Shaving Compact Discs to improve the sound (?!)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ก.ย. 2022
- Today I'm using a special lathe that cuts a 36º edge into a CD to improve the sound quality. Is this madness...I aim to find out. You might also like this video about demagnetising CDs • Demagnetizing CDs?!
V.FAQ… Q) Why didn’t you just rip the CDs into the computer?
A) Because I wanted to use a regular Audio CD player. Since the improvements claimed related to audio produced during CD playback (at 1x), this is what I chose to concentrate on.
Snopes has an entry regarding the use of green edge markers to prevent ‘light scatter’ www.snopes.com/fact-check/bew...
ONE SLIGHT CORRECTION to this video…
The Dave Brubeck Hybrid SACDs I bought cost me £5.69 each - not the £8.50 I mentioned in the video. So that’s a bit of a bargain. If anyone is interested here’s an AFFILIATED LINK to the discs I ordered. amzn.to/3e7N3DS However I can’t guarantee you’ll receive SACDs like I did. Note - my discs were ‘Sold by: Amazon EU S.a.r.L.’ -
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And if you have a book stored on that CD, it'll make the plot clearer, the characters more compelling, and expand the intrigue of the mysteries.
🤣🤣🤣
🤣🤣😂😂
If you also have a video game stored on the CD, the graphics will have a noticeable improvement, better frame rates, and improved gameplay
Well done
If you use it to store school files, you will be getting greater amount of information, wider perspective and more interesting topics. I started using it 3 years ago and I had only straight A+'s since.
I used to work at a CD manufacturing plant, owned by Québecor Media. We had an engineer there who was on the original team designing the CD format. One of the smartest people I've ever known. He got one of these things, and he went through dozens of CDs, testing on manufacturing and validating equipment that costs more than a nice house. He used known good discs, as well as discs that had failed quality checks for bad data printing, off center data tracks, off center or out of round discs, warped discs, etc. The results?
There was NO difference in a bit-by-bit comparison between a treated and non treated disc. None. And NO disc was ever improved to the point it wasn't scrap. Think about this: A CD is ones and zeros, and it can only hold data. If there really are so many output errors, you would NEVER get a computer program to run off of a disc. One error would crash the whole thing.
At best, the machine is a waste of money. At worst, you can damage the disc. When testing, several discs cracked when being cut. If the plastic is cooled off incorrectly after being injected, it can induce stress points which will open into fractures if disturbed, similar to a Prince Rupert's drop. Normally, the testing of a disc focuses mostly on the recorded inner section, but you are cutting on the outside edge, so there may be an unknown stress spot. You can also chip off the lacquer coating that protects the aluminum from oxidation. If the disc is a dual layer disc, you can chip into the seam between the layers and cause it to seperate.
The best use for these things is transferring money from an unsuspecting consumer to an unscrupulous manufacturer.
Even funnier is now audiophiles believe in audiophile ethernet cables. When people don't understand the underlying technology you can sell them anything.
This is the best comment hands down.
Don't confuse the audiophiles with facts 🤣
@@electrictroy2010 those kind of people are the ones who use gold plated Ethernet cables thinking the music in their Minecraft game will sound crispier when connecting to a server.
@@electrictroy2010 One way to spot the ignorant audiophile is to ask them "Why are audio CDs 44.1Khz sampling rate?" If the answer is anything other than "Because that's what fit perfectly onto PAL U-Matic video tape." you know you're dealing with a clueless audiophile, one who probably believes in "oxygen free copper" speaker cables, has a disc shaver, and who knows what other audio snake oils. Probably even owns TOSLINK cables with gold plated connectors.
the 36° angle was probably determined by the off the shelf cutting blade having a 36° angle to the blade.
In my audiophile experience, the best way to improve the quality of a CD or LP is to get it autographed by the band. Then the sound quality skyrockets.
@@TD75 what is this even supposed to mean
@@pandoraisadog Read OPs name.
@@TD75 If you want to tell people about something, you have to go where there are people to tell in the first place
XD at op
no @@F_I_J_I_W_A_T_E_R
The reason it didn't work is because you used a low-end sharpie, instead of the $200 audiophile-grade ink. The sharpie ink tends to add a rosewood tone to the mids and lower-treble, which is not what you want if your goal is getting a clear digital signal with no wow or flutter.
I've always told people that the gas laser in my Dragon's Lair machine had a much warmer tone than those newfangled solid state lasers.
unfortubately there is a global shortage of audiophile-grade ink
Just what I was thinking
tone ink
I can only take so much sarcasm per day.... Help!!!
/s
Funnily enough, in forty years working with audio, I've never come across any test instrumentation that measures 'transparency', 'clarity', 'cleanliness', 'focus', 'separation', or even 'space'.
Dear audiophools: it's DATA. It's readable, or it isn't. It doesn't leak out of the side of the disc. The designers of the CD spent a lot of money coping with the expected errors - even physical holes in the discs - and implementing mechanisms to correct, disguise, or, if bad enough, mute them. A clean new CD should be capable of being read with *no* errors - as demonstrated by Mr Techmoan's excellent A-B comparison.
But then, where would we be if couldn't sell snake oil to suckers?
Wobbly discs, or more accurately the placement of the track being a bit eccentric, is deliberate. Of course this is nothing to do with any visible wobble in the edge metalised area and sure as heck isn't anything to do with the edge of the plastic and absolutely nothing a skimmer will fix. An audiofool and his (her) money will always be easily parted.
You could rip it using software that supports accurate rip and compare checksums
100% agree with everything you said. True AudioPhools can hear the error correction though!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
digital data can be copied and transmitted perfectly... but the analogue conversion step is still beholden to the rules of the analogue domain
on less than adequate digital systems, the rate of data transmission might vary, they call this jitter ... the analog converter has no choice but to convert the digital data as it receives them, when it receives them , and when the output is a sound wave, these out-of-time reproductions will result in deviations from the original sound
the question, as it relates to this video specifically, is whether an optical medium with less than perfect readability can cause the laser read head to somehow introduce jitter into the system
The optimal angle of 36° is the same as an exacto blade. What a coincidence
And if you have photos on the disc, it makes the image clearer, increases the resolution, improves the colour grading, decreases the file size, improves the framing of the shot, adds post-processing and makes the subjects more attractive
In extreme cases it changes the weather you had on holiday.
shaving a cd with precious family photos now, I'll never have to edit them again!
Critically, it also improves the script.
You should see what happens when you shave a photo CD using a 69 degree angle.
40 years after the introduction of the CD, audiophiles still don't understand digital audio.
Yeah amazing, you'd think it's simple enough a baby could understand, just ones and zeros!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't early compact discs contain analogue audio? So for a small moment I thought that *maybe* the CD lathe could possibly have an effect on an analogue audio CD, but then they said that "shaving your DVD will improve the sharpness of your movie", how could anyone fall for that? Too much disposable income and too little sense?
@@emiloguechoons9030 Nope, CDs were always digital. You'd see things like AAD or DDD showing the stages of analog or digital. The CD was always a D. The standard CD format is WAV
@@TheRealInscrutable Technically, CD-DA is in the Red Book audio format where the audio stream is LPCM. The WAV file is also LPCM, but can also be encoded using RIFF as a wrapper. So to avoid confusion, it's more proper to just call CD audio as being LPCM.
@@TheRealInscrutable Ah ok thanks for the info, I must have been confused with analogue laserdisc audio or something similar, I could have sworn that in a previous techmoan video mat talked about analogue CD audio being a standard in the late 80 or early 90s, though that definitely doesn't exist based on my searches
Don't worry, audiophiles don't sully their elevated minds with anything as sordid as evidence. What you've done there is just deepened the mystery for them, which will make them appreciate their $500 magic box even more. "The difference is so subtle, a digital device won't pick it up, but I can clearly hear it!"
Haha, good one :D
I build soundsystems for a living and it's amazing how most 'audiophiles' really know nothing at all, spouting shit and stats they read on a website trying to justify spending 20k+ on their hifis, when I can make you a rig and even an amp for a fraction of the cost that'd wipe the floor with anything their bought from richer sounds lol 😂
@@UnjustifiedRecs what do you recommend as a good brand?
Seeing the same guy review hundred devices kinda does the trick. Clearer highs
Audiophiles have been providing the comedy for over thirty years.
