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In Reply to: RE: an addition posted by unclestu52 on August 13, 2007 at 22:48:05
Howdy
All of this I expected with respect to cryoing, but how home freezing has any similar effects I'm quite skeptical about. I have to wonder if home freezing is more an issue of changing the static charges, etc. like the "demagnetizers" as I don't believe that it changes anything physical about the discs.
-Ted
Follow Ups:
and, of course, I have no explanation.
However, I have burned several copies of discs and simply used the copies as my experimental base. In relation to the unfrozen discs, the frozen copies seem to retain their sonic' attributes', even when I use them as demo discs (in other words, on a daily basis, often having them on repeat in order to break in various pieces of gear). That would dispense the static charge idea, as I would believe a static charge would simply build up again and not be very permanent.
Cryogenic facilities where I live, are available only through the university labs and a few military sites, and not open to the public. This triggered my investigation with a home freezer (later with a surplus lab speciment freezer).
I first started with a procedure described to me by an airline mechanic. After a specified numbers of landings, the axles of the Boeing 737 landing gear are removed and cryogenically treated. Lacking the proper facilities, they simply place the axles in a huge Igloo cooler, packing the axles with dry ice. After the the cooler is packed, they pour in liquid nitrogen, and then seal the container with duct tape. He told me that they leave the cooler sealed for about a week allowing it to slowly return to room temperature.
I actually tried this technique myself, using smaller coolers of course. Note, if you should try this , be very cautious as liquid nitrogen expands to something like a 1000 times its initial volume. It can displace oxygen and some statistics show that at least one person dies a year from being overcome from asphyxia. Not recommended in a small enclosed room!
The truth was that lugging around a Dewar flask was not much fun, although the cost was relatively cheap. I got lazy and simply froze the discs, first with dry ice, where I could still hear the effect, and later with a refrigerator where the effect was still audible. Treating other 'bits' seemed to also help too, BTW.
Incidentally, the CD demagnetizers have a much more transient effect. It works for only one play. Stopping a disc in mid song, then repeating that track will show that the sound changes roughly at the point of stopping the disc. That would indicate that the disc change is correlated to the laser mechanism in some way (heat from the laser, perhaps?).
I got a chance to play with a Nespa, the light treatment of a disc. That works very well too, but, curiously, demagnetizing a disc treated with the Nespa seems to reverse the Nespa treatment.
Like you, I believe nothing really changes in respect to the bits of code stamped onto the disc. I believe the plastic substrate is being affected, and, being a relatively soft and yielding material, it can respond to much 'weaker' forces.
Of course, YMMV,
Stu
Unclestu, I see you are, yet again, coming up against the old, conventional, "Oh, how can freezing a CD change the sound of that CD when the information is digits, 1s and 0s ?"
I agree that the subject heading started out as "Freezing CDs/DVDs" but, surely, by now, people are aware that 'the effect of freezing extends much further out than merely freezing CDs' - which then takes the subject away from being purely about 1s and 0s ?
We discovered the benefits of the freezing technique long before we owned a CD player or any CDs !!
In the early 1980s, we were investigating the sound of different metals when used as a conductor - by listening to different bare metals. We decided to try an additional experiment, we baked all the different bare metals in the gas oven (as reported by Martin Colloms in his 1984 article "Cable Controversy" - 23 years ago !!). After baking, we allowed the metals to return to room temperature very, very slowly. On listening to all the individual bare metals again, we found the sound from all of them to be much improved but, as soon as Peter applied any plastic insulation around the bare metals, the sound was worse - what could be described as 'harsh, shouty, aggressive'. Peter knew that he could not bake the plastic insulation material in the gas oven so he decided to try the opposite - he decided to freeze the plastic insulation materials in our domestic deep freezer and, after freezing, allowed the plastic materials to return to room temperature very, very slowly. After doing this, applying the plastic insulation around the bare metals did not have as great an adverse effect on the sound as they had previously - the sound was now much less harsh and aggressive - more open and coherent with better resolution.
So, by the time we eventually acquired a CD player and some CDs and were disappointed in the sound of the CDs - describing the sound as 'harsh, shouty and aggressive', we already knew what technique to try - we put the CDs through the freezing/slow defrost procedure to beneficial effect !!
This simple 'freezing/slow defrost' technique was described to our customers (and some UK journalists) way back during the 1980s and they reported similar success.
Then we read Robert Harley's 1990 article on freezing - particularly the sentence
"In addition to CDs and LPs, the process has been used on Laser-vision-format video discs, speaker cable, interconnects, integrated circuits and musical instruments."
We realised that here was someone else (Ed Meitner of Canada) who had, completely independently, discovered exactly the effect we had discovered - although Ed Meitner had discovered the same effect by using cryogenic temperatures.
Robert Harley's article was written in 1990 - 17 years ago !!
It was written about Ed Meitner's discoveries, so that means that Ed Meitner had been making HIS discoveries over 20 years ago, and we had been making our discoveries over 25 years ago. All this was then followed by such as the New York Times 1999 article on freezing musical instruments (which we and many of our customers had also been doing - freezing such as headphones, microphones and the strings of musical instruments)
Just how long does it take for people to realise that 'there is something going on' which needs investigating, explaining and not just dismissing out of hand ?
Quote from Unclestu
> > > "But freezing a disc, CD or DVD, defintely does have benefits. I haven't tried LP's but I've been told that freezing them also helps, too (I know of a couple of individuals who have done so). Cryogenic facilities where I live, are available only through the university labs and a few military sites, and not open to the public. This triggered my investigation with a home freezer (later with a surplus lab speciment freezer)." < < <
How is it that such as Unclestu has been willing to try the 'freezing' experiment using a home freezer but (it would appear) Ted Smith has not ? rlw suggests that if people try the experiment but cannot hear any changes in the sound and report such things, that they should "Be prepared, however, to get jumped on if you report no difference."
Why, rlw, would anyone saying that they had tried the (freezing) experiment for themselves but could not hear any improvement be 'jumped on' ? Surely if they cannot hear any changes in the sound, then they cannot hear any changes - but at least they would have tried. Surely they would only be challenged re their attitude if they said that they WOULD NOT try the experiment and dismissed it out of hand because they could not understand how it could possibly work - in the face of many others' experiences - in the face of it working successfully for many others.
Mark W (who claims to be a music lover but who appears not to have already tried the simple freezing technique) comments instead "in fact i was thinking of having my wife join and write an exactly opposite review of the results just to watch it all happen. But I thinking just trying to keep the beer from blowing out my nose while I read some of this BULL**IT is fun enough."
Why don't you try the freezing experiment for yourself Mark W - then you would be able to provide an answer to your own question "Now what I really want to know is if I leave one of these magic disks in my pickup and it gets hot say 130 degrees will the veil return to the music?"
Then Mark W, if you still do not hear any changes to the sound after trying the freezing technique it would still not instigate a reaction from me (as suggested by rlw of 'jumping on you') but, instead, my reaction to such a sentence as
"i was thinking of having my wife join and write an exactly opposite review of the results just to watch it all happen. But I thinking just trying to keep the beer from blowing out my nose while I read some of this BULL**IT is fun enough."
would be of utter amazement at such an immature sentence from someone who calls himself a "music lover".
A mature music lover's reaction, surely, would not be to think of silly games to play on audio discussion groups but to ask the question "If freezing things such as wires, cables, integrated circuits, printed circuit boards, components etc can give the improvements in the sound which people are describing, then why am I being asked to pay 5,000 dollars/pounds, 10,000 dollars/pounds, 20,000 dollars/pounds for new, UNFROZEN, CD players, amplifiers, speaker systems etc ?"
Kmarikos initial posting was sensible and intelligent and informative, as was his later sentence :-
"I had that mentality (scepticism) before I decided this was easy enough to try out for myself. For my system and ears, it does make a difference. Try it out and you might be pleasantly surprised."
only (unfortunately) to be met by some (usual) dismissive responses - even after others had added their own positive experiences.
Regards,
May Belt.
Your quite right I never should have gotten into this silly discussion. I don't believe in ghosts (yet the green people on TV say they hear see feel them all the time) I never said I was a music lover. My media of choice is vinyl I own over 2000 LP's and maybe 50-60 CD's I own twice as many Cassettes as CD's.
I'm one of those silly people who need some form of proof some tangible repeatable example. Not the rantings of a number of guys who think they can hear the difference between one variety of wood block their CDP is sitting on compared to another
BUT I will give you this since the whole process for KNOWING if I can hear a difference between frozen music and raw is so easy here is what I'll do.
I'll try it. And I'll write a post detailing the whole thing.
A refreshingly polite reply. I thank you. It is appreciated.
Regarding my reference to you as a 'music lover'. If you click on your name at the top of your postings, it will reveal your details which are "Music Lover/Audiophile". THAT is where I got my information from. So, if YOU did not provide those details, then someone did.
Just as a general reply to your
> > > "I'm one of those silly people who need some form of proof some tangible repeatable example. Not the rantings of a number of guys who think they can hear the difference between one variety of wood block their CDP is sitting on compared to another" < < <
I personally am aware that there are a multitude of things which affect the 'sound' so I already know not to dismiss (outright) other people's experiences. But, instead of asking you the (usual) question "Whose experiences are YOU going to chose to believe?" I will turn the question on it's head and instead ask "Whose experiences are YOU going to dismiss ?"
Such as John Atkinson's ? Where he states that he uses such as the Myrtle Wood Blocks under his equipment because they give him an improvement in the sound of that equipment ? But, where he goes on to say that "he does not know or understand why or how".
Ditto a multitude of other reportings of other 'tweaks' by various audio editors and journalists.
If you personally are not able to try anything and everything and hear things (or not hear them) for yourself, then at some point you are going to have to come to some decision as to who to believe - or who to dismiss !! They can't ALL be wrong - different people can hear different things, yes, but they can't ALL be under the influence of 'suggestion, the placebo effect, imagination, audio faith healing, or effective marketing' !! Especially people who are regarded as 'professional in audio'. Surely no one (editor, journalist or manufacturer) would deliberately expose themselves to ridicule by claiming that they could hear this or hear that changing the sound if they did not genuinely 'hear' the sound changing.
This is the point where you should be at. Because they are all telling you that there is 'something going on which affects sound' which everyone is struggling (in their own way) to try to understand.
Regards,
May Belt.
Further to my earlier reply.
What we (the ones who can hear the effectiveness of the freezing technique) are trying to tell you (and others) is that it is not the 1s and 0s which are being affected. Because you can get similar beneficial results by freezing so many other things which are nothing to do with digital information (1s and 0s).
You say you have more audio cassettes than CDs. Then why don't you try the freezing technique with an audio cassette ? I am sure you will have, tucked away somewhere, an audio cassette you do not like the sound of - which you have been disappointed with ever since you bought it. Dig it out, listen to it and confirm that you still do not like the sound of it, then put it through the freezing/slow defrost procedure - then listen to it again and see if you can listen to it with more pleasure.
Regards,
May Belt.
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