Taming edge from remastered CDs?

Last_lemming - The pits in the commercial disk made from a glass-master are not precisely placed. This is because these are virtually "stamped-out" rather than written using a laser and a drive.

When you use a laser disk writer with a low-jitter master clock, clean high-quality media and write the CDROM disk at a 1X rate, the pits are not only more geometrically perfect, the positions of them are more accurately placed on the disk. These things enable the disk to be read in a CD player with lower jitter, since the clock in the drive must synchronize to the pits in the disk.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Audioengr, I do understand what you're saying and you're perfectly right, there are many contributing (purely) digital factors that help with this problem, but I suppose what I'm getting at above is really that many people who've spent a considerable amount of taming things like jitter (and disc treatments and etc) still complain of having this kind of problem. If you want to see what I mean, just visit any thread where people are comparing the turntables they own to their CD solutions (or start your own thread) and see what are saying about the topic. There are a lot of things in play and I certainly don't want to say that the money anyone has spent toward a digital solution is money they never should have spent or anything like that, but a successful amount of power conditioning (whatever that turns out to be) IME turns out to be (provided you do your homework first) generally much cheaper and can completely solve the problem of the digital nasties while also improving the usual parameters involved with that approach (blacker background, better decay, better extension etc). The big problem I see with conditioning is that there is no way on earth anyone can predict or predetermine how much of to use - you end up having to continue to apply it in order to see how things progress, but I managed to effect all the changes I had on my list, plus a few more, for not much over $1K. Are the digital changes you describe relavent? YES. Should they be applied? Probably. Should they be the first thing that most should turn to when addressing this problem? I really don't think so. There is at least one considerably cheaper and more sonically effective alternative.

Ghosthouse, I'm running out of time at the moment, but I'll take all this up again in a few hours.

Ivan_nosnibor, Pretty much everything affects jitter. Power conditioning is very important to avoid system noise induced jitter, but it won't help in reduction of the jitter already present in digital signal coming from the transport. Clean power to transport is only one of the factors but there is also quality of media and laser, mechanical quality of the transport, quality of CDP's electronics, quality of digital cable and quality of D/A converter's clock not to mention ambient electrical noise.

Rarely any edge for me. Carefull built my system on reproducing clearly with no edge for one and only input: CDs. There still are some which can make my ears bleed if played too loud, but they were so poorly recorded or remastered they are hopeless. I refuse to sacrifice clarity for pleasantness of bad recordings/remasters. But mediocre recordings still need to be listenable on my system.

Kijanki, I agee with you, there are really 2 different problems like you say, and to a degree I've done both in my rig, but the conditioning had a bigger impact on it and was a bigger bang for the buck. Apologies all around if I got carried away with my first post, but I still think audiophiles ought to be considering both when it comes to the specific problem CD harshness/edginess. It does not get mentioned enough for a variety of reasons.

Ghosthouse, I use a variety of Alan Maher Designs gear, but for a few reasons it can be a bit of a tough recommendation: Alan doesn't believe in the all-in-one-box solutions, he says they physically can't address all the individual sources of noise in the home (which he says is anything and everything that's plugged into the home, even when in sleep mode), so you end up with a bunch of different smaller devices that are scattered throughout the house, but it's both cheaper and more effective at reducing noise because it's a more efficient application. The drawback for most is that you have to be patient and experiment at various places around the home (Alan guides you through all that) and see what works best (that takes anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks even), but if you can get past all that, it's bit like tube rolling - you may be getting into uncharted territory in a sense, but when you hit paydirt, you know it!! There's a little more assurance of a good outcome than with tube rolling, but in the beginning it may feel like it's a little uncertain, it just takes some time.

Regards to all.