Shaving Compact Discs to improve the sound (?)

Shaving Compact Discs to improve the sound (?)(youtube.com)

3 points by shashashank 3 years ago | 4 comments

ksaj 3 years ago |

As a data forensics person, I would simply rip a copy of each CD, and then do a bitwise comparison. Of course the results will be the same. I would even do them on completely different systems to demonstrate that no matter what, the resulting digital stream is identical. That's how digital recording works.

I definitely enjoyed his demonstration with inverted waveforms sampling. He proved it quite well after the DAC stage. A bitwise comparison of the ripped content would show they are the same before the DAC stage as well. The shaving and marking literally does nothing but cost you money.

IndySun 3 years ago | |

TechMoan certainly provides more than an occasional worthwhile youtube presentation. And this was a typically thoroughly true-to-style takedown.

Side-note: I would like to read some reasoning into why so-called Audiophiles 'fall' for this snake oil, still.

ksaj 3 years ago | | |

I don't have a real answer for that, but I know of a few distinct places where audiophiles fell for blatant snake oil.

Back in the 90's a company calling themselves MIT (but nothing to do with the university) created guitar cables with a little black box at one end. They claimed it did all kinds of magic on the sound signal. Nobody has been able to pass an A/B blind test, and that shouldn't surprise anyone.

One thing they never did was hook it up to a tone generator and chart out a sweep on an oscilloscope to see what, if anything, changes whatsoever. My expectation is that nothing changed, and the little black box was snake oil.

Monster Cables went one further by claiming their digital cables were of superior sound quality. Of course that, much like OP, completely ignores what a digital signal even is.

And the most egregious one of all: Robb Report magazine had an article about these "tone wood" knobs you could put on your audio amplifier that magically improved the sound of your high end audio gear. Which to my mind is ironic, because you pay such a premium for this high end gear, and it needs something so low tech to convince the owner the sound has improved?

Finally, on the subject of guitar players, it is super easy to find guitar players that insist on tube only amps, and how they sound this way or that way so much better than modern digital amp modelling amps. They often use Tony Iommi as an example of a true guitar tone. BUT if you check out any of the Tony Iommi interviews he put on in his studio, the first thing you might notice on his effects rack is a Pod Pro - at some point he changed to amp, speaker and mic modelling (literally everything but the guitar!) and nobody noticed!