I'm an audio engineer and you tested this exactly the way I would've. So glad you inverted one and compared, perfect way to do that.
as a professional, do you provide special attention on ear health and hygiene? years of reading audiophile discussions, I rarely encounter this topic.
@@arpeemac oh yeah. I'm paranoid about it. I'm sure you're aware of most of this based on your question, but it takes way lower sound pressure levels to damage your hearing than realize, especially for low frequencies. Anyone interested in protecting their hearing would research Equal Loudness contours. You'll find that basically something that's low frequency requires higher db SPL (Sound pressure levels) to sound equally as loud as a 1khz sound. So all these idiots with insane car bass systems where the bass sounds louder than the mids/his are doing way more damage than they realize. At least hearing aids and cochlear implants are easier than ever to get?
@@arpeemac oh, on the hygiene part, I do what people recommend you don't do, and that's is q-tips to clean my ears. I've done this nearly everyday for a decade and had no problems but I think part of that is due to earwax composition (everyone has different earwax and mine is that nice non chunky kind)
Oooh no, now I'm thinking about chunky earwax 🤢 🤮🤮 😩 🤮
@@arpeemac Sorry, all I heard was "eeeeeeeeee.prrrrwppepppppppp." I guess I left it too late!
I am a broadcast engineer. What is being stated was a true problem.
People who are not trained to hear distortion via quantization error can make all the difference. It's not a criticism towards anyone
it becomes a problem in radio when audio processing for louder sound to overcome road
noise in a car on any road or noise in a house.
The problem is that a lot of players do not do great error correction.
Most machines don't even have the ability to slow the drive down to read the bit stream more carefully. Machines that do employ not only error correction but active error correction.
Reading the CD with active error correction also includes a second even slower pass to compare both. Basically they are trying to reduce jitter that can be 25% of the distortion.
If they are using a real time playback mode there is less incorrect data or bits in the buffer.
The thing that may have been lost with time are two things. You can introduce huge amounts of jitter over plastic optical cable as well as coaxial and ABS/EBU.
Thing's like not using Belden 75 Ohm cable can cause significant jitter affecting stereo separation and presence or mid highs!
Most don't remember tri laser and tri color laser cd rom drives that were 50x to cut jitter. Some came to the Idea of just reading the bits and spitting them out and adding the clock at the end to stop the phenomenal ways jitter could trash digital signals.
At some point in history, DVD could be shaved to make the video as sharp as BluRay. Insane.
no bud, you gotta take an old Laserdisc... Shave that to the DVD size... it will blow BLuRay clean out of the water... Be amazed :D
What about my HD-DVDs?
If the shaver is powered by a free-energy device, then the sustainabilities become more sustainable. Don't forget that Vitamin O enhances the viewer's audio/video experience.
now that's some serious cutting-edge technology right there
Underrated comment!
Cutting edge indeed but the fact that it doesn't work is a black mark against it.
You guys are real sharpies
My head is spinning with these jokes
I guess I am not sure I get it. I may need to hone my skills to be able to understand.
cutting edge, well done
Talking as someone with a PhD specialising in signal processing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with your methodology, aside from it being difficult to line them up, so even for known identical, but differently timed files it's a challenge to get that zeroed out audio, but you did a great job and managed it.
For the record, error correction on CDs isn't 'making it up', there is redundancy in the data and CD players are able to figure out precisely what the audio should have been even for very long runs of corrupted bits.
The device is predicated on both a misunderstanding of the optics of CDs and the digital nature of the data on them. There is not even a suggestion of how this one bevel in this one place solves any optical problem that somehow Sony and Philips both missed with their armies of world-leading engineers. Instead it encourages people to damage their precious optical media for the sake of total woo.
I commend your open-mindedness and patience for it.
It really jumped the shark when it said that dvd videos would get more vivid colors. 🤣
@ContradictoryCrow they are a PHD in signal processing, not English. Shoo, prescriptivist. We all understand what they are saying.
@ContradictoryCrow pedant
@ContradictoryCrow Is there a method of removing noise from signal in the reply section? 🙃
@@Mostlyharmless1985 Grammer Nazis are almost as bad as angry audiophiles.
My friend is a lifetime audiophile with a stereo representing a the value of a modern house. I'm a audio lover with a electronics degree and i stopped having discussions with my friend about the theory's he has about the workings of his stereo set. CD demagnetisers, special cloths for the cd's. Special African woodblocks underneath the feet of every component and even a ff-ing rock (stone) that improves airmolecules and the timbre/ambiance of the room. Double blind doesn't work bla bla bla. if you get more then 2 in a room together and they start talking.. OMG you are going to laugh beyond tears. it used to make me angry to see him getting scammed for allot of money, but the man is so extremely happy with his personal tailored stereo set. I guess thats also worth something.
Thank you. That comment was a joy to read!
At least his money is now in the hands of someone who is clearly a lot smarter than him, and thus probably capable of putting it to better use.
I knew a guy in the mid 2000s that was lecturing me on how much better FLAC was compared to MP3 - problem was, all he was doing was *transcoding* his *existing* MP3s to FLAC - not from an original source. I just sat silently and nodded.
A decade ago there used to be a blog making fun of various audiophile gadgets. Does your friend own an authentic Tibetan bell to cleanse the room for better listening? Because between golden cords, stones to remove vibrations and wooden legs this was my absolute personal favorite.
Anyone who appreciates this story should check out the comedy track "Tom and the Audio Guru" by Scharpling and Wurster (on the album New Hope for the Ape-Eared). It is pure comedy gold.
I was in a hi-end audio store once and the salesman was going on about why I needed $500 oxygen free copper wiz bang power cords and how much better they make my amp sound... I asked him, "what type of wire is behind the plug in the wall?"... He is probably still having nightmares over that! ... In any event my guess is you almost NEVER find an "Audiophile Electrical Engineer"... Ha!
Haha! I've been given that pitch before too. Not only what's behind the wall, but also inside the component!
@@Trondogful did you mean "compound'?
Oh, and you need more "Watts".
wall power is dirty, most clean it up before it gets anywhere near amplification stage.
Ah, but did you put a special error absorbing audiophile energy crystal on your CD players? And was your house wiring made of mono directional oxygen free copper?
Indeed. And, of course, everything should be grounded directly to a leyline.
Sigh... amateurs, right?
Maybe carbonation will help improve the sound? 🤔 😋
A Peter Belt special foil sticker or digital timing clock too?
He needs you to send him a BigClive x-Ray machine, maybe Ralph has a spare?
Your TOSLINK cable wasn't expensive enough, you really gotta spend at least $3000 on one to get listenable sound out of a CD. It probably wasn't even shielded and didn't have gold plated connectors. Imagine the interference it was picking up!
/s
It picked up the same interference in the same pattern each time you ran the test too :) /s
Power cables were too cheap also
/s
Optical cable needs to be made from oxygen-free glass of course. Otherwise the mid-tones will sound soft, and the high end will sound muffled.
For a moment there, you got me.
it has not skin of real prehistoric Python
I've been an audiophile for almost 40 years and when this thing came along, my BS sensor told me this thing was snake oil as was the practise of using a green marker to colour in the edge of the CDs (all the rage in the early 90s). Not all audiophiles are audiofools. Those that are, usually don't have basic technical or scientific learning/background.
I agree it is an unfair argument to bunch up "audiophiles" this way. The reason why the argument might be compelling, as I see it, is that there is a theoretical advantage of the device in that it might be useful if you had a bad CD-player where the error rate was >0 and relatively constant. In that case, the error rate might be reduced or eliminated with a "treated" disc. I think the chance of this case happening in a real life scenario is extremely low probability though, but most people don't reflect about that.
@@oscarwahlstrom5426 *"...but most people don't reflect about that"*
Possibly because they've had their edges shaved off at a 36° angle.
There's a very clear misunderstanding here about how error correction on data streams work (which includes digital media, QR codes, computer RAM, and computer storage). For a CD with 25% error correction bits, you can lose 25% of the total bits bits without ANY change in the data read. However, once that 25% limit is exceeded, the data changes VERY DRAMATICALLY. The CD will either play perfectly, or play extremely bad or even completely give up. QR Codes take this process to the extreme - many of those are often 90% error correction and only 10% real data - those can be almost completely destroyed as long as the corner marks are still fine and still work!
Yup. You get correct, nothing, or something very completely wrong. You never get "not as good" quality.
