Addendum to Coloring CDs:

Coloring the CD with different colors addresses the visible portion of the spectrum but as fate would have it, the CD laser is just past the visible portion of the spectrum at 780 nm. In fact the reason that the laser light is amenable to colorizing CDs is that the sideband as it were of the laser falls in the upper part of visible red say around 650-700 nm. But what of the invisible portion of the laser light that's NOT amenable to influence by colors, the portion up around 700-850 nm? Even with colorized CDs that absorb certain colors (wavelengths) of background scattered light inside the CD transport there remains background scattered light in the infrared region between 700 and 850 nm THAT CAN MAKE ITS WAY INTO THE PHOTODETECTOR. The photodetector is kind of dumb and thinks that any light signal greater than say 70% of full reflected signal is real. Unlike visible light there's no such thing as a complementary color, e.g. Turquoise for the color Red. Thus you cannot use colors for absorbing infrared light like you can for visible light. So, you ask, what are we supposed to do now? The answer is Dark Matter. Just as a complementary color of a particular color turns that color to BLACK Dark Matter does the equivalent (absorbs) for non visible light in the region of interest 700-850 nm. Thus, we can get further improvements to the optical performance of the player that translate to improvements to signal to noise ratio and dynamic range upstream. Problem solved! Dark Matter is a thin film that is applied to the label side of the CD using a spray bottle. Dark Matter from Machina Dynamica is the ONLY product to address this important issue. It might seem rather odd, it does to me, but most audiophiles and pro audio dudes, recording engineers and such have never even heard of background scattered light being a problem or, if they have heard of it, they are unaware that most of the scattered light is actually invisible.

No matter how much you have in the end you would have had even more if you had only started out with more. - Old audiophile expression

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica

Someone I know planned to rip his entire CD collection to hear drive but was interested in getting the best possible results so he was investigating how effective Treating the CDs prior to ripping would be. He had read somewhere that black was a good color to use around the outer edge of the CD, so he proceeded to paint the edges of all 2,000 CDs. AND he even went further. Being convinced that black was a "good" color, seemingly a good absorber for just about any color, he even went so far as to color the Entire Label of all 2,000 CDs black using a chisel tip marker. It was a little bit later he ran across my post on Audio Asylum Tweaks forum, the title of which was, "Anyone else using colors for CDs other than Black and Green?" One of the points I made in my post was the admonishment that the color BLACK should ONLY be used on the inner lip of the CD, that anywhere else on the CD black will degrade the sound. So, to make a long story short, after some experimentation he wound up realizing that painting the labels black really was a BIG MISTAKE. So he had to painstakingly remove all the black marker from all 2,000 CDs, a job that took him one month. Moral of the story - Look Before you Leap.

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica

steve59 wrote:

I had to double check the date of your post, I've only posted here a few times and don't want to be thought a troll (I paid the price of admission) but wasn't painting edges dismissed 25 years ago? around the time of the radio shack/tice clock radio?

Steve59, You're absolutely right. The Green Pen from Audio Prism was dismissed as a fraud. And would you believe it was dismissed by folks with more or less the same type mentality as the ones who dismiss coloring CDs today, you know what I'm talking about, the ones who say bits are bits and you can't change the data, or they say the inventors of CD were very smart and they would have figured out the problem already or they say Reed Solomon Error Correction Codes take care of that potential problem, or it's just another placebo intended to rip off naive gullible audiophiles.

The same Logic applies to the Tice Clock. You probably never saw the Tice letter that as published in Stereophile responding to a snippy customer who complained that the Tice Clock didn't work as advertised, did you? The letter in which Tice lists the four reasons audiophiles sometimes don't get good results with tweaks. Hint: one of the reasons is poor hearing ability. By the way, my audiophile clock is even more infuriating than Tice's clock since at least Tice's clock plugged into the wall. Mine is battery powered and just sits there.

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica

Is he a phd or an ignoramus? You be the judge.

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica

iosiP wrote:

geoffkait wrote:

By the way, my audiophile clock is even more infuriating than Tice's clock since at least Tice's clock plugged into the wall. Mine is battery powered and just sits there.

And does the same nothing as the original!

P.S. If poor hearing would be a reason, how comes it doesn't come into play when testing legitimate tweaks? Better make this "poor tolerance to snake oil"!

It does come into play when testing "legitimate" tweaks. It always comes into play for everything in audio. Your hearing is compromised from the get-go. You just don't know it's compromised because that's just the way it's always been. No one questions it. Remember, you heard it from me first. And that's one reason why testing can be unreliable, because you're not really hearing the sound in the room properly or completely.

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica

You'd think by the time Blu Ray made it's appearance fifteen years ago (!) it's designers would have figured out how to deal with scattered laser light. Oh, right, they don't know it was a problem. I almost forgot. Silly me. So, we know how to color CDs to help minimize scattered background laser light effects on the sound. And we know how to color DVDs and SACDs since their laser is solidly in the visible red. But what of Blu Ray?

Pop Quiz: What 4 colors should be used to color a Blu Ray disc? Hint: the laser is technically not really blue.

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica