This week I’ve been shaving CDs.
You’ll have noticed that I never get hung up on the Hi in Hi-Fi. I can get enjoyment out of pretty much any kind of Fi - it doesn’t need to be the highest of Hi.
However today I’m briefly visiting the other side of Hi-Fi - a place where the oxygen content of a cable might make or break your enjoyment of a piece of music.
I’ll be carving into my CDs with a £350 lathe because apparently this will make them sound better. We'll see.
Take care and I aim to get a Patreon update video shot in the next few days…so I’ll get to chat more about anything and nothing then.
Comments (168)
Matt, that was hilarious, I'll consume my magic beans while listening to shaved CDs on my reference deck hooked up to a sound-bar via oxygen-free cables that cost $250 a metre and have all the crystalline domains longitudinally aligned... hmmm.. well..
Ha ha.. I don't think I've uttered the word 'b*ll*cks' as often while watching a YT video.. It reminds me of the old adage that "spending $500 improves your hearing and helps you really appreciate the improvements you just invested in"
This video is doing wonderfully - congrats on its performance!
It’s a bit of an anomaly…but I’m not complaining.
Great video, Matt. It prompted me to realise I knew very little about how CDs work (beyond the obvious!). These clips get to the nub of the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHRR-8Q2DHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYO6vm9PTsI Makes me wonder what other nonsense is accepted as truth in the audiophile world!
Man, being a youtuber must be so frustrating. Like all of Matt's videos I liked this, but I'll be dammed if I can figure out why it's so much more popular than his average videos
It’s really not a great video - if I had to score it, it’d be a 4/10.
So close to 1 million views 🥹
I was reminded of the user comments here - great fun. https://web.archive.org/web/20071024000602/http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina60.htm Wonder how much he took them for in total?
When I first bought a CD player in 1984 the hot quackery was a cardboard ring you glued to the disc to "balance it". Of course expecting a person to balance a CD more accurately by hand using a cardboard punchout than the precision machinery that made the disc in the first place is the sort of common sense thought that is anathema to quacks. To prove the "balance" concept was bunk, I taped a penny to one side of a CD and it played perfectly. Plus error-corrected digital is either going to sound good or not play, not be "improved" by any analog nonsense.
Back in the day when CD/DVD writers were still a thing, some premium Plextor drives (and BenQ, probably others) allowed measuring the block error rate or "BLER" of a disc, which refers to the first error correction stage (C1). Every CD has C1 errors, which are introduced during manufactoring or writing (e.g. signal noise at the optical unit introducing bit errors). Roughly 220 C1 errors per second (on average) can be fully recovered. After that, the C2 stage kicks in, which means interpolation on an audio CD. Zero C2 errors are desirable and achievable.Being able to measure the C1 error rate was a quite useful feature to find those CD-R brands that worked best with your drive. Or to identify problematic brands, where the error rate increased toward the edge of the disc, which indicated a insufficient sealing to keep the oxygen out (which ruins the dye over time). If this voodoo CD tuning gear had any effect, it would be noticable on a C1 scan. I think most if not all contemporary drives can do at least C2 scans, but since Mat's two audio files are identical, there was no interpolation going on anyway.
We don't have to guess about this stuff. We can read about how the error correction works. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-interleaved_Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_coding A 2.4mm scratch can be corrected. That's bit perfect correction. Scratches between 2.4 and 8.5mm can be compensated - that is interpolation is done. Maybe you can hear it, maybe you can't. If that fails you get clicks and skips and jumps.
Folks, it’s digital. It works or it doesn’t. It doesn’t variate. What’s with the people defending this crap?
#26 on trending 👍🏻
I’ll never figure YouTube out. It’s nice to get a bit of a hit though.
The one kind of optical disc that this could make a difference with would actually be a Laserdisc since those store analog video. As for comparing the audio waveforms, a more illustrative example would probably be comparing a lossless rip with something like an MP3 or AAC file.
That was brilliant. I was like you. How on earth could such a superficial change have a detectable effect on stereo separation or "transparency" in a digital signal and you have rightly proved that it's complete BS. Says a lot about those 100s of people that could swear that there was an audible difference, if even that wasn't a complete lie. :D
As I was using a basic CD player (a necessity as it’s the only one I have with an optical out) - I didn’t want anyone to be able to employ the excuse that the results were down to my CD player. By doing it this way I’m just using the player to spin the disc and get the data off it - after that you could route the output via a very expensive DAC - and you’d get exactly the same result. Funnily enough this approach shows that if the results were identical with a basic CD player - they’d be unchanged whatever you spent on a CD player. If anything, for me, this shows that expensive CD players are a total waste of money too.