It's always hilarious to read about HiFi equipment that is supposed to improve digital signals. It's the same thing with digital cables that are specially shielded to protect the bits or something.
I used to be a repair technician at a high-end consumer electronics store. I've worked on McIntosh, Lynn-Sondek, Luxman, Meridian, Denon, B&O and even the occasional Mark Levison amp...equipment of that quality. One day, the owner of the store introduced me to the owner of Kimber Kables (very expensive audiophile cables) He was making outrageous claims about his magic wires using terms like "imaging, sound-stage, acute focus and the like. I asked him if I could run some A/B comparisons against some decent but affordable cables we carried. He told me no, because technicians always want to measure differences with test equipment instead of using our ears. He said that our problem (technicians) is that we believe that if we can't measure the difference, then we assume that there is no difference. Audiophiles can get really defensive when it comes to their religion.
You noticed the emperor had no clothes, and he sold those "clothes", so no wonder he said you need to not use a camera but the imagination.
Religion is such a nice term ,I never thought about it that way . I was a little more harsh . Thank you.
*_Audiophiles can get really defensive when it comes to their religion._*
So can their Elmer Gantry profiteers.
Really sad. "technicians always want to measure differences with test equipment instead of using our ears." What? Technicians don't have ears? Believe me, any technicians worth their salt, if they hear a difference, they'd get out their test equipment and quantify it. They'd first understand it. Design circuits to simulate it, correct for it. But most of all they'd show the differences on a scope. Because it would be THERE. Not so much with placebo claims.
@@billr3053 when you don't know the science behind the technology it's easier to get scammed most audiophiles don't even know how a cd works and assume it's the same as vinyl only with laser that's why many still claim that vinyl audio quality is superior to cd well if we put them to the test cd never lies all the data in the master before duplication is there
As someone who studied a little bit of error correction in university, I feel like I can add a bit to the picture here. Error correction is an absolutely necessary part of playing back a CD, but when it works, it usually works perfectly, outputting exactly the same audio as if there were no error without any "filling in" or approximation. Only when there are too many errors to correct, the CD player might try to approximate the missing part, but the error-correction is tuned to be pretty darn tolerant of dirt, scratches and even to some extent bumping/moving the CD player (though we've all experienced that that's often enough to overwhelm it and cause skips and pops).
You may be wondering HOW it can perfectly restore incorrect data, so I'll give an example of an error correcting code (much simpler and less efficient than the actual cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code used on CDs). We will simply record every byte of data (8 bits) three times. For example, if our data is 10110001, we'll record 101100011011000110110001 onto the disc. Now if one bit is changed by a speck of dirt, we might get 101100011011000110010001 when reading it back. Splitting it back into the three copies 10110001 10110001 10010001, we can not only DETECT that an error must have occurred since the three don't match, but since two agree with each other, we can throw out the one that doesn't agree to CORRECT the error. This corrects the error PERFECTLY: the output is EXACTLY the same as the data we started with, as long as at most one error occurs within the 24 bits! It *sometimes* even works if there are up to eight errors, as long as no two of them occur at the same position in two copies.
This error correcting code adds two bytes to every byte of data and is only guaranteed to correct one error every 24 bits, so it's very inefficient. The cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code only adds one byte to every three bytes of data (so it uses less space) and by cleverly interleaving multiple samples can apparently correct 3500 erroneous bits in a row.
this is f***ing amazing to learn!!!
Same here, the error correction is so good you can cut a 1cm groove into it and it will still retain all the data.
Also this could expose the aluminium reflector and allow it to oxidise.
Thanks for the clarification. I just remembered that CDs employ redundant digital information so error correction should always be digitally perfect or the CD is destroyed beyond repair. So hearing about a $500 CD shaver claiming to improve error correction made me suspicious, too, to say the least.
Red book is only 16 bit though.
Excellent explanation of error correction!
It's truly amazing how much snake oil is in the high end audio scene.....and how many people truly believe it makes a difference. Placebo effect is a hell of a drug
yup. digital music quality just depends on the resolution of the file and how good your dac is
Placebo must have been Rick James' choice of drug.
It didn’t work because he used a black sharpie. It’s supposed to be green to absorb the red laser light 😂
Very interesting. No, there's nothing wrong with your ears or your methodology. We gave up on double-blind tests in the audio business back in the '70s when it was discovered that, on average, when they didn't know what they were listening to, many people preferred the sound of an old Dynaco Mk III tube amp with 0.5% THD to "state of the art" solid state behemoths that excelled at everything we thought mattered: ultra-low distortion of every kind, frequency response of DC-to-light, 120dB headroom, damping factors of 0.001, and on and on. Some musicians claim to be able to hear the color of the cord that connects their guitar to their amp, and if you set up a scientific test to prove that they cannot, YOU become a villain.
I was amazed that your comparison of "treated" to "original" CDs was that perfect, but I guarantee you there are people who will be able to "hear" the difference between one silence and another. They can probably even tell you what color the silence is.
Stradivarius violins are a great example of this, too. Sometimes just knowing there's history or money behind something can make you hear things that aren't there.
yes but you could argue it's just the frequency response of the amp and therefore if you EQ'ed the signal a different way you might get more people to like the newer one.... people often describe sound as "warmer", this might be missing highs that can sound quite sharp
@@DarkShroom But if we have to hobble our great new state-of-the-art gear to make it sound as good as our old stuff, maybe we're missing something.
@@GarrishChristopherRobin777 Tone deaf? Who knows? But I have been playing guitar, in and out of bands, and working on musician's equipment (repair and modification) for a tich over 50 years. I'm VERY familiar with musician's and audiophile's superstitions. Still don't know what to do about them, but I'm retired and it's not my problem anymore. Test tube baby? I was adopted when I was 4 months old, so nobody knows for sure where I came from. IVF was not a very big thing in 1952, but there were swarms of UFOs sighted all over the country that year. We may never know.
I always thought the appeal of tube amps is that they introduced a moderate amount of distortion that for some reason people just seem to find more appealing then some of the super accurate newer amps. I remember seeing someone claim morel speakers also utilize distortion to produce their signature warm sound but I’m not informed enough to know how true that is. I definitely know I prefer morel speakers to brands that are marketed as having a flat frequency response.
It also works with JPEGs copied onto a CD. After shaving the CD, the images are not blurry anymore and text documents are crystal clear. Amazing! :)
😂😂😂
ENHANCE!
I copied my GTA 3 to the CD, shaved it using this thing, copied back to the computer and now it's GTA 5! 10/10 would buy ten of these
@@capsey_ try it with GTA 5, maybe you'll get GTA 7.
This is how they invented HDTV. Look out for the shaved disk inside your TV.
4k however is another story.
What a happy coincidence for the manufacturers that the 36-degree angle of standard craft knife blades just happened to be the perfect angle to "minimize internal reflections" !
For me this is the biggest weakness of the product itself: why aren't they using gold-plated blades to improve the cutting quality?
@@purplegill10 and make the knifes soft and single use, so you have to buy new for every CD you mangle? Brilliant!
@@romank90 _Now you're getting it._
@@purplegill10 Yeah, but he forgot the orphan tear based ink for blackening the shaved edge. Even more expensive per ml than inkjet printer ink. You need those extra special audio grade Sharpies.
@@purplegill10 For that, you need the professional-grade box. More expensive, sure, but worth it!
I can think of two likely reasons this product received such rave reviews when it was on the market, despite not doing anything - the manufacturer paid for positive reviews from the professionals and the consumer reviews were the result of a type of audio Placebo Effect where they heard what they wanted to hear based on expectations but there was no actual difference.
Its only use maybe to salvage a disc that was skipping from a physical balance issue.
Online reviews are hopeless, a sea of paid articles and youtube clips. I've got some fairly expensive headphones because of that.... and some cheaper ones I prefer.
Literally all scam products I think
Especially after the person paid hundreds of dollars for it, they are guaranteed to hear a ~30% improvement, the average placebo effect.
Placebo effect or just people who wanted to present themselves as having a "better ear" than the average person & are therefore more impressive examples of humanity?
@@nathanielneveryman that's also highly likely.
When you started explaining this I though it was some kind of surface polisher for removing scratches; that would be a lot more useful.
Same. I have one with a scratch that loops the song at that point.
Me too
My god, I still can't believe I was ever able to install WORKING Software from a CD!
Yes I expected that too.
