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Anyone use CD tweaks

I was wondering about the effectiveness of products hyped to improved sound quality - i.e. products like Maple Shade's "Mikro Smooth" for polishing CDs and their "Optrix" surfactant product. You want to believe these claims, but sometimes they sound too good to be true. Anyone with any experience with these or similar CD enhancers??

Thanks in advance...
2chnlben
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
14,147 posts
 
One of my favs is three 1 inch strips of black plastic tape on the label side arranged like spokes of a wheel.
nonoise's avatar
nonoise
4,382 posts
 
The CD mat from Herbie's Audio Lab works great but sometimes gets stuck in the drawer mechanism, which is why i stopped using it. That, and it looses its ability to stay stuck after several uses and needs to be cleaned as a result. I believe its no longer available and has been replaced with a permanent stick on.
It really cleaned up the sound.
hifiman5's avatar
hifiman5
1,611 posts
 
Yea. Give Herbie's Black Hole CD mat a try. It is meant be adhered to a disc permanently. It stabilizes the rapidly spinning disk in the drawer and damps the inherent resonance within the disc as it is being played. The music is more coherent across the frequency spectrum. I bought two 200 mat lots of these little beauties. Highly recommended!
sabai
2,027 posts
 
Opaque blue marker pen twice around the outside and the inside hole of the CD.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
14,147 posts
 
The color of marker that's most effective depends on the color of the CD label artwork. For example, Mercury Living Presence CDs (labels are Black and White) prefer Red marker on the outer edge and black on the inner edge. Most CDs prefer Green or Purple (Violet) on the outer edge and Black on the inner edge.
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