Enjoyed the Video Mat, your visual experiment was the way I was thinking you could do it while you were winding up to it. Enjoyed the humour and the knowing smiles behind the published accolades of the shaver. Philips did invent the compact disc and you'd think their shavers division would have got in of this 😉
Well, For the Balance and Stabilisation it could make a difference with poor or cheap discs that have plastic slag or rim around the edges, but the Light scatter... Possibly with a disc that was scratched then scatter could be an issue, but aside from that its just QUACKERY for Gullible Audiophiles. The only thing that any imperfection's are going to caused is more Data held in the Buffer Memory possibly adding a slight (millisecond or less) overall delay but that would only be the case with a crappy player with a very small amount of Memory for buffering audio before offloading it to the DAC. I'm just going to stick with QUACKERY!
Thanks for the video Mat. I agree with your comments.
The comments section on videos like this never disappoints. BTW I'm not sure if anyone knows this... but apparently the inventor's name is Dr Schrott, and "Schrott" is German for "junk".
Mostly seems to be people telling me what I ‘should have’ done - in order to get identical results. The rest are people telling others the meaning of one of the inventors’ German surname - often right under three people who posted the exact same thing. That’s all I really need to see - I’m out of there, nothing of any value to be gained.
darn i always miss the prerelease. this would have been great to do with other youtubers like Matt Parker, Tom Scott, Steve Mould and others. lots of math, physics & tech involved in the reason why it is identical. ps i guess i have to quit Patreon because bad ux and bad behavior of Patreon. wonder if you have another way of supporting because I like your content very much.
I prefer working alone - it’s just my thing. As for Patreon - you should be getting an email each time there’s a new post and I put the video link in the text, so as long as your email client is working then you can pretty much avoid having to sign in to patreon and yet still see things before YouTube.
This was fascinating. My immediate reaction was that this wasn't even worth an investigation because it is snake oil but the testing you did proved it wasn't even snake oil, it was a bag of air. Fascinating. I really enjoy how the marketers used just a sliver of truth to create a whole product around a lie. Craptastic! Thanks for the video!
Great video and excellent title / thumbnail, hope it does well for you. Separately, I know you're the one who gets the hate but I really wanted you to call this the load of crap that it was at end haha - especially those reviewers, what were they on or were they just copying the manufactures notes? But again, you're the one who has to deal with the hate mail!
perfect timing Matt. I look forward to listening to the new Elvis CD. I believe hes due to release it next year!!! Unfotunately i dont have a disc shaver, i guess i will have to use sandpaper!! :)
There’s a lot more to digital music playback than just the file being played. As I understand it when you start going higher end the speed at which the file is fed to and from the dac becomes more of a factor and does influence what the end user hears. Just because I’ve never heard a difference in cables doesn’t mean I don’t believe other people have so I’m not going to rule out this making a difference to the people who have the equipment to show it. This may very well be an item that falls into the snake oil category but if someone has hundreds of thousands to spend on a hobby then what’s wrong spending a few hundred quid on an experiment like this. It’s not hurting anyone and it might be a bit of fun. We’ve done similar things just maybe slightly different price brackets. A lot of it might genuinely come down to how good someone’s ears are. If they’ve spent years listening and changing setup and tweaking then chances are they can hear differences we can’t.
Wow. There’s a lot of hate in these comments!
That was absolutely brilliant, Mat. What a detective job! Those were very well thought out tests, well done. I suspect the investigations took days longer than making the video. You incurred no anger from me. I'll be interested to hear any interesting comments that come in when you make the next update video.
You’re right about that - I spent most of the week thinking about this one…it sounds odd but I wanted to get some thoughts clear in my head first about how to frame the whole thing and whether I would even be able to demonstrate an audio improvement in a visual way. It was a weird week.
i can remember something about a Green Marker pen making CD's sound better in the early 90's i tried it and could not hear any difference, the trouble with all theis myths is that you start listening to the HI-FI equipment and not the music now i just listen to the music - great topic Mat
Ah I just came here to make the same comment after getting just 1 minute into he video - I remember a pen to stop light scatter! Didn't do anything :D
Off-topic Mat, but as time goes on I think you have the right idea when it comes to working for yourself and with nobody else. Corporate life is the pits.
Sorry to hear that but yes, I can only work on my own now. You won’t believe how much a company offered me to review something recently. I deleted the email…I have to put sanity above everything else. I just can’t work for anyone any more.
Brings to mind an old magazine, Digital Audio & Compact Disc Review from the late 80s/early 90s, and several articles (and back-of-magazine ads) talking about similar fixes. I distinctly remember a "green marker" trick that would provide a similar fix. I also remember some kind of rubber-band like offering that you would attach to your CDs that would allow for the same "pronounced improvement in focus of the laser and playback quality". I always chalked it up as snake oil; people having what they wanted but wanting to spend more to get something that brings them a level beyond. (That said, I also remember a New Yorker style cartoon from one of the audio magazines where an executive in a board meeting says, "it's a miracle, gentlemen; the 50,000 gallons of LP cleaner fluid we had stored has somehow changed into CD cleaner fluid")
Reading through the comments, I see you noted the Snopes article about green markers, which also mentions damping rings: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewaring-of-the-green/
I feel like somewhere there must be a person who’s job is just to come up with ridiculous ideas to fleece audiophiles of their money. Fun video.
