated for the shaved disc and original for the untouched one now the next thing to do is to load both of those files into the audacity audio tool and then get them into the same workspace and try to get them to line up perfectly now the reason for this is i want the software to compare one against the other and it'll only do that properly if they're completely perfectly lined up if one is ever so slightly ahead of the other by the tiniest of margins the software is going to determine that they're two different things completely so there's probably a clever way to do this but i don't really know what it is so my method is to look for the first peak and then erase the silence all quite a bit before then and then try and get everything just to line up on that first peak on both of those recordings now once i've got them perfectly lined up which does take a bit of time i can pick one of those and use the invert tool on it and as it suggests this has now created what is effectively the opposite of what was there before so now we've got one normal recording and one inverted recording so now if i merge those two together one recording against the other and create a third track from the results that third track that's going to be the audible difference between those two cds as you can see the result of doing this is a completely silent track this is showing that there's absolutely zero difference between the two recordings the track when it's played from the treated disc sounds exactly the same as the original untreated disc now just to show what happens when there is a difference between the two i'm going to snip out a couple of seconds from the second recording around about two minutes 24 and then i'm going to do that same thing i did just then which is merging the two recordings into a new track and as you can see the results here they show silence up to the edit point so up to the point tracks they're identical but after that they're then different from one another hence the waveform that's shown along the bottom of the screen now if that demonstration wasn't visual enough here's another way of showing the difference between two tracks this is a spectrogram that's been produced by an open source piece of software called sound exchange this image reflects what the ear does it shows energy amongst frequencies as it varies over time so this is what track seven on the dave brubeck cd looks like when viewed this way so the yellowy peaks are the louder sections and just for interest as comparison here's a modern track off another cd that shows how the levels have really been boosted here and brick walled up to the top right so now we know what music looks like or should look like let's go back to the software and compare the recordings that are made from the treated and untreated brewback cds and this is what you get nothing showing that there is no difference there's nothing here and therefore there's nothing to hear right earlier on when i said i wouldn't be able to hear a difference i wasn't saying that there definitely won't be a difference i mean i suspected there wouldn't be but even if there was i wouldn't be able to hear it i thought because my ears aren't the best in the world me hearing i'm getting on i don't have golden ears all these things that people were talking about in those reviews about transient attacks and transparency of treble and stuff i mean it's all just over the top of my head to me things i've mentioned before they either sound all right or they don't i mean if a cd's skipping and jumping i can spot that but to me one cd would sound the same as another one i wanted to put it into a computer to see for sure if there was a difference and i was really hoping there would be because it would make it a lot easier on me you see now i'm incurring the wrath of the audiophile community by saying that there is no difference i mean i've got one audio file off one cd one audiophile recorded off another cd compared them and they're identical do an inverse of one compared to the other one the difference is complete silence there's no difference i mean you can't hear any difference that's the thing it's silence so all this i can hear more bass and the noise flaws lower and all that kind of stuff well surely that would show up because it's audio you can't hear what you what isn't in a waveform it's not if it's not showing there there's nothing to hear but of course maybe i'm doing something wrong maybe my test methodology was flawed i'm sure i'll hear about it now i didn't just do that one cd test i've cut it a little bit short for this video because the other test i did was identical the only other cd that i had that where i had a duplicate copy was this candy apple blue cd as that's because they sent me two of them i don't normally have two of a cd you see so i did the same with this in fact with that one i did something different i compared both cds beforehand got the audio off both of them same method as before over the optical cable into the pcm recorder compared both of them before and they were identical before so that kind of makes me think well what's all this business about some cds are manufactured slightly off sensor and the error correction comes in and it sounds different although they sounded the same before two identically sounded cds which is what i'd expect cds i just think cds a cd will sound like a cd and of course they're identical after treatment as well which isn't entirely unexpected i mean for me a cd is a um it's data in a way that's in a state of either being on or off each of those bits is either on or off it's just like a uh just like a light switch a bit of data no bit of data these things are kind of reliant on there being some kind of middle ground where the data is kind of corrupt somehow but when you get corrupt data on a cd you get dropouts you get clicks you get annoying sounds you don't get like a subtlety of the music being lost not in my experience anyway but again of course this is going against all the the audiophile stuff so i best shut my mouth now before incurring the wrath of a million angry voices if you've got one of these maybe it works different to mine maybe yours works perfectly maybe you're noticing a massive difference maybe i was using it wrong i forgot that one but uh yeah for me it made no difference if you've got one and you notice a big difference well may it give you many more pleasurable years of use in the future and do you want to buy some magic beans i'm really upset everyone today i think i'd best just go that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 1,688,624

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, cd sound improver, audio desk système glass, cd lathe, audiodesk cd improver, cd tuning, test, demo, cd cutter, cd shaver, compact disc

Id: f-QxLAxwxkM

Length: 24min 40sec (1480 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 03 2022