TAS Recommended CD Tweak….

I've tried 3 different CD cleaners. The first was called Q-151, of which I have not heard in a while. The bottle says "CD Coating Oil." I did some A-B testing, and concluded that it did have a modest effect of seeming to make the sound somewhat more detailed and clearer. I did not notice a timbre change.

The same would be true for Mo-Fi Shine Ola. Modest, but the difference seemed to be real. I guess, however, that it wasn't quite real enough, because I haven't been using it lately.

I also tried something called Optrix. There is some information posted elsewhere on the 'gon about Optrix. I tried it on one CD and thought the sound was a bit brighter (which is something I really can't stand), so I didn't mess with it anymore. One could say that I didn't give it a fair chance, I guess. But, you know, first impressions...

Thanks Eldartford, Looks like I have some studying to do!

Extreme A/V Liquid Resolution and Jena Labs 3D-X are among the very best of today's CD treatments.

Anyone try purple pen on the CD edge?

Racamuti...Error correcting codes are really interesting, and much more widespread than you might think. IMHO the most dramatic example is in the transmission of data from distant space probes using tiny transmitter power. For example, transmissions from a probe in orbit around Saturn can "drop out" for about a minute, and still all the data can be recovered intact. Of course, to do this a great deal of bandwidth is devoted to the redundancy needed for error recovery.

As I have said before, error correction is not a band aid for transmission errors. It is an integral part of the Hardware/Software data transmission system. Error correction makes it possible to operate the hardware much faster than if it had to be error free, and even though some bandwidth is used up for the error correction capability, the overall result is higher bandwidth.

I suggest you read up on error correcting encoding.

Yes it is based on Reed-Solomon Interleave.

However, contrary to what Eldartford mentions, if the error correction fails (a really badly damaged CD) then most players will "interpolate" between data points. On a bad CD with "CD Rot" it can actually sound exactly like Vinyl surface noise (pops and clicks).

If error correction did not work to way more than 99.9999% accuracy then your PC that you are using to view this thread would crash constantly (perhaps it does and you need a new hard drive...).

Despite the fears propagated by analog users about CD accuracy, all the science suggests that CD discs and readers are generally orders of magnitude (10's and 100's of times) more accurate than any analog reproduction. Digital is the only way to preserve data such that it can be copied thousands and thousands of times without error - this is because errors do not accumulate as they do in any analog chain.

All this makes computing, satellites and other amazing things possible, stuff that purely Analog systems are incapable of.

Of course A to D and D to A conversion is a crucial step and it is fair for analog users to criticise the quality of this process, however, this step occurs after the data has been read, decoded and error corrected from the disc.