I think a lot of what motivates this kind of equipment is the striving for the next level. If you got a really good HiFi, let's say for $20.000, there will not be much difference to one that costs $1.000.000, so you reach the end of the rope quite early if this is your hobby and you want to continuously upgrade your gear. Back in the analog days a good cable might have improved the sound by a certain amount, but digital audio really threw a spanner wrench into the whole thing because the cheapest telephone wire can probably transfer the low bitrate of a CD over a meter or two and it makes absolutely no difference compared to a $1000 cable. If you are into cars you can always put more money into your car to make it faster or more personal or improve it in whatever way you want and you can end up with a $10.000.000 supercar or a whole collection of them, but for a HiFi there is not much to gain. What you do buy for those expensive devices is the enjoyment of having a really cool piece of equipment, a CD player that looks really luxuriously and that is quiet and of high build quality, but it just won't improve the sound quality!
Watching this i checked the date no not april. Its the emperors new clothes again.
I remember buying a used CD and being confused by the green magic marker someone had defaced it with around the edge... until I looked it up, and that's another audiophile myth about it supposedly improving the sound of CDs.
The way these totally made-up myths managed to spread always used to confuse and surprise me - but then more recently we’ve seen a lot of very illogical thoughts and nonsense theories turned into real beliefs for millions of people - so now nothing is a surprise. It seems people like to believe in things - any things.
I think this was fantastic. Good story telling, good science, explanation without patronising and... Debunking You got to say though, that for a device aimed for audiophiles, it makes an awful sound... Speed control seems sketchy. Part of my work is on acoustics and I'm afraid audiophiles would have a stroke seeing what we do. It also shows, as you pointed out, that anyone wanting to use this does not understand how a cd works. Which BTW I understood better with your videos and those from technology connections, so thank you for that too. Anyway, I believe the title needs more oomph Man with a beard gets an edge over man with 500 quid on fancy apple peeler Also I have to admit being surprised that two CDs would generate the exact same wave form. Because exactly is hard to come by. This was for me interesting over using one CD before and after
It does tell us something about the consistency of how our modern CDs are being produced, wouldn't you agree? If two random sets of 2 CD's are exactly the same, pretty rare...
This was great. The funny thing to me is that any arguments involving error correction make most sense for people with abused/scratched CDs… which is usually the exact opposite of audiophiles!
To be honest, I might be an audiophile, but I was young too. So not all my CD's survived those days without some battle scars... And while I do believe that error correction might be happening more than we expect (even with minor scratches), for pristine ones, it obviously won't. And I agree, I would assume most audiophiles have as new CD's, even if they are 100 years old already and were dug up in a site at the Great Pyramid..
There is a lot of magical belief in the audiophile world. Of course, there are differences in many components such as headphones, etc. But from the digital sources it's not the digital part that can fail you but the DAC and all of the analog bits afterwards. There was a time that it was believed that you should color the edge of CD's (without shaving) a green color and that would have the same effect. It does. None.
It was fortunate that 36° was the same angle as generic low cost scalpel blades, imagine if it'd been 40° and they'd have to make special one-off blades!!! Phew, dodged a bullet there!
I also wondered. Does a DVD use the same colour laser that the CD player uses? It's supposed to work on that too right? Surely, that angle must change for different lasers..
Very nice. Still, I kind of missed something: it is supposed to also improve DVD and Blu-Ray (was it that?) in the same way? The image quality? It would have surprised me (as an audiophile) if it would have made a difference. To me, if the CD player can't play back an immaculate CD without error-correction, the CD player would be faulty, not the CD itself! Oh, I also wondered if you also tried the SACD side, as I think you also have a SACD player? Nonetheless, I really wonder if, for some reason I can't imagine, it DOES work on a high-end CD player. I bought a beautiful Marantz CD11LE (4000 euros when it was new in 1992) which I can push through a nice DAC as well. So I'm going to look for one anyway. Too curious NOT to try it! So cool you found that thing Mat!
If a high end CD player experiences these many issues - surely it’s not very high end and second it’s a good demonstration of why everyone should use a £40 Denon CD player found on ebay instead.
Is there such a player that will log error encountered? or a computer cd-player that would be able to indicate any errors in the audio stream? I'm curious if a data cd would do the same. Compare the file size and hash before and after "tuning". either way I think your test is pretty conclusive as is. Just not sure how else to satisfy those who are sure to complain.
