On Jan 23, 2008, at 6:28 AM, Jerry Hartke wrote:
Some writers have technical skills, while others spin out profitable junk
for acceptance by gullible editors and readers.
Full disclosure, I have been an a occasional reviewer for both print and on-line audio journals.
It is not a profitable avocation, and I have never claimed technical expertise beyond that
available to any informed consumer. I don't consider anyone who investigates any issue gullible
per se, which is unfortunately the frequent opinion of many who claim special knowledge in any
field. That seems arrogant to me. However, having access to CES and other venues, I have not
infrequently heard effects I cannot easily explain. Not all such changes seemed to be
improvements, and some that were hardly seemed worth the cost. But then I drive a Mazda, not a
Porsche for the same reason. I have friends who disagree and preferred to pay the difference. Are
they gullible, or just happy?
De-gaussing (there are no
ferromagnetic materials in a disc), polishing (introduces millions of
microscratches that distort the laser beam), and trimming (can worsen track
eccentricity or unbalance), have the potential to degrade, but not improve,
CD or DVD disc quality.
The underlying assumption here is that a class of objects produced by multiple agents at the
lowest possible cost will have no functional flaws that can be remediated after market. The only
other consumer category I can think of that makes such claims would be the purveyors of religious
texts - the Bible, the Qur'an, and whatever the Scientologists keep by bedside and toilet.
If this remains an issue, Media Sciences would be
glad to participate in a controlled test on a few discs, both before and
after the "improvements", at no charge and then publish the results online.
Please contact me if you wish to participate.
The logical fallacy here is to equate "disc quality" with the perception of music. I switched from
physics to psychology as an undergrad because the girls in class were prettier. But I quickly
realized that while the physics lab experiments were straightforward, experimental psych projects
in perception had a lot of independent variables that could not be controlled. I appreciate that
in itself can drive some people crazy.
Again, there is ample documentation that some but not all auditioners can and will hear a change
from a variety of treatments, tweaks, and widgets. Some perceive the change as a worthwhile
improvement, others don't. That is normal, not something to get huffy about. If you are curious
about such things, please do look into them.
That this topic keeps re-surfacing, I suspect, is the result of a certain lingering
dissatisfaction among listeners familiar with the sound of acoustic music in real space with the
electronic and and particularly digital reproduction of that music. The response is essentially a
desire to find something - anything - that will ease that disappointment. Tom Fine started the
discussion by blaming the engineering, not the technology, for the the problem. I take a broader
view, as I believe the limitations of CD reproduction are obvious in comparison to higher
definition digital as well as analog, to say nothing of the real thing.
Conversely, many folks (like my kids) who grew up listening to amplified instruments and entirely
digital media have different criteria. They prize the loud, the clean, and the convenient. Here
the iPod trumps even the CD. The logical extension of a "bits iz bits" definition of perfect
sound is to have the marketplace decide how much more data can be thrown out and still fool a
listener into thinking it is music.
Bruce