Tried and tested DIY tips and tweaks for newbies and unaware audiophiles

ddalfa

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Fellow member, on a timely basis I wlll be posting few tips on improving your system performance without making a hole in your pocket. These are tried and tested by myself and everytime i tried one, pumped new life in my system. Many of them may know them and ignore (audiophiles,......phantom of all knowlege) and some will benefit of out of it.

Note: some of them woulld not have effect on the hometheate in box system or the plactic garbage made by some wellknown companies . The only thing you get out of them is Noise and not music.

Will start with a very Basic tweak...."Enhance the Media" well known as compact disc or dvd or any damn optical disc you have that you chuck it into your CD/DVD player.
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GO to your local hardware store and stationary shop and but a Blue or Black permenant marker, not so rough sand paper and a soft paint brush.

Hold your media carefully and sand the inner and outer circle of CD (edge only) and dust off the fine dust from scrubbing with the brush you bought. Take a marker and paint the inside and outside edge with permenant marker, let it dry and paint once more.

CD's is a bulk production product and the edges are very smooth and reflective and never treated to cut the cost. A CD player is a dumb devise that picks up optical signal reflected from your CD's. When laser enters the plastic media, some gets reflected and some gets refracted and travells through the plastic layer itself. Inner and outter edge from purchased CD's acts as mirror and reflects back some infomation. The lense cannot differentiate between whats what, hence the unwanted reflections are processed as well giving you smeared image and coloration.

sanding and painting your CD's mitigates these reflections and you get much better seperation of instruments, soundstage with less coloration in sound.


Try this and i am sure you will be surprised. Stay tuned for more tweaks.
 

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and how does that work with data cds? if there were reflections causing the drive to read the data wrongly, you will end up reading wrong data, rendering the cd as a non functioning medium.
 
GO to your local hardware store and stationary shop and but a Blue or Black permenant marker, not so rough sand paper and a soft paint brush.

Hee hee... second generation, eh? It used to be a green marker pen, and this was the start of a whole series of hifi tricks, at all prices, inlcuding free.

And before anyone demands to know if I tried it... Yes :o you'll find some green-edged CDs in my collection.

But hey, it's free, it costs absolutely nothing, except a little time, to check out. I'd guess that it is the time spent that "improves" the sound. Time spent on a hifi system can improve it almost as much as money :)
 
Time spent on a hifi system can improve it almost as much as money :)

OT..

I like this quote! :) Thanks! Very true. This is sheer "experience" speaking! ;)

Often we don't spend enough time with our system.

Using this as my signature with your permission Thad?! :D
 
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Well, I meant tweaking it often produces the mental illusion of having improved it (and sometime the opposite too) but ... I like your interpretation, and you are very welcome to the words :), which did not have any sort of DRM attached ;) :cool:
 
Well, I meant tweaking it often produces the mental illusion of having improved it (and sometime the opposite too) but ... I like your interpretation, and you are very welcome to the words :), which did not have any sort of DRM attached ;) :cool:

Thanks! There goes the signature with due credits :clapping:
 
Why not?

If someone offers me a rock for a thousand quid, telling me that it will make my hifi sound wonderful and prevent me and my family from ever catching cancer, I'll tell them how they can use it to treat diarrhoea. But a green marker pen? Well, I had one anyway.

I was more gullible in those days: I even had some special fluid for cleaning CDs etc, and it came with advice that it might be good to wipe the interconnects with it. Well, maybe ...no real judgement on that one ...but I didn't buy another bottle.

Off-topic by-the-way... I don't think they claimed anything for hifi, but a friend of mine bought a box that was supposed to remove negative energy from the mains wiring in her house, which some naturopath had told her was partly responsible for her ill health. I read a review of same box (yes, in an alternative-medicine-etc magazine, for I too had an interest in these things) where someone had melted out the black filler and discovered that the box contained nothing but the neon lamp which indicated that it was "on." About eight years ago, in UK, I bought an ultrasonic mosquito repeller. It was absolutely inefective, and taken off the market soon after. They are still being sold, and it is still being shown that they do nothingBBC News - Ultrasound mosquito repellents: Zapping the myth

I wonder what these do? Back in those days, I was sorely tempted to try one. This is a reputable company --- but so was the shop where I bought my mossie repeller!
 
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Why not?

If someone offers me a rock for a thousand quid, telling me that it will make my hifi sound wonderful and prevent me and my family from ever catching cancer, I'll tell them how they can use it to treat diarrhoea. But a green marker pen? Well, I had one anyway.

Thad, nice way to put it, LOL.
 
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