Sure. I rip CD's with XLD on my Mac (which it says rips bit perfect as long as it can read the CD properly). It tells you all that. Pre-gaps, hashes, errors, etc. I rarely encounter an irrecoverable error when ripping. But... It might have read several sectors multiple times before it was able to read it properly. Something the CD player would not be able to do. Whatever it is, brand new CD's like the ones Mat used should always play without issue if the CD player workes as it should... (as he also proved they did :)
I wonder if it's worth considering the time and context where this device was released. By 2003, downloading music was really kicking off, and plain old CDs felt 'old' and expensive! A device like this offered to improve your existing collection, and improve them to a level that downloaded music couldn't match. Making CDs better than CD. And the hifi magazines were in just as much of a panic. They'd back any device that proved that a massive stack of separates and physical discs was the only way to get perfect reproduction..... at exactly the same time as consumers seemed to be perfectly happy with MP3s / Lossy downloads.
Apparently needlessly marking the edge of CDs had been around since 1989 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewaring-of-the-green/
Absolutely brilliant! I was thinking to myself "record both and phase one and they will cancel out" and that's exactly what you did. Nothing like using math to irritate "audiophiles". :)
Pesky irrefutable maths ruining all the fun.
And chappesses ..sorry
Audiophiles ..come on chaps…fight your corner.
This show had *everything*! You will *definitely* be harangued by the more rabid audiophiles. It was perfect in that, for a while, it wasn't clear if you were drinking the Kool-Aid or not. Given that I've been a Patreon for several years and have seen a lot of your back-catalog, that's saying something.
The best test would be to rip the same track from the disc as a wav file using a computer, then hashing the resulting files to see if they are identical or not. However the audacity test and merge was pretty conclusive. There are people on YouTube that are taking Blu-ray players and changing the mains cable for some expensive silver cable and swearing blind they have more detail in the images and better sound, all of which is impossible given the digital domain nature. I think you have two sorts of things going on here where people swear these things work, 1) They are marketing it, so know it makes no difference but of course aren't going to say that, 2) The power of the placebo effect for those shelling out lots of money on snake oil.
FAQ… Q) Why didn’t you just rip the CDs? A) Because I wanted to use a regular Audio CD player. Since the improvements mentioned all related to the quality of audio produced during CD *playback* (at 1x), this is what I chose to concentrate on.
Any video featuring Monkey Jesus has got to be a winner! Surely Audiophile stuff is the biggest 'Emperor's new clothes' hobby ever?
Everyone loves to hate audiophile stuff, don't they? Nice and easy..
When I first saw the description I thought oooh maybe it shaves off the bottom layer of the disc to remove scratching not oooh it takes off the sides…. Does kind of remind me of a comment from about 14 years ago when I was working as a network engineer and I was told we had to “flush” coiled fibre optic cables as there could be “stray photons” stuck inside the coils which could be a security risk 🤦🏼♂️. The manager who said the immortal words “speaking as a physicist” made us attempt to shine torch beams down the cables and stood over us to make sure we did it properly …. Never forgotten that afternoon … I bet he bought one of these for his home use
Stray photons? Oh boy...
Great video by the way and good on you for calling out this nonsense :D
It makes me mad the the magazines shown here printed such positive reviews ... SURELY they must have had the level of knowledge to know it was complete BS, or else what were they doing working on the magazine? They should hang their heads. Actually I guess the fact the product was produced in the first place was also equally frustrating. I hope nobody wasted a lot of money on it they couldn't afford, anyway :(
Well, we all know magazines tended to give positive reviews to suppliers that paid for their reviews. So it doesn't really surprise me that much. What DOES surprise me is the colouring of the edge of the CD is something I read as a way to tune your CD's in lots of places.......
Great video and a really straightforward and practical test.
Great video and review as always , Mat. I am an arch sceptic of audiophile claims, but over the last few years, I have invested in some 'better' hi-fi equipment as those who claim benefit are SO vehement, I did wonder if there was something, however small, to be gained. I even bought some relatively pricey interconnect and speaker cables. As you can already guess, no individual item made a difference that I could, hand on heart, detect, but I have to say that overall, my vinyl-only playing hi-fi really does sound great - really good, certainly better than it did before. I don't think there's any one thing you can do to make your hi-fi sound better, but there does seem to be some cumulative benefit from higher end equipment, which isn't all that surprising. Whether that expenditure represents good value is between you and your bank balance and hoping your wife doesn't find out. I don't know if you followed the recent 'MoFi scandal'? A high-end vinyl record producing company that allowed customers to think that their very expensive products were analogue only was revealed to use a digital step in the production process. Much outrage and even a court case has ensued. The funny part, from my PoV, is that not one of those audiophiles who claim to be able to hear the difference between analogue and digital sources ever called them out on it - it was 'discovered' by people wondering how the original master tapes could be played often enough without degrading to generate the needed metalwork for the large number of records they were producing. (that is a very condensed summary that misses out much important detail - obviously!) Have a good week!