Same here
If you want to improve the sound quality of your disc shaver, they sell $1200 AC power cords for high end audio equipment that have a special copper coating to reduce wave reflections and electron spin. It will make the scraping sound of the blade brighter and clearer, with more depth and fidelity.
Underrated comment
brilliant! :)
the blade needs to be solid gold to work right
The attack angle of the blade should be optimised as well as having a 36 degree cutting edge…. Also, a lubricant would further optimise the finish of the bevelled edge…. Angel tears are recommended…
I bought the AC cables that use "cultured copper" which is far superior to "non-cultured copper" with respect to audio purity. The fidelity and sound reproduction is so amazing I am going to have all my copper wires replaced with "cultured copper" wires.
I’m amazed that when you shaved the edge off of the cd the music didn’t leak out! I guess it’s a good thing you sealed it in with the sharpie.
It would, if it had been a pop cd. Jazz music has a much higher viscosity and doesn't leak out as easily.
@@c0ldc0ne they say black metal cds leak blood when disturbed.
It can't leak, ordinary jazz music is solid at room temperature. Laser in CD player heats it up so that some of it escapes. Ultimately all is gone and you have to replace or refill it.
@@ahmetrefikeryilmaz4432 That's why they require regular transfusions.
I hate when that happens.
you know the whole "the CD is irregularly shaped causing reading errors" is really funny because I'm supposed ti believe the industrially tuned disc formers and assorted quality tests are not capable of making an adequately shaped disc but the dinky little shaving box is
Yet they could still press, print and sell miss printed CD's with the wrong Music stamped on them. Not all were recalled and destroyed.
In the end, you nailed it. The disc contains DIGITAL Data. Ones and Zeros. If there is any "Distortion" , it would be OBVIOUS, unlike vinyl which is analog and can introduce Noise.
I'm sure this device must work. I remember when I bought a higher quality tape player for my ZX Spectrum, the games looked so much better once they loaded. The spectral inheritance of the pixels gave a more visual stage focus and the beeps just sounded so much beepier than before.
Beeps more Beepier than before made me LOL 😂
@@liquidusblue beeping in high fidelity.
@@liquidusblue and the winning comment for TH-cam goes to... This guy!
Ah, I've heard about this old Speccy trick. What we used to do back in the day on the C64 was shave the edges off our 5¼ floppies and cassettes, but for the cassettes you did have to remember to run the black sharpie around the bevel or it didn't work. It had the same result as for the Speccy. The clarity and sharpness improvement, especially on the sounds, was so remarkable that I couldn't believe it! It even made the power switch seem more crisp and clear when you flicked it.
Masterful! This is easily the funniest comment of the lot. You've got a great sense of humour. Keep on giving people smiles and laughs, and don't get your tongue so deeply embedded in your cheek that you can't get it out!
Did I expect to view a video about shaving CDs this morning? No. Had I ever even heard of such a thing? Not until about two minutes ago. Am I excited to hear Mat talk about it for next twenty-five minutes? Absolutely.
I guess we learn of new things all the time, one another channel I just saw a wind up mini reel to reel tape recorder, the amp was battery powered of course but the motor power was spring powered like a gramophone.
haha same
Exactly stuff I didn’t even know I didn’t care about this guy not only makes me want to go buy it, but also research it more, so I’m glad he does both of those things for me!
This was a brilliant video, but I always find myself looking at the equipment and wanting to buy it. What was that CD player which took two cds?
ACKSHUALLY it's 24 minutes and 40 seconds. Debunked!
The fact that those who bought that contraption spent $400.00 so the disks had to sound much better and no one can convince them they were scammed.
Yep it's the sunk cost fallacy.
And some would SWEAR by those interconnect lubricants LOL
@@lancewood1410 we need to sell them some orange blinker fluid.
"It is much easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled". Mark Twain
It reminds me of the Bedini CD Clarifier from the same time period. It was used to “demagnetize” CD’s. Never knew that aluminum could be magnetized to begin with.
magnification and magnetization are two different things
I’ve got one and it works for sure.
If this really resulted in a massive audio/visual improvement, discs would be manufactured this way.
You would think, but one should never underestimate what saving a few bucks will do to any given industry.
They'd sell the treated CDs as premium or gold or in something for even higher margins
Exactly
yeah but they still sell the non-treated version for marketing reason
He missed a simple thing. It’s a hoax and hinted in the name of the guy. “Schrott” meaning rubbish in german. 😂
I think the lid is also for safety for when a cd just explodes from being spun around at high speeds while stabbing it with a knife
I expected that the lid would have an interlock switch on it, so lifting the lid would stop the disc spinning and stop the belt to prevent fingers getting caught in the belt drive!
I wish this would happen but not for safety
@@Trebor2024 This was probably the 90s or early 00s. The safety regulations weren't as advanced then. That we ever lived through that time without massively dying from all kinds of accidents is a sheer miracle 😆
Jokes on you! I buy all my CDs female so they don't need to shave. 😂
@@erwintimmerman6466 I've had a Windows installation DVD explode in a PC drive before, so standards haven't changed.
Just remember to always lubricate it with proper snake oil. 😂
Another way you could have checked this was to grab the checksum of the first disc and compare it to the second one-and do it multiple times. This would take out any variance there could be in a recording set up and really get down to the basic building blocks-that the CDs are digital files. But yeah, the obvious was already pointed out in your video!
I agree, but recording it the way done in the video ensures that there's no defense along the lines of "oh the OS performing a data transfer has better error correction than real time playback"
I like how with audiophool products like this they always use unquantifiable metrics like "clarity and transparency", rather than something real and easily measured like bit error rate or clock skew.
A simple double blind A/B test would dismiss 99% of product in this space. It is mostly placebo to users.
Sure, some of the equipment and techniques are of better "quality", but it has absolutely zero effect on end result in terms of audio.
Be careful using terms like "clock skew". For a while, clock-jitter was a colossal problem that needed solving. I remember separate drives and D-to-A converter boxes. Then that same company decided to put those two components into one box. Imagine that. Oh but they're totally separate, we swear. It's just smaller now. But don't by any other brand who've done this since their first model. They suck.
Exactly.
Audiophile promotions always use ill-defined, imprecise language based purely on subjective opinion. They are selling a feeling, not a solution, because there was no real problem to solve in the first place.
All that matters is the data. You can very easily compare the data extracted from an unaltered CD with the data extracted from a shaved CD. They will be identical, down to the last bit, unless the CD is extremely scratched up. Since the exact same data is being sent to the DAC, the DAC is going to produce the identical sound (within the limits of the DAC).
Like many things, this product was sold to ignorant people who could be convinced, via feelings, about things that are quite easy to disprove scientifically. If a 36 degree angle on the edge of a CD had any advantage, ALL CDs would be manufactured that way - this would be a relatively simple additional step in the CD manufacturing process. But they aren't, because it's completely unnecessary.
@@movax20h A-B-0 tests are absolutely hated by people that sell 3000USD 3-foot IEC power cables. And by the people that buy them :)
I have been a sound engineer for over 40 years, The company who invented this CD lathe, has a background in Vinyl, which is analog. Taking analog techniques to digital media is pointless. Your Tests were not flawed. You are 100% correct. I remember when these were hitting the magazines 18 or so years ago.
Never doubt (and I am SURE you have heard some doozies) the amount of utter bollocks spoken about where audiophiles are concerned: and the amount of stuff sold contrary to basic science is equally unending.
Post-purchase rationalization
People would have to admit that they've wasted money. That i think applies to all audiophiles toys and pseudoscience mambo-jambo.
If the CD was sufficiently scratched that the error correction failed, there would be skips. I think it's unlikely this technique would help much, but repairing the scratch with some sort of near-equal refractive index fluid would be an "analog" fix to the digital failure.
@@ryanmcgowan3061 there are indeed repair kits that do just that: though as CDs fall out of use the amount of cheap replacements might make that pointless
Even digital is analog on the physical layer. But yeah, it would skip, not degrade...
For best results:
Hold marker with a grip force of 30 p.s.i.*
Rotate disc exactly 0.253 m/s in the counter-clockwise direction.**
Apply marker without overlap or redundancy, while maintaining the tip at a constant 15 degrees in the superior angle.**
The marker must be composed of pure virgin, organic dyes with ethically sourced alcohols.
*right hand only
**northern hemisphere only
You are absolutely correct. The way Error Detection and Correction works is it simply returns a missing bit to it's original position and plays the corrected data stream. If enough bits are missing for EDAC not to work you simply get a dropout. There is no fix for that. The idea that EDAC simply dreams up a substitution for missing bits is ludicrous. If that was what happened internet data would o corrupted you wouldn't want to try reading or listening to it. The purpose of EDAC is to return data to what it was originally not just replace it. A cd either works or it doesn't it's that simple.
The internet uses a record of TCP/IP packets from the source, and tells the source to resends packets not received at the destination. A missing bit on a cd is missing. How can it be returned "to it's original position", if it's missing?
Error correction involves redundant data on the disk that's transmitted as well. TCP also has error correction, the 3 way tcp handshake confirms transmission, it does not provide error correction. UDP is also error corrected this way
What's interesting, is that TODAY we probably COULD do it - with some machine learning, we could train a model to "patch" gaps in the track with something that sounded like it was correct, even if it wasn't - though with sufficient information about the entire track, the result could probably be pretty close to the original anyway.
@@jimbendtsen8841 data on a CD is repeated multiple times . The interleaving repeats data so that temporary problems like the microscopic pinholes that were common in the early days didn't cause drop outs. The error correction doesn't make anything up. Instead, it attempts to ensure all the data is available even if there are imperfections in the physical media.
About 25 years ago I visited an audiophile to fix his computer. He wanted to show off his audio system: directional cables, speakers cemented into the foundations, etc. He played a classical music CD to demonstrate it. The sound was good, and as clear as if I'd been wearing headphones. I (with my mid twenties ears) commented that the recording was from before 1974. "How do you know that?" "I heard the tape hiss at the start." "What tape hiss?" Nuff said!
lol some off those real old takes has artifacts, it sometime more cute than the remastered filtered new version ...
Digital recording started in 1974?
@@JC20XX Some did. But better Dolby NR came in about then.
@@JC20XX I'm not sure about the first use date, but yes, digital recording was definitely used in the 70s. That gives much mirth to people in the know when you hear certain types waxing lyrical over how their LP sounds much better than all this digital rubbish. There was a good chance the LP was mastered from digital tape recordings. - edit, Google searched, first commercial LP produced from digital audio recording, 1972.
that right there is why. as you age your ability to hear certain frequencies is lost, so those minor things fade over time, but then like as you say the hiss, because in reality thats how it sounds, he couldn't hear it
the vast majority of CD players read the data into a buffer and then the DAC (or next stage in the audio pipeline, whichever) pulls data out of that buffer at its own pace, this is both necessary as part of the decoding step (as part of error correction, the bits on a CD are not only expanded for storage, but not even stored in playback order), and also gives the laser time to reread a sector if it fails the first time. notice that if you have a CD player without a top cover, if you put a finger on the disc to stop it from spinning, the player will continue playing for a few seconds. NO CD player plays them back in real time, they're not records
Sssh don't try to reason them. They put shakti stones on top of the CD to erase the buffer!
This is blatantly false. Seconds? Get a grip fella.
@@fdfsdfsvsfgsg4888 literally just tried it, played for another 3 seconds for me
@@fdfsdfsvsfgsg4888 I could pop the disc out of my PS1 and still play the game until it needed to load more data from the disc. With some games I could finish a level before the game stopped. A major mechanic of Monster Rancher was to remove the game and insert a random music CD 😂
cd players used to be touchy. dance too hard and your disc would start skipping, aha... modern cd drives have skip and error correction, but my 1980's cd player sure doesn't :) (i'm not supporting shaving disc's tho ;0 )
Back in the late 50's, early 60's, my Dad was a very young TV repair man who made House calls ( in the days of Valves ). After repairing an elderly Lady's TV, he was putting his tools away and saying his goodbyes when the Lady asked him "aren't you going to let me choose the best picture ?". My Dad told her that he didn't understand quite what she meant. "Well," she said, "the other Man always lets me choose the best picture from the roll of Film". It dawned on my Dad that her previous TV Engineer used to trip the Vertical Hold control and ask her to say "stop" when she saw "the best picture". He duly obliged and had one very happy customer. That's the science behind this CD shaver I think.
Thank you for this video. I worked in optical disc manufacturer for almost 20 years. All things are digitally stored on CD/DVD/Blu-ray disc and protected with error correction codes. The way you compare two tracks is correct.
What really pisses me off about this scam is that the device is so similar to a cd resurfacer, which produces real results (i worked in a used cd shop from 1995-2005, removed scratches from more discs than i could ever count using one) such a waste of equipment and display of pure greed and dishonesty. Thanks for the excellent video!
From the title I thought this was precisely what you mentioned, a tool that shaves away a microscopic layer to get rid of scratches. The moment he mentioned the snake oil pitch I was rolling my eyes. What a scam. These are the gold plated HDMI cables of their era.
@@SuhailRehman I thought the same. I have one of the resurfacing. The real one, not the Disk Doctor thing. Works nicely. I think I would like to see him do a segment on the resurfacing tool.
There's a video on this device from 2013 on YT by AVcompanytours, the salesman almost looks ashamed talking about it. But hey, scheisters will be scheisters.
No, what's really annoying is sites like TechRadar having absolutely no integrity and running botched reviews for scam products.
_corporate greed!_
I am professionally working in the audio industry for over 20 years, and I can confirm, the test you did was absolutely correct (however I would have digitally read the CDs in a PC-drive to save the time of the alignment). I also expected the result of a inversed cancellation. Making the sound on a DIGITAL media "brighter, better, deeper, clearer, more 3D" etc. is just ridiculous. You cant alter the information on the CD - of course you can lose data / have dropouts caused by a scratch, but you can't alter the content in any kind. I wonder what these "review" magazines got in exchange for their reviews.
Nothing, I bet. It's a psychological phenomenon. Our brains also do an error-correction and post-processing. If you are strongly convinced, that they would sound differently - they would. In your head.
So there's a group of people who convince each other that their weird shamanic rituals would improve quality, so they do experience it. It's a real effect that happens in their brains. Power of imagination, if you like. Self-induced post-processing.
I'm glad he used the optical cable from a dedicated CD audio player (probably of a similar vintage) instead of reading it from a CD-ROM drive because the differences between the two devices would undoubtedly leave some person arguing that it invalidated the test somehow.
@@laierr That's another placebo effect
@@insta_725 That's a long and elaborate description of the mechanism of a placebo effect in that specific case, yes.
@@laierr yeah, if we think something will be better we will perceive it as better
honestly tho, it must be great being convinced by stuff like thi
I mean, imagine ur some audiophile who is absolutely certain that u can double the quality of sound just by putting a 1 pence coin on top of ur sound system or soemthing like that
they will be enjoying their sound wayyy more than anyone else, even if it is total BS
I envy those people XD
The audacity test was a *great* idea! nice one, it's undisputable *proof*, that it does nothing.
Hey. I was heavily involved into audiophile stuff in my college days, some 20 years ago. I knew about the method of "improving" CDs by painting their edges in black. I never heard any difference after painting my CDs, but I painted all of them. Like, better be safe then sorry. Fortunatelly I wasn't aware of requirement to shave their adge at particular angle as that would not be as cheap tweak for a colledge kid, as painting with black marker :)
That is the same method tho. They only said that this angle is better because they could then sell a machine to cut it. People still do the marker without cutting and it's way better for the disc also. You can wipe it off if you want to remove it. You can't remove a cut. Still not saying it will actually improve the sound tho
This is like a device I once imagined as a joke: An automatic CD rewinder.
If you don't spin it backwards for the same amount of time that you played it forwards, the bits might become misaligned, after all! /s /j 😏😂
I don't know about CDs, but DVD rewinders did exist for a time. It was just a disc tray that spun the DVD counterclockwise and nothing else.
@@CaptianKatsura I'm not an engineer, but that should be backwards compatible with CDs.
Be kind, rewind. :D
Well, it's about as useful.
I just beveled the edges on my thumb-drive that I store music on to 36 degrees and can in fact hear the sound quality improvement. Amazing.
You forgot to paint the end of the drive casing carbon black to prevent ambient magnetic interference. Without doing that, I'm surprised you tolerated the sound at all.
I did the same to my iPod Classic and now it sounds better than ever although I keep cutting my finger on the exposed metal.
You're clearly homosexual.
