As all men know, the perfect rotundity of the compact disc is necessary to prevent warbling and jittering in the digital audio stream. Up until now, though, any music aficionado who happened to accidentally purchase elliptical or even square compact discs from disreputable music blackmarketers were forced to take compass and grinder in hand and attempt to eyeball it.
But no longer: from the land of leberkase und schweinefleisch comes the Audio Desk System, which for the mere price of $900 can grind any stuttery CD in your collection back into a mathematically perfect disc. A compulsory investment for any audiophile, worth its weight in literal gold.
Ultra System [Official Site via Gizmodo]
Some fun, marginally related links.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0QT4Y1Y3ug
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWI9MM1Zlfo
To what extent a not perfectly round disc contributes, the rest of you can argue about
This goes on par with the CD rewinder and expensive audio cables.
Good investments in my book.
“Literal gold” perhaps you mean “literary gold”, unless this precision system only weighs an ounce or so.
Audiophiles will pay a thousand bucks for any pretentious, over-hyped piece of useless crap.
wuh? You mean Leberkäs? Actually, lacking the dieresis, you could legally spell it Leberkas, which in some regions of Bavaria is actually the preferred term. But then, in the rest of Germany we commonly refer to it as Fleischkäse. As for the second cliché, you probably meant Sauerkraut.
Now I wonder, don’t you live in Berlin? Why so derogative?
Is this supposed to be an infomerica post?
To be honest, if this were cheap, it might be nice to have: I’ve got a couple of disks from a while back that make a heckofa noise when I put them in my laptop. They’re prettymuch fine in my desktop though. My guess is, they’re slightly off-balance.
Something like this would stop them sounding like a plane taking off, maybe.
Stories I have heard about this device from people I trust are like this:
Many people have tried this gizmo and it is very highly recommended. Talks of blind testing using two copies of the same cd…one trimmed and one not…with people who didn’t know…and they noticed sound differences.
Apparently its not usually subtle if you have good equipment….
Now I wouldn’t pay the price for it myself, but I definitely would like to hear it Unfortunately my CD front end isn’t particularly good so I doubt I would hear anything..
Its not insane to think that something that improves the symmetry of a rapidly spinning object would reduce any read errors introduced by previous eccentricities in the rotation. Insert the movements of the servos needed to read this information and possible electrical distortions introduced by this and well….I don’t poo poo the whole thing off hand.
Nukular FTW
Its easy to scoff at this if you’ve ruined your hearing with consumer gear, but in this game to see the emperor’s clothes it helps if you’ve spent several times your yearly wage on audio equipment.
Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug..
The point isn’t to make discs rounder, it’s to put a 36 degree bevel on the edge to prevent the precious laser light from leaking out. A $900 step above using the green or black magic marker on the edge. Oh, and it also comes with a black marker, just in case…
Internal reflection and the like is just a little looney even to the “loonies” is how I would describe it in the audiophile world.
Digital reading really shouldn’t be changed much by “light leaks”, but servo mechanisms having to cope with an eccentricly spinning disk are much easier to understand/explain.
The website claims both “mechanical jitter” reduction and reduction in light leakage due to the 36 degree angle. The use of the term “mechanical jitter” is a bit suspect. “Jitter” in the digital domain relates to errors induced by timing/clock inaccuracies in digital processing and conversion, not by mechanical shakes due to out-of-round discs.
The light leakage issue is totally bogus IMHO.
There are at least two types of “eccentricity error”. One is where the disc actually shakes because the centre of gravity is not exactly in the centre of the rotation axis. This could potentially be reduced by planing the disc in this machine. It can also be reduced by good quality transports that hold the disc securely in spite of the imbalance. Good quality servo control also helps.
The second type is where the tracks on the CD are not concentric with the centre of the hole. Only good servo control can address this. This lathe thingy won’t help with this in the slightest.
I doubt either issue actually matters at all for 99.999% of CDs. The occasional total dud might be helped, but more than likely simply won’t play in any circumstances on a regular CD player. Computer drives with error correction and multiple reads and variable speeds might help a bit.
Conclusion – Probably bogus.
That’s AWESOME
I need something like that! I want to manufacture things like that and sell them to goobers who would rather read audiophile disinformation crap than actual science!
Heaven forbid that you accidentally LEARN anything about wow, jitter and flutter as well as the error correction systems. Oh, and don’t forget about learning how that D-I-J-I-T-A-L stuff works.
Don’t go and learn about that, ’cause then you’ll drop out of my target audience..
$900…. I wonder what the profir margin is on THAT!
I’m guessin around $450, they seem like to silly to actually optimize their production, they should be able to get production costs below $20 by outsourcing to china.
I thought true audiophiles were playing vinyl….
At $900 you could buy a real lathe and some custom fittings, and be left with a tool that could be used for a lot more than just the one purpose.