I’m only vaguely aware of this recent ‘scandal’ because some people mentioned that I’d covered this issue a number of years ago here https://youtu.be/5KHSz9Gi-II?t=1021 - At the time I thought the idea of using actual master tapes was impractical - but I chose my words very carefully as that’s what a lot of places were implying they were doing and I didn’t want to get into a legal situation.
Also, error correction is error correction, not "oh something is wrong here, let's just guess what it could be and stuff that in instead", which is what those reviews are implying happens.
100%. CDs have error correction, not error mitigation.
If you know anything about the CD digital stream format, it should be obvious that all the interleaving and error correction that goes on makes the idea behind this device completely ludicrous.
Of course, Mat, you do realise you've got to do it all again to see what effect shaving has on DVD's? And then Blu-rays, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R, CD-RW...
The video title is almost a "Fast Show" sketch catchphrase - "This week I have been mostly shaving CDs".
That really is how it started off - but I shortened it to avoid the word wrap.
And if this method were any good, wouldn't all CDs be made like this? Certainly SACDs would?
I think you should have saved this one for April 1. This is pure audio snake oil. CDs are digital. You are either getting the bits or you aren’t.
My understanding, too. Further, the error-correction bits are not optional - they are part of the stream - the decoder looks at those *always* to make certain that the data passed on to the next block on the diagram is correct. "Correct" in this context being "exactly as it was when pressed to the disc".
How do digital files… DIGITAL FILES… change their sound reproduction because you physically alter their medium?! This is like selling people $500 pet rocks lol
Except everyone knew they were rocks when they bought them (remember to let your pet rock out of its carrier to play periodically). With this, the vendor is pretending it is real. And charging a LOT more.
This is the biggest pile of smoke and mirrors for rich idiots that I've seen since the $5000 HDMI cable infused with Pure Oxygen.
As a software developer with a basic understanding of how digital audio works, I thought your method of demonstrating that the audio from the two CDs was identical was a good one. That said, I doubt the True Audiophiles will be convinced.
My dad taught me to shave up, not down. Maybe that was the problem.
If this angle and a black edge were really so important, they would have been part of the red book standard, surely. It seems like those 5-star reviews were either deliberately exaggerated or wishful thinking.
Audiophiles listen to music. Stereophiles listen to stereos. Always been a ridiculous amount of bunk in audio market.
Yeah.. I always knew this was bunk. I used to see people claim that using the sharpie around the edge was supposed to make it better. I always argued against that. I said it's a digital file. The computer can either read it, or not read it. There is no in-between. About the only possible use for this would have been back in the day of 100x CDROMs where they went out of balance a lot. This might have been useful to correct that for higher-speed reading.
Small correction: There is an in between for music CDs. The standard allows players some interpolation of data that is not readable, before giving up. (But of course that wouldn’t make sense for DVDs or data CDs.)
Quack!
That Dave Brubeck CD looks to me like it comes from the same Colombia range a Miles Davis one I have comes from. The blurb on the sleeve already boasts at how much better quality sound it has than previous editions. I've got some discs that seem to have a more rounded edge than others. They seem to be early ones, perhaps when more care went into the manufacturing process. Hilarious anecdote... one of the first CDs my dad bought when he got a player in 1988, was Hello Children Everywhere. £500 of digital equipment, and he goes and buys a scratchy 1940s recording of When Father Papered The Parlour. I've some BBC CDs from around that same time that also feature scratchy 78s of jazz recordings. Odd decision. Also, Wolfgang Schneider sounds like he should have been in Kraftwerk...
Yes, but thanks to error-correction, they are perfect reproductions of scratchy 78s.
The "audiophile community" has almost as many opinions than there are people in it. Most of them don't believe in garbage devices like this one. But audiophiles are always a welcome group to make fun of. Not as much in the video but already in the comments here.
Great video , looking forward to comments. Nice one Sir Moan of Techshire
Oops. As I was saying.. is it the amount of money you spend, the groups you join, the way you talk about sound. There is a clear difference between bad sounding kit and good . It’s the minute differences I read about that baffle me . I joined an audiophile forum once to ask about the NAD amp id just bought. Is it any good. The snobbery was hilarious. “ it’s ok I suppose but it’s not a 2020, you could add mono blocks I suppose and separate the blah blah ,fiddle with your bi wires etc.. Well maybe I just miss the finer points as per usual but you can keep all that shite.
The best part is that those who can afford all this audiophile-level gear are older people, who won't be able to get the best out of it anyway because their hearing has started to degrade.
