Shventus,
I have a friend who works for a major software firm that is in charge of transporting sensitive and trademark data to other divisions throughout the World. Some of the data is BLER sensitive, in other words, he must supply them the data with extremely low BLER.
Thankfully, he is an audiophile of sorts, and agreed to test the various CD treatments that I had around, along with those that a few of our friends had also. In all the products tested, those that did not contain oil and wax and did not leave a film, lowered the BLER "significantly".
He went on to explain that to obtain optimal disc readability, you want the disc as clean as possible, without any film what so ever. That "filling in the pits" with wax and/or oil would lower the readability of the disc and would make the Error Correction Circuit (ECC) work harder in attempt to properly read the data.
We've all heard discs that are scratched, that sound horrible when the player is trying to play the song. The sound is squashed, distorted and not what you'd call high resolution. Some disc damage goes beyond the ability of the ECC and are unreadable, (As were my Armor All treated CD's after a number of years). In cases like this, the BLER is sky high. This said, it makes sense that you'd wouldn't want to use anything that would increase the BLER and make the ECC work harder. As said before, he told me to think of ECC as a variable negative feedback system, which increased with an increased BLER. Films and waxes that cause light scatter will raise the BLER. (Not good)
To answer your question, Shventus, my friend sent back all of the cleaners and treatments to us but one. He kept the Shine Ola.