I'm gonna do this with my phone next, it's very lacking in sound quality.
Though, not sure why I need to spin it...
I beveled the edges off of my spinning hard disc and I can't hear anything at all.
Funny thing... if this was true, wouldn't CD manufacturers just do it? LOL!
Seriously! It would be cheaper than the label.
If there's anything I've learned from having to deal with the audiophile community it's that they are SO. GODDAMN. PRETENTIOUS. 😩😩
I had to deal with a guy who wanted his (extremely expensive) B&O soundsystem stripped down and "better resistors" put into the boards because his friend, who is apparently a sound expert, said that they give off an electrical noise that muddies the audio output 🤦🏼♂️
Well I mean they can't have cheesy parts in their audio system right because they heard all this happening before someone suggested that there "could be parts causing issues" xD
As an electronic service technician. That sounds legit.
No it doesn't. 😂
.
Well, depending on where the resistors are, they can absolutely affect the analogue signal quality (as can almost any component). I say this as an electronics design engineer, but not someone who knows B&O systems. Doesn't change that the customer was pretentious, of course.
@@joemills4603 yeah that's absolutely true, and a good point, but I assumed that with B&O style systems they wouldn't be using any mass produced PCB's, so there "shouldn't" be any accidental crossover between the signals and the electrical components due to design, but I too don't work for B&O so 🤷♂️😄
@@my3dviews
I concur.
I mean it certainly IS possible and definitely CAN make a significant difference.
For corn's sake....if "the customer is always right", who tf are *you* to tell him he's wrong?
I mean, just because YOU suffer from the unfortunate disability of having unrefined ears which cannot discern either way is certainly no reason at all to attempt to hang such an ailment on a paying customer....
Amirite??
😉
Although I definitely DO much prefer good repeat customers over any one-and-done customer!
Therefore I do believe in using a fair degree of tact while still factually informing them regarding something they could harbor vindictive feelings about at any time in the future, and certainly the minute their ego is damaged.
Their cousin's bestie DID work at IBM, after all...
Ya' really just don't wanna haul off n' say:
"I CAN sell you this but YOU are too uneducated to know the difference, so...save your money or go elsewhere".
There certainly is some legitimate wiggle room in between...and in my experience that works out better for both parties somehow.
Reminds me of when my old band had our album mastered at an expensive Sony mastering studio. We excitedly played the finished product, noting the punchier dynamics and wider stereo field, patting ourselves on the back for money well spent, before realising we had played the wrong CD, and were listening to the unmastered version. The mind plays so many tricks!
I assume after that you listened the mastered version. Was the difference as big as you were 'hearing' on the first CD?
We recorded some fancy band live one time (might have been Steps Ahead) on DAT. Somebody then did a backup copy on tape - digital wasn't really trusted yet.
A few people insisted that the tape recording sounded SO MUCH BETTER than the digital recording :D
@@IlBiggo Not suprised analog have the real sound, digital is a limited frequency range and leave stuff out, also depends if it 16 bit, 24 bit etc.
@@Revener666 No it doesn't
@@Revener666 “leave stuff out” - what file types have you been listening to?
I’m always fascinated by products that exploit the gullibility of the “audiophile” segment, and the amount of money those people will spend. Thanks for taking the time and expense to show us.
These shaving machines give a better result if you upgrade the mains lead. So I hear.
I'm an audiophile and I totally agree with you. I've listened to everything from cheap stereos, to extreme high end $150,000 systems. My $3000 system sounds impressive. The $150,000 sounds damn impressive, but not enough to justify the price. Money has its own "sound" and that's what they're hearing.
There are audiophiles and audiophools.
I might be considered an audiophile to an extent, but I understand how digital signal process works. And that is either the signal is there, or it is not. It is a binary concept because it is binary. Hence, there is no 'audio quality' because either the disc can read, or it can't. That is all there is to it.
Gold plated optical cables... Tos link for gods sake uses a plastic core (maybe glass if the manufacturer wants to overdo it), the stupidity knows no bounds
The thing is, the error correcting codes used COMPLETELY remove almost all classes of errors. Even if there were reflections, which caused some bit errors, the ECCs would just fix them.
Audio engineer here: Your methodology is spot-on. Good show.
Back at the dawn of the cd era they came out with green pens to paint the edge of your cds for much the same effect. Unfortunately the pens weren't pricey enough to catch on with the audiophile community.
Not pricey enough. Yes they LOVE telling people how much it cost.
And they have no idea how they will go deaf sooner and faster. Sharper clearer sound
ruins the ears. Especially tho powerful 20KHz sounds. YES I CAN HEAR IT.
just wait until they are too infrequent
@@listen2meokidoki264 *CAN YOU FEEL IT MR KRABS*
After your demonstration of data using a light switch, I've sanded down the edges if all my light switches, coloured the edges in with marker pen and have noticed the light bulbs now give a much better, clearer light with better separation of the light frequencies and shadows are more defined
They probably have a more 3d feeling aswell
i tried this with my cat to improve the quality of it's disposition, but sadly the applicability of that theory did not translate well.
On a side note, if you find any random pieces of ear, nose or fingers lying around, I'm gonna need those back.
I prevented light leaks on my eyeballs by drawing a ring around my irises with a Sharpie. The whole world has vastly increased resolution now.
Cheeky! I’ve done the same and can really tell the difference in the shadows… I can hear them…
😂😂😂😂
Also, the error correction in a CD is not just "cannot read a bit, let's guess what it is". There is a lot of thought and different mechanisms on how the data is stored so that it can losslessly recover even quite long read errors, check it out, it is quite fascinating stuff. And with all that complexity, audiophiles think that something like light scatter would not have been considered, hehheh.
This is true, but the patent application for "Cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding" (US4413340) does list 2 methods the encoder can use to interpolate for unrecoverable errors.
In 80's one Finnish music magazine got the original digital data of one CD from the company making CDs and they compared it bit by bit to the data read from the corresponding CD and there wasn't a single difference between those two. If there has ever been any problems with CD sound quality, they are caused in the AD-conversion of the original analog data to be written into CD or in the DA-conversion of the digital data read from the CD.
*SPOILERS BELOW:*
I must express my appreciation of Mat's presentational style, which I prefer to the "this is a blatant scam, and now I'll tell you why - right after this message from today's sponsor" approach employed by many TH-camrs.
When he explained what the product was purported to do, it sounded like utter nonsense. "How could physically altering a Compact Disc enhance the digital data it contains?" I thought. "Improved instrument separation? That's absurd."
Then came the reviews, which genuinely had me questioning whether I was fundamentally confused about how CDs work - and wrong to dismiss the product's potential benefits.
When the tests showed absolutely no waveform differences, this was vastly more satisfying than it would have been if I'd known from the start. It's the difference between a lecture and a journey.
Bravo, sir.
The reviews were almost certainly not from blind tests. They knew what the "improved" disks were, and thus heard the improvements they believed should be there.
Also, I'm incredibly amused that they go on about how blacking the edges doesn't work because the laser is infrared, then tell people to black the edges.
...
And I absolutely lost it when they declared that one angle is appropriate for both the infrared of CD and the actual red of DVD and SACD. That optimum angle should depend on wavelength, I'd think(not to mention that there's no way this can generate a sharpness difference on DVD-Video. MPEG doesn't work that way.)
I thought the same, plus 'light scatter' is something you hear about illumination sources, not lasers. In fact, lack of scatter is one of the benefits of laser light, it's how they can use them to measure the distance to the moon.
I saw the title and expected some kind of scratch removal / extreme cleaning device.
Then he started explaining what it was... oh dear
@@st0rmforce Honestly, this is kinda close to what I expected. The bevel was a surprise, though. I thought the thing was going to trim the edge to "true up" the disk and reduce physical wobble. But it only trues it as an accidental side-effect of the nonsense snake oil.
I'm a professional audio engineer here to say that your methodology is valid. It's what audio engineers call a 'null test' and it's the gold standard for this sort of evaluation.
The reality is that digital audio either works or it doesn't.Things like expensive cables, for digital audio aren't going to improve your sound quality (though they may be more durable), because you have to really mess up a piece of copper before it can't accurately transmit digital information. If you have uncorrectable errors you will hear them as clicks or skips, otherwise you should get an identical bitstream.
I see the incredibly expensive power cables people buy, and my first thought: and did you have that outlet you plug into re-run to the panel with solid silver core wire? And then out to the transformer on the pole?