Fascinates me this audiophile business. What constitutes an audiophile. How do you become one. Do you label yourself. I do ,
I'm going to predict five responses from audiophiles in the YouTube comments, explaining how you screwed up the test: 1) You thought you could use a (god-damn) _Sharpie_ to apply the black stripe, and not the acoustically-calibrated black paint that was supplied with this instrument? Clearly you spend all of your time with consumer gear (****ing _Kenwood?_ Seriously? 😂😂😂😂) and don't understand that every element of an audiophile path is engineered to function as a single system 2) If you replaced the belts and the caps before performing your "tests," you didn't include it in the video. The fact that you didn't is totally sus 3) I can tell by sight that the TOS cable you used is a TPOS. The noise floor of that total piece of s*** is so high that both discs were equally garbage by the time they reached your recorder 4) What version firmware is your DENON transport running? At barest-minimum you should have flashed it to the most current one (on camera). And if you _really_ cared about credibility, you'd be using a transport that operates through open-source firmware, so the community can download the source from Github and validate it 5) Hate to burst your hero-worship, Techmoan "fans," but as part of my due diligence I watched all of his previous videos. It looks like he forgot to delete the one where he admitted point-blank that the LED lights in his studio generate so much radio interference that the site was unsuitable for tests of audio gear CONGRATULATIONS YOU JUST PLAYED YOURSELF
It sounds like this might be the week for me to take a complete break from looking at the YouTube comments. That will mean that I won't be around to delete the posts from bots regarding 'Uve won a Pri2e - Klick my UZER NaMe to Collekt it' - however I feel that these bots might get on well with a gullible Audiophile sucker. It's a match made in heaven.
Good lord that is OCD on 11. I want one. :)
It's always the best way to scam people... make it SOUND scientifically plausible, banking on the fact that most of us aren't experts in the field. And even though audiophiles like to THINK they are experts in audio science, the fact is, they aint. I mean, you pretty much proved that by actually making a scientific test of the device.
I found that if you tape a penny to the tone arm of a briefcase record player, the needle picks up the grooves of the vinyl 45 better. That solution has the advantage of being cheaper and of being of genuine utility. But I don't see a Technomoan video for THAT!
Now I'm picturing the puppets wearing flashy sunglasses and dressed like Mike Myers in SPROCKETS listening to Kraftwerk .. Technomoan!
This is the best non-solution to a non-problem I have ever seen in my life. How long have commercial CDs been around? That's how many uninterrupted years of clear digital sound I have experienced. I long ago accepted the "loss" of harmonic fidelity between vinyl and digital recordings when I realized that unless I had a top-of the line sound system in a perfected tuned listening environment I would miss approximately 0% of analog experience. It's like chasing the tail of an invisible dragon. But then again, my neighbor enjoys spending hours in his garage on the weekend fiddling with a vintage car that otherwise runs perfectly well. Some people even go to church on the weekend! Your use of Audacity was a wonderful lecture on acoustic wave dynamics that I would be proud to show any first year physics class!
Are there any claims as to this device's effectiveness in turning CDs into throwing weapons? That seems to be all this thing may be remotely good at. Could be a good way to reuse the thousands of Susan Boyle CDs clogging up op shops and thrift stores.
This video has proven that the audiophile community are the gift that keeps on giving since forever. As usual the more pronounced the difference an audiophile claims to hear has always been proportional to how much they've been ripped off.
I just took to colouring my speaker grill cloths with green marker years ago. Now, even AM radio sounds like it was mastered by Bill Inglot!
Everybody knows digital music sounds better when the zeros are rounder, it's so simple
thicc zeros
You mentioned that the inventor's name is Schrott... well, in German "schrott" means "tat". Fitting, isn't it?
Looks like an "improvement" on the green marker from the 90s. I never bought one of those either.
Anyone get the feeling that the reviewers just copied and pasted their review from the manufacturer's literature. You see more paid reviews than genuine ones these days so not a stretch to think these guys were doing it back then too .
The audiophile community are the gift that keeps giving.
There's one thing that comes in mind and wasn't mentioned that PERHAPS could make some difference. There are many IFs in that. The error correction produces perfect data up to a point. If the CD is damaged beyond that point, CD players recreate the missing data by interpolation and that does indeed create something that is not on the CD. So, IF your CD is damaged just SLIGHTLY beyond what can be fixed by error correction, and IF it is not well readable by the optical pickup JUST to the point interpolation produces stable audio without skipping in your SPECIFIC player because of light scattering and/or because the pickup can't track vibrating CD well, this "treatment" could in theory, get you a TINY BIT of that stability to read the CD a better and get you to the area, where the error correction creates perfect data. It has to be said, computer CD/DVD/BD drives are damn amazing marvels that can read damaged CDs well beyond what causes issues with normal* CD players and there's software that will read damaged parts of the CD more than once (with different speeds and god knows what) to read as much as possible and to recreate perfect data even if it is damaged somewhat beyond what would be unrecoverable by normal single-pass playback. If you make copy of the damaged CD this way, it will be certainly better (and more stable for the future) that this weird trick to enhance CDs. (* maybe drives in audiophile-grade hi-hi-fi CD players are as good as ones in computers and it makes no difference, I don't know.) Still, I believe this is bullshit in the same category as cheap bit-flipping toslink cables and whatnot. Also, that's almost certainly the reason, your recording was flawed. Unless you use hi-hi-fi optical cable that costs 5000€/m, you recording is all wrong and that's no hi-fi. /s
Never heard of this device before very interesting and very enjoyable video. I like the way you did your testing and a lot of this is above my head also.
