Cheap tweaks...What would YOU reccomend?

The cheapest tweak is to rotate your RCA jacks about a quarter of a turn and back each day, especially if you have not treated the contacts. Note it also works if you have gold plated plugs and jacks.

Auricauricle, I currently have six different mats and can recall another 5 or 6. I would be worried that your wedge cutout would imbalance the disc are the rpms it is turning.

I have found only one mat that really has much of an effect, but it is hardly cheap. It is the Millennium CD mat and costs $119.

After you turn on the CDP/CDT, hit the pause button. This is supposed to re-center the laser improving the sound.

That's a good thought, Tbg; so far I have not perceived any ill effect on speed or stability. Now and then, the player refuses to read, but sonically there seems to be an appreciable difference.

Again, this was done as a spur-of-the-moment experiment that has not been subject to quantitative analysis etc.

In the meantime, I'll rotate the jacks....

Thanks for the caveat, nevertheless!

Ultrabit Platinum from Digital Systems & Solutions, sold with Clean Disc; provides impressive improvement in the CD sound in my system. I use use a couple of drops(I find the spray amount is very excessive)per disc,spread well and wipe off with old soft cotton t-shirt. Provides significantly cleaner more nuanced sound for me. Enjoy. pete

A comment about a speaker tweek lifted from another forum-

"Sorry if I didn't make this clear. Longer waveforms are wrapping around box speaker enclosures and being reflected later in time by room boundaries and such. Hence, a reason for room treatment. Shorter waveforms higher up in the frequency response and produced by your tweeter are first interacting with and being diffracted by the baffle and edges of your enclosure arriving just behind the pure signal at the expense of proper time and phase arrival. This would be damped and diffraction eliminated by what I make. The example that previously appeared in my avatar was on a Dynaudio Confidence C4 speaker. I custom fit to a particlar speaker. A Revel M22 appears in my avatar at present. Here is a link to an animated illustration of diffraction in action. You may be able to imagine what you would be hearing without those green and red circles- http://www.silcom.com/~aludwig/images/diffdem.gif

Speaker designer John Dunlavy wrote that the phenomenon known as listener fatique is the direct result of time and phase malady. I observed this to be true in the design stage for myself. The more obvious benefits are improvements to how instruments are rendered and sound. Questions?"

That link is pretty revealing of the subject and this would be my recommendation.