Audiophiles have been getting fleeced on some things since day 1. This gadget is no surprise.
Absolutely no esoteric audiophile. Quite the opposite. But where in a setup are external copper cables used for a digital signal? Speaker cables don't transport digital data, neither does a power chord.
That said: For both cables the only decisive factor is if it has the right gauge for the power transmitted.
@@danielmoore7342 audiofools are the ones that need fleecing
I recall working in a workshop that handled vintage electronics recently, and how a determined band of audiophiles would waste our time asking for pointless capacitor "upgrades" to be fitted to their already correctly working equipment. Drove us nuts!
@@TelepathicRabbit POWER cables. Look what I found below. Blows my mind.
You've done well with your testing. If you want further confirmation, you could use a CD ripper to rip to uncompressed audio, and then do a binary compare between the tracks, as well as your audacity check.
Is this why backmasking a CD doesn't work?
@@user-kg6us4ik6i Could you explain your thinking?
well clearly if I paid more for it, it sounds better! what you did is a null test and its very valid, I've been enjoying these vids!
Audiophiles are the greatest source of amusement in this hobby. I was in a store recently and the owner was trying different Ethernet cables on a network audio streamer. He was convinced there are subtle differences in the audio quality between various cables. I nodded and smiled and backed away slowly.
That's just incredible.
Did he try an Audioquest RJ/E Diamond Ethernet cable? £1,000 a metre. The marketing web page is full of 100% pure high dynamic clarity oxygen-free bullshit.
Oh, incidentally, they need to be plugged in _the right way round_ for ideal audio quality. Seriously. They have arrows on them to show which end goes on the audio source and which on the destination.
I can POSSIBLY see a difference if it was between a shielded and unshielded cable. But that would be about the only thing.
monkaS
@@johnsantoro4771 now you see, this is where I don't know if you're being serious or not
It never ceases to amaze how people can learn so much about audio equipment, and fail to understand something as simple as how digital signals work.
Completely different subjects, technology by definition does not need the user to undertand the underlying scientific principles to be used/operated.
Please define "learn". If by that you mean being able to regurgitate some kind of gospels, then there is no mystery there, it's just a different church. If by learn you mean acquiring comprehensions then, they just don't.
When doing the first comparison i was screaming 'put it in a DAW!!!' (in my head). Thanks for not letting me down!
I was hoping you'd try an inverted comparison of the two versions of the track. Excellent approach. Perfect.
The skepticism bleeding through every fiber of his being until the predictable conclusion was delicious.
He is very British.
It makes you wonder, when audiophiles have a wide range of excuses for things to be different, why pick on the digital data?
I assumed that cabling, speakers and the DAC would be big enough targets for ridicule.
it's what makes these videos just so damn watchable :)
never nasty, never judgy but factual and funny. Love it Mat :)
Retired broadcast engineer here. Well done. Flawless testing methodology. The conclusion didn't surprise me at all. The supposed benefits of CD shaving (better bass, expanded sound stage, etc.) simply can't happen with digital source data. Perhaps this might make a difference if there was an analog optical disc format. But even Laserdisc was analog video, PCM digital audio IIRC.
Given how fiddly the Laserdiscs were to handle, grabbing them out of the case and shaving off the edge would be the last thing you'd want to do to them I imagine 😅
Yup, the only thing that would make any difference in all these subjective reviews would be the post AD electronics.
Everything you just stated I already suspected or rather knew. Especially after watching VWestlife's video regarding cheap versus expensive audio cables with regard to digital sound.
I agree 100% with test methods, from the beginning of the video I thought to myself "please do the waveform inversion method" with each as accurate signal sampling as possible, which he did when he recorded the signal digitally.
If there had been even the slightest deviation in anything (stereo image, transients, etc.), you would have been able to see or hear it with the inversion method.
BTW, I am a passionate sound tinkerer, have been making my own music and working with digital sound processing for almost 20 years.
Retired broadcast sound engineer too. Absolutely right.
This was approximately 20 minutes of buildup for a man to simply declare “Faff and nonsense” to outrageous claims.
And I loved it down to the last second.
I had begun collecting CDs in 1984 before I could even afford a CD player. I went to buy one at Sears and brought some of my CDs to try the demo players. One player still had a the screw tightened up inside meant to protect the laser head during shipping and, as a result, it scratched the surface of my CDs with concentric rings; the worst possible sort of scratches. I complained to the customer service department and the manager looked at my scratched CDs and told me: "Well, this one is AAD, that's a low quality CD; we can't be held responsible for it getting scratched."
Your test methodology was spot on. However, this won’t stop audiophiles from arguing that null tests don’t count. They’re a special breed, they are.
One of the benefits of digital content is that it either works or it doesn't. On or off.
There is no 'drift' with a digital signal.
Great video!
I would've just dismissed this product as snake oil without giving it a second thought because I know how digital audio works. But your dedication to this channel is outstanding!
i mean... it IS snake oil. but many "high end audiophiles" (maybe most? maybe almost all of them?) are pretty deliberately looking for some kind of snake oil so they can claim a supposed superiority over anyone who "can't tell the difference with [whatever] OBVIOUSLY superior method that they are using."
If you think that's how CD audio works, then you need to read "Error correction and concealment in the Compact Disc system". Audio CDs were designed to allow CD players to play back corrupted CDs with reduced quality. If error correction fails, then concealment can still interpolate between samples, which halves the analog bandwidth (~10kHz instead of ~20kHz). If the data is even more corrupted, the CD player will mute the signal before the corrupted portion. Data CDs have an additional layer of error correction because concealment does not work there.
All those publications that sang the praises of this product are the real story. They should be blacklisted by the audiophile community (assuming they aren’t out of business by now)
@@Finder245 But that's the opposite of the point. Yes, it's possible to get *worse* sound out of a CD, but it's not possible to get *better* sound, which is the product's claim.
@@ThatOldGrey exactly. When audiophiles with no technical chops start claiming error correction or jitter, it's usually a warning sign that they have hit the Dunning Krueger level of subject matter expertise.
Thank you for this fun, entertaining and educational video/channel!
Thanks for this video! This is a great device. It is important to light a candle before using the Sharpie.
As an experiment, I disassembled a hard drive with MP3 files and shaved the plate. The result was fantastic. Unfortunately, the hard drive that I opened broke after 10 minutes (due to oxidation), but those 10 minutes gave me the best MP3 playback I've ever heard.
By the way, the name "Schrott" is German and means crap (no joke)!
This product is absolute genius. It looks like it is doing something while doing nothing. They paid off enough good reviews that people didn't want to on up to hearing no difference. They also did it before tools that could test it were easily accessible. I gives the product 20/10 it is a great idea as long as you have no soul.
the inventors are probably still alive. Why not interview them too?
Greed is the wicked stepmother of invention.
The United States' Government?
This demonstrates the true quality of 'expert reviews' on Hi-Fi+ magazine.
Emperors New Clothes ?
Professional audio engineer here. Your methodology and audio theory is sound. Your test is the same test I would've done. You've done a good job with this.
The effect is caused by interaction of the digital (laser sled) and analogue (output amplifier) sections of the CD player. So removing the output amplifier section of the player for the testing / comparison stops any chance of showing the effect. Indeed knowing the mechanism, you would also infer that the digital output MUST be the same in order for the effect to be produced. (The whole point of the extra work done by rereading and error correction is to reproduce the faithful digital output)
Only one minor comment - if you wanted to give the contraption the benefit of the doubt, you could also do a test on scratched/dirty CDs, the argument being that light scattering would be a better test material. You could also measure the sound the cd drive makes while playing to compare the wobble.
@@LeeTanczos so the laser reads exactly the same signal and sends exactly the same signal to the dac but if the cd is shaved the same signal will interact differently with the dac? How would it know or care about anything happening previously to it doing its thing when the data is the same?
@@jerkersandquist7244 exactly
Well if there was anything to test, I would have followed Matthew's steps pretty much. In reality even just reading the reviews tells you this is 100% bunkum and in reality doesn't require testing at all ;) Still, the video was entertaining as all Techmoan videos are!
Got my CDs balanced at the tyre workshop. Defenitely a huge improvement.
Your testing regime is better than I would have expected, kudos. Being more of a data person I would have put the data on a hard drive using whatever ripper I had handy. I would then do a bitwise comparison of the files. Your method may take other factors into consideration and might be better. Mine would take the DAC out of the equation. Assuming the comparisons you provided were in the analog domain as interpreted by a DAC.
I've found that the audio quality of CDs are improved substantially if you store them in a equilateral pyramid container with walls made out of rose quartz. (I've also tried beryllium crystals, but although the audio quality was perhaps even better than with rose quartz, beryllium had the disadvantage of summoning Zuul the Gatekeeper, so caveat emptor.)
Pyramids also keep razors sharp and fruit fresh if you keep them inside the pyramid. Pyramids can do anything!
So it WAS Louis Tully, and his client party music that started that whole mess!
@@emprsnm9903 haha
ay
Have you tried kyber crystals? Those really let you hear the force of the music.
These audiophiles seem to misunderstand how CD error correction works. The player doesn't make anything up. They produce data streams using a combination of identical data replicated throughout the disc and--if I recall correctly--some parity bits that allow for the original Bitstream to be reconstructed algebraically (ie the missing bit could only be x). CDs were used for data storage far into the DVD era in part due to the robustness of their error correction, which was overkill for music. If the error correction worked by guessing then we could never do things like store files on CD, as a single error would corrupt the document, application, etc. tl;Dr: CD error correction is accurate, it doesn't guess, the reason given for this tools existence is senseless.
this.
Wrong. Audio CD players will have a function to fill in a gap with a guess when an error was too severe to b corrected by the CIRC.
The error correction in redbook CDs is the least rigorous compared to other media such as HDD. The error correcting algorithms are essentially the same. At the time, redbook CDs were pushing the technological limits of the media in terms of data storage capacity and transfer rate. Ultimately, errors were "removed" with the antialiasing filter.
@@timramich the device’s claim seems to be that CIRC kicking in at all results in guesswork/interpolation, which is incorrect. When the error is so comprehensive that CIRC cannot recover the data, it still does not guess: it fills in small gaps with repeated sound from the bitstream immediately prior or audibly skips. The theory here seems to be that a damaged CD will produce a bitstream/waveform that is close to but not exactly the original whereas a shaved disc is more likely to faithfully reproduce the original bitstream. That’s just not how redbook audio works.
@@timramich ... The video you are commenting under, PROVES OP's comment, CORRECT, m*r*n. xD
Omfg, use your brain, dude. xD
I really appreciate your excellent test methodology.
I do like the look of the black edge especially with the red label.
What if they had made the CD look black - like some of the CD-Rs that you could buy or those Playstation(?) discs? That might be a nice look too.
I was REALLY hoping this was a high-end device that removed scratches from the surface. This device was snake oil. Great video!
Snake Oil gets a bad wrap. I saw a yoututbe video on it. 😂
Yeah, I thought they were gonna shave the entire surface like those disc polishers but better.
There are legit devices that buffer the surface of CD's that can remove scratches and make some unreadable or skipping cd's readable again.
remove scratches by shaving them off?
@@donosborne9398 got any links?
The audiophile write-up, while including many of the required words and phrases such as "focused", "sharper", and the obligatory "enhanced soundstage", they made a glaring error by forgetting to use the phrase "night and day". The audiophile elders will surely punish the author for this oversight by removing his £2000 mains leads, remove his cable supports so the speaker leads are touching the carpet, and replace the audiophile grade fuses in his plugs for the standard fuses that came with the plugs. That'll teach him.
I KNEW they left out one of the important buzzwords! I just couldn't put my finger on it... Thanks! 😆😆👍🏻
HAHA the joke's on you!! You didn't take my uninterruptable power that can switch at the speed of light, (sticks tongue out)
Did they get "paper ear" in there, too? You gotta shame the people who can't hear the obvious difference in quality (they would have to have papers ears not to hear it)
The difference is only night and day with the improved version. Notice the glaring problem with this item - the knob holding the CD down is just a big steel nut. The improved version (A bargain for only an extra £800) has a bakelite knob instead.
His audiophile crystal privileges have been revoked 😞
Audio CDs (Redbook CDs) are different in how they are read to data CDs. Many years ago I tested about 50 manufacturers of audio CD readers to see how accurate they were. I had test audio CDs where I knew every bit on the CD. I would play the CD, capture the bits as read and compare with the original bits. It turned out that there were only a few ways the read failed, and in each case the failure could be heard in the audio if you trained yourself to know what to listen for. It was always some kind of "pop", and failures to read accurately never resulted in less "clarity" in the overall music. Any differences in general playback quality could always be attributed to jitter being fed into the DAC.
That's not unusual.
Are you talking the truly ancient era when CD players were using an honest-to-god 16-bit DAC while sacrificing virgins by the drove to the supreme beings of linearity?
Oh, the furor when the high fidelity crowd discovered that some of the cheaper players (none of them were truly cheap) where sharing a single stupidly expensive / outrageously linear DAC across _both_ stereo channels. That's at least half a sample phase shift between the two channels right there. Totally intolerable.
As soon as you brought out that Denon next to the pcm recorder, i knew it was all over. Waveform null through phase inversion does not lie. Bravo sir. You would think, an "audiophile" would understand the difference between analog and digital preproduction. Or understand was waveform phasing is. Very, very few do.
Gotta love the DVD comparison, several times in reviews. Literally digital files on a disc, you can't improve the quality in any way or form. You get what you've got.
Data CDs have more error correction than audio CDs do. That doesn't make this device make any sense, but you can't make a valid argument that audio CD data is exactly the same as data CD data.
Loved the bit about the "image becoming sharper"...
But but noise floor!
@@jhoughjr1 So noise floor is a term for recording. As in while you are making the recording. So shaving cds is so effective it goes back in time and improves the equiment used to make the recording.
@@infesticon don't forget the soundstage 😂
If there was a significant improvement in sound quality between the two discs, manufacturers of CDs would have implemented this in their production.
good point.
Exactly. I've seen people color the edge of the disc black thinking it does something! 🤣
I didn’t think trimming would do it..great video!!.. subbed…
Hi!
As a former engineer developing CD / SACD and DCD drives for automotive use, I am very greatful that someone is showing the facts without ranting of useless overpriced equipment that just rips off people with too much money but far too less technical understanding. However while watching the whole video I would suggest you should do a video on the technical details of the CD and why it is better to put it on the desk with the optical side down, why the sector interleave helps correcting errors without the loss of a single bit of information and why you can punch a 5mm hole into the disk that nobody will ever hear. Leave me a note if you like to do that and I support you in that task.
The plastic is thicker on the optical side than the label side.
I believe he has a video on your first suggestion, if I'm not mistaken!
Technology Connections has an excellent series on CD (and Digital Audio by extension) Audio format.
@@wayland7150 the label is just screenprinted onto the data layer. there is no plastic protecting the data layer on that side.
@@colonelmustard2652 But, IINM there is also a layer of lacquer that is applied via spin coating to the data layer before the label is screen-printed to provide some protection.
Disk shaving is the highest grade of audiophoolery, right next to "audiophile" Ethernet network switches.
Even worse than an audiophile network switch is an audiophile network hub. A hub is way slower and slowed even more by more devices. The only way you could be losing bits from your music is if you lose a packet, and TCP will resend it until it's received. As far as I know, there is no way to hear any difference in a digital to digital data transfer.
Disc not disk for CD
I saw a audiophile NAS that costs about 20x what suppose to. The cleanest 1s and 0s you can get
Search for "I Can't Believe What This $25,000 Computer Is For" - Dawid Does Tech Stuff
To fully upgrade your DVDs to blu-ray-like quality, combine the magical 36* bevel on the edge with a good demagnetization afterwards. The picture will be so sharp it will cut your eyes! And the sound so crisp your ears will bleed (or is that your wallet??)
Absolutely fascinating video! A really fun watch
What a cutting edge technology
You went there. Well done my son.
I heard back in the medieval times counterfeiters would mold those CD edge shavings into more CDs. This would cause CD inflation, so the punishment for this crime was death.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED that this high end audio product doesn't deliver on all its promises!
But are you APPALLED though?
Nonsense. I could hear the difference between the binary 1's of the untreated disk and the superior binary 1's of the treated disk even via TH-cam.
🤣🤣🤣
@@chartwell5245 they went from 1’s to 𝟏’s
@@chartwell5245 I even heard a couple of 2s. Trust me, I'm an audiophile engineer.