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Audiophiles are a strange bunch. Some of them believe drawing around the edge of a CD with a special pen (not just any marker will do you know!) will improve t

• yaantc 5y ago
  To me, it seems like an "analog" cargo cult thing. A lot of audiophiles simply don't get the digital transition. In the old times, the musical signal was analog and any impairment was a degradation. Audiophiles went to great length to avoid this. And they keep on applying this approach to the digital part of a modern system, in completely useless ways. For example, here, it seems they use a marker to prevent light to leak from the side of the CD. I guess it's a misguided way to try to increase the SNR of the laser detector while reading the disc. What they don't get is that the digital part of the system doesn't carry a musical signal. It's information, that is used to reconstruct a musical signal at the DAC. And this information is very robust. As long as it can be reconstructed error free, SNR and the like do not matter. As long as it arrives on time at the DAC (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's easy to get the idea) any previous jitter is irrelevant. If you're an audiophile, keep on caring about the DAC and the analog chain after it. And don't bother too much about the digital part, it's not audio it's IT!
• iso1210 5y ago
  To be fair I did this with ink opaque in the infrared spectrum all over a Justin Bieber CD and the sound was massively improved.