How I tamed digital glare.


For months I have been trying to eliminate digital glare in the my system, which showed up most noticably in the upper middle frequency vocal range, especially female vocals. I tamed some by replacing the stock fuse in my dac with HifiTuning Supreme Cu on the sage advice of Chris Van Haus of VH Audio, resulting in a significant improvement in tonal density, detail and clarity. So far, so good. Today I lightly dusted the laser lens in my CEC transport with a microfiber cloth and was astonished to discover a substantial improvement! And the laser lens and drive compartment appeared clean to begin with (in a smoke free environment). I tried cleaning contacts, swapping power cords and interconnects, rolling the tube in my MHDT dac, and so forth, but this simple protocol was more effective than any of those experiments. I suppose results may vary as every system is unique, but for me this simple tweak was revelatory: greater clarity and a signifcant reducton of hash. Wish I had thought of tt in the beginning; it would have saved me considerable time and frustration.
pmboyd
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We know that glare and other types of noise and distortion in CD playback are produced by a number of problems inherent in CD players generally - you know, susceptibility to vibration, the vibration of the CD itself even when the player is isolated, and distortion produced by background scattered laser light getting into the photodetector. I use the word we editorially.
geoffkait thanks, you hit the nail on the head.....Also to clarify, if a recording is bad, a music server won't help.
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Buffering doesn’t help with the issues I referred to because the buffered data contains the distorted data. Buffering does help with shock, to prevent gross errors (skipping) but doesn’t stop more subtle degradation of the sound. Playing a CD without a cover on the CD may or may not help or exacerbate the scattered light problem. The photodetector bandwidth is rather narrow, but not monochromatic. All CD players are improved by isolating them, I don’t think that’s a big secret.