Is analog & vinyl anoying? Is it worht it.

Eldartford,

04-18-07: Eldartford
I really question the need to clean CDs.

I agree with you. However my personal experience with CD rot did leave my faith in the robustness of CD's slightly shaken. (CD rot is pitting damage occuring on the silver CD layer of a badly manufactured disc which corrodes from the inside over ten years (below the lacquer surface)

What struck me as very odd was that the affected CD still played without skipping but with audible distorting scratchy noise (no skips)...so much for error correction! I must emphasize that this was one CD out of thousands - so this is by no means indicative of CD's in general. However, I was expecting a bad CD to NOT play at all!!!

Shineola was a brand of shoe polish. I don't know if they make it any more. It was brown, and had the consistency of you know what.

Do people who have skipping CDs clean them a lot, or does cleaning CDs a lot cause them to skip?

Shine-Ola made resulted in clearer definition, and more extension. Bass and mids were less muddy. Overall, it made the music appear to be slightly louder, although the volume had not been touched.

Eldartford,

Actually I just answered my own question on the last post. So I thought I would share it.

Cross-Interleaved Reed Solomon Coding

It states

INTERPOLATION: If a major error occurs and a sample cannot be perfectly reconstructed by the error control circuitry, it is possible to "guess" the content of the sample; that is, obtain an approximation by interpolating it off the neighbouring audio samples. While this concealment will not "fix" the error, it will make it inaudible, offering a graceful degradation of audio quality as clicks and pops are avoided.

A corroded CD with errors from additional random pits over the surface would be a candidate for "interpolation" - as the data will be consistently affected rather than in "error bursts". (Corrosion being a very different situation from a scratch, dirt or thumb print on the surface)

I suspect my rotten CD was being interpolated in regions where data was bad for more than 2.4 mm.

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Now back to the Shine-Ola comments. Armed with the above informaton from Wikipedia it seems that Shine-Ola could cause an audible improvement if the CD surface was dirty enough to cause interpolation but not cause skipping. This situation would mean that the CD would sound OK to the listener (no skipping) but would still benefit from being cleaned because there was excessive interpolation going on (excessive interpolation would definitely be audible, at least I can hear on a CD with CD Rot)

However, cleaning is cleaning and there is no reason to suspect that Shine-Ola offers the only effective way to clean a CD.

BTW: I don't handle my CD's much, as I only ever feed them into the machine once and they stay there. So I may not need to clean my CD's - but others might benefit from keeping them clean.

BTW: I don't handle my CD's much, as I only ever feed them into the machine once and they stay there. So I may not need to clean my CD's - but others might benefit from keeping them clean.
Shadorne (System | Reviews | Threads | Answers)

FWIW, the A/B test we conducted involved two brand new black CDRs, fresh from the stack. Cleaning one with Shine-ola still made an audible improvement.