Cryogenic treatment of an LP?

"I guess you could say the same about black holes, the big bang, relativity theory, teleportation and the atomic bomb - the preposterous nature of such things makes it extremely difficult to conceive they're real without proof or demonstration." - Geoffkait

The audio world has a lot of BS products that consumers lacking scientific knowledge happily purchase. Some of the products you list fall into the category and others have potential, but I think cryo-LPs takes the cake.

As for black holes, I don't claim to have any knowledge on the subject, but I'm skeptical that we really have a solid understanding of a lot of things in space. I believe the Big Bang to be total BS, but that discussion has nothing to do with audio so I'll leave it alone. Do some reading on origins and you'll find that the Big Bang isn't really the best explaination even from the perspective of evolution. Teleportation isn't a reality and I highly doubt it will ever be. Finally, including the atomic bomb in this list is just plain ignorant.

I have been racking my brain to come up with any reason that a cryo-LP would sound better. Sometimes something unexpected happens during a process and the change is attributed to the wrong thing. Here's the only thing that I can think of.

Is it possible that during the process of cryo treating an LP it's become cleaner? I know dust and such has a significant impact on how it sounds. Is it possible that the cryo process somehow allows the contaminants on the surface to be released such that they can be removed during the cleaning process?

Mceljo, while I appreciate that cryo is very mysterious, not so much for tools and musical instruments and golf balls and rifle barrels, racing engine pistons and valves, and razor blades, for which the benefits appear to be strictly better durability, hardness, stiffness, but for audio related items like CDs, LPs and cables, for which it is not so obvious why there is a performance improvement. I think that it would be relatively easy to demonstrate that dust is not the issue for cryoing LPs, since brand new or thoroughly cleaned LPs would exhibit sonic improvement with cryo. Without a thorough examination of what is going on, and I kind of susoect noone has really done that, not even the cryo labs, in the case of LPs, the sonic improvement most likely is associated with better characteristics of the vinyl making it less subject to vibration coming from the floor and the turntable motor. Better sound might be due to improved stiffness, reduction of stress and strain (that the vinyl is subjected to during the stamping process), and perhaps other reasons that remain unknown.

Cryo treatment effects the material properties so unless the use interfaces with these properties then it's meaningless.

As I've said before, a more homogeneous material may transmit vibrations more uniformly, but it doesn't reduce the vibrations in any way.

Stiffness would only apply if your actually believe that the stylus is leaving a temporary trail of deformation in the LP as it travels in the groove. If this was the case to any significant degree then I'd suggest that LP playback would be someone random because it's unlikely that the stylus would ever follow the same path.

The stress-strain relationship is a measure of how far a material can be deformed before it takes a permanent set. In my college material labs we used steel bars and then pulled them until they break. In certain ranges the steel will go back to the original shape, but there comes a point where it goes outside of the elastic range and starts to stretch like taffy. Even if you don't continue pulling to failure it will never go back to the original shape. For this to matter in a record you would have to assume that prior to cryo treatment the stylus was actually pushing the material outside of the elastic range causing permanent deformation.

The most likely cause for any change in playback quality is playback quality. There's no need for the people selling the goods to test it because there are plenty of people that don't have any understanding of what they claim to be selling and in many cases it would debunk them all together.

Ironically, when stress is reduced in metals the material actually becomes more ductile can deform more and still return to it's original shape. Do you really believe that this has anything to do with the stylus to LP relationship?

It's quite obvious, having done it, that cryoing a steel rod makes it vibrate less, so it's not too much of a stretch that the same is true for vinyl. So I disagree with your premise that a more homogeneous material doesn't vibrate less (for its modes of vibration). If the vinyl, in fact, vibrates less due to extrernal forces, then the stylus will be extracting information from the grooves more accurately. Make sense?