Nonsense Nonsense Nonsense. Just a complete and utter misunderstanding of how CD technology works. Data is numbers. Either it reads the numbers or it doesn't. It's not an analog signal. This would be like saying "Dude! I can make your playstation games look better! You just have to shave the disc!" Imagine being one of the people who worked on the CD; seeing this thing being sold. They either laughed or lost all faith in humanity.
This is not entirely correct. As far as I understand, CD error correction allows the drive to interpolate numbers under some circumstances, before giving up and skipping.
Nice to see this kind of stuff, audiofools are all too gullible
Well, I'm looking forward to the comments to come, there's nothing more belligerent than a wounded audiophile who's been shown to have cloth ears. This could be a companion piece to the 'Mobile Fidelity' saga*, which is dying down a bit now. * Mobile Fidelity audiophile LP's famed for AAA conversion exposed as having used a digital stage. Many, many Youtube videos.
It's like that guy who is selling "Hot Stampers" LP's that are from the best cutting matrices, so a "White Hot Stamper" of Steely Dan's Aja sells for 699 US dollars.
🤣🤣🤣 Great video! It proves that you can really sell anything, just if you give some story behind it. Unfortunately also true in other areas in life...
I remember showing an audio engineer audiophile NVME, another snakeoil bullcrap like the CD shaver you showed. Can't wait for the video to release to public, so I can show it to him and hear him squeam :D
For the people who are inevitably angry that Mat's debunked your favorite device: I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. Great video as always!
However on a different note...back in the late 80s I bought the New Order "Substance" compilation CD set. Both disks had visible pitting in the optical layer...I was bummed, because I couldn't take it back (lost the receipt...only copy they had) so since I had nothing to lose, I used a black marker and painted the label side where I saw pitting with it...worked great...still works great decades later.
I once bought the latest Ice T album on CD and it has a click all the way through it on all the tracks. I took it back, but the replacement did exactly the same. In the end I swapped it for the cassette version and that became the most recent release on tape I bought for perhaps twenty years.
You didn't notice a difference because you didn't have gold plated low oxygen optical digital cables.
If you ever need to compare CDs again, you could rip them to your Mac instead of having to record them. That'd eliminate any ADC/DACs since it reads the CD as data and spits out an audio file.
I wanted to run the test with a normal run of the mill audio CD player. If I'd used a computer drive then *this* would become the reason why I didn't notice any difference.
Btw, you couldn't tell a difference because you're using a single blade shaver. You need to use a 5-blade shaver with built-in lubricant and an exfoliating strip.
And cucumber juice.
I could really nerd-out about the scientific testing methods used to see if there is any real difference, but the fundamental point is this: this device is designed to make CDs sound better, but you can't tell by listening to them! The placebo effect is real, tests have shown that a (medical) placebo makes a difference, even if the test subject is later told that it's a placebo. What matters is whether the person believes there is a difference in sound. If they believe there is a difference in sound, then they enjoy the music more, even if they are fools. That's pretty much what the advertising industry is based on.
I am still jealous that I did not think to start the company that "breaks in audio cables", so they are already at their peak performance when you fit them. Receive customers cable, put sticker on cable stating it has been "broken in", wait a few days, send cable back to customer with large bill. I wish I was joking, but this is something people spend money on.
The 1991 film by Lars von Trier Europa covers the trials and tribulations of a sleeping car attendant. In one scene a haughty German gentleman berates said sleeping car attendant for not cleaning his shoes overnight. The sleeping car attendant insists he had, "No, you haven't" states the sleeping car attendant, "as you have not marked the soles with chalk. So, how can I tell you have cleaned them?" aside from a socio-political statement about the mindset of the German class structures and bureaucracy. I'd imagine the haughty German would be a worthy audiophile and would relish the confirmatory stickers as a mark of a job performed according to protocol.
This is a Transient Attack against a Time Out CD. 😥 That's an expensive bottle of 21st (or 20th?) Century snake oil. No wonder it's now discontinued. I enjoyed this debunking video. Human fa(i)libility - people are told something by 'experts' and they begin to believe it themselves. We'd best leave the lathe cutting to the woodworking channels. Maybe this item could be repurposed for something else - sharp-edged drink coasters?
Yes I didn't understand many of these audio descriptions. Transient Attack sounds like an assault on a homeless person. I'd really rather my CD didn't do this.
I think you did it right. Playing the CD at audio speed and recording the bitstream is a valid test. Had you ripped the CD using something like Exact Audio Copy then that would have been unfair as any misreads would have been corrected by software. The only plausible use for a device like this would be to correct a wobbly CD and even then I would expect that it would be the hole off centre so even shaving the edge would leave a wobbly track. Good video - thanks.
Audiophiles blow my mind. As well as all of their money. It's almost amusing.
Always nice when a test confirms your expectations. I'm sure someone will be along to insist that a human would be able to detect a difference. I wonder if there's a similar way of testing the difference between basic and fancy audio cables. Maybe it's been done.
"You did it wrong!!11!!" Everybody knows that you shouldn't use a blade to shave off the edge of the CD, you're supposed to file the edge down with a file! Why do you think they call them "Audiofiles?!"😁
Plus, obviously you LEFT THE LID OPEN when you shaved the disc. Running the device with the lid open lets all its bullshittery escape, so it will have no effect on any further discs altered. :)
Why would anyone think that physically altering a cd disc would possibly change the audio? It's impossible, the only difference is in your head and thats that. Now what I don't get is why people still pay for devices like this? I guess they just want to burn their money in fire. At least Mat can use this device as a conversation starter or for spare parts, a sander maybe, that drive belt is still good.
I've had wobbly CDs that I thought about something like this to fix, but even then, it was never worth more than the cost of a new CD to fix. Good job on the video, but I fear someone will tell you you need to use deionized water to clean the CD, or something. Sigh.
Well, on the bright side at least, the "treatment" didn't ruin your test CDs.
…and I ended up scoring SACDs for £5.69 each (I’ve just re-checked the price I paid on Amazon)
The only "flaw" in your method would be that you recorded the digital output of the CDs instead of ripping the files directly. So you were in need to line up both files and yet you still managed to produce a 100% silent file to show that there is no difference between those two CDs. The "flaw" in your method worked in favour of the audiophile community. Well done!
I wanted to run the test with a normal run of the mill audio CD player. If I'd used a computer drive then *this* would become the reason why I didn't notice any difference.
Awesome job on debunking that. We need more people fighting against all the audio snake oil in the world.
This _totally_ supports a longtime theory of mine: there are a lot of people out there who are just as entertained by the _accessories_ around a hobby as they are by the hobby itself. And that's just an observation, not a judgment. For those people, discovering and using a new gadget that shaves CDs is almost as much fun as listening to the CD itself; learning about a new putter that moves the center of balance away from the heel is almost as much fun as playing the game; re-bagging and re-boarding the comics in the collection is almost as entertaining as reading them...etc.
Normal people use HiFi to listen to their music. Audiophiles use music to listen to their HiFi. A former colleague was into HiFi but sceptical to say that a great wheeze would be to sell "HiFi" solder at a vastly inflated price kmake it expensive enough and all the purchasers would claim to be able to hear the difference.
I have long suspected that the hobby with the largest amount of Snake Oil products is anything to do with music listening. I am not sure if it is because it is entirely subjective and so cannot be proved wrong, if it is confirmation bias or people are just fools.
thank god you're not on social media. that's gonna cause a shit storm.
Quite messy 🤢
If I had a proper lathe I'd enjoy spending countless hours turning expensive metals and hardwoods into pointless shavings for no reason
Could have entertained the idea a bit more by running a scratched CD through the device, so it started off with some known bit errors and see if the "removal of scattered noise" would improve the sound quality by improving the bit correction rate.
This would definitely sound better with some gold plated Toslink cables (:
I can't even listen to an MP3 without shaving the edge off the SD card. It makes it sound lossless.
I laughed out loud at this
Well OK, I'll give you $500 for those magic beans but that's my final offer. OK, $1,000. Will you take $5,000? Boy you drive a hard bargain.
I’m sorry I don’t have any change. Will you take this gold bar and contract for my soul instead lol
Humm. That fact that the difference is silence makes me wonder. I wonder if a mid shelf recording might benefit from this. Not because of any type of upconversion but because the error correction causes some muddyness and minor distortion. One wonders if a mid tier release would actually benefit from this or a release from the 1980’s or 1990’s when the tech and manufacturing was in its early days. But this might just be me looking wayyy too deep into this and over analyzing his statement about the silence lol.
If you rip it then error correction becomes irrelevant.
Yup. CDs are digital, absolute insanity with all the quality talk online. Same with HDMI and optical and all that.
Perfect. I just retired to my garden with my favourite cold beverage, and a Techmoan video is my notifications. Happy days.
Nice bit of snake oil to make money off of people who don't understand what error correction does.Thanks for doing the spectograph analysis, it's the only way to review these sorts of products.
Are these people on drugs
Perhaps they should be.