AUDIO-TWEAKS from demagnetizing to varnishing （1）

Published:2011/8/19 1:06:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

By Harry Baggen

For true audio enthusiasts, nothing’s too far out when it comes to improving the sound quality of their hi-fi or surround-sound systems. Naturally, you can spend a lot of money on cables and other accessories, but there are a lot of possibilities that go even further, such as equipment modifications and special treatments for LPs and CDs.





Despite the mountains of cheap audio equipment sold every year, there is still a sizable group of people devoted to true hi-fi reproduction in both stereo and surround-sound versions. Many of these confirmed high-enders even resort to rather unusual methods to squeeze the last drop of performance out of their gear and obtain just a smidgen more detail from the speakers. Here we have collected several of these methods, which range from quite serious to rather questionable.

Let’s start off with a few in the latter category. There are various tips going around for making CDs sound better. For instance, it’s supposed to help if you put the CD in the freezer for a few hours before playing it. That doesn’t cost anything, so it’s easy to try it out. Another way to improve the sound of a CD is to demagnetize it before you play it. Several manufactures market commercial devices for this purpose.

One of the strangest tricks for improving the sound of a CD is one that we recently found on the Audio Tweaks website, There someone recommends spraying a bit of Pledge (a sort of wax polish for wooden furniture) into the air and then dragging the data side of the CD through the aerosol fog hanging in the air. That will cause microscopic drops of liquid to adhere to the surface of the CD, which apparently affects the playback. This seems rather risky to us from a technical viewpoint, since residues of the polish will most likely be spun off from the CD and end up in the drive, and that can have disastrous consequences for the laser and the slide mechanism. At least you can’t say we didn’t warn you. This site has a collection of more than 300 audio tweaks, and it’s quite amusing to browse through them.

Another rather unusual tip involves ’C37 lacquer’, a sort of magic potion formulated by the Austrian violin maker Dieter Ennemoser. It’s a sort of violin varnish that also appears to have special properties for audio equipment, and everything that is coated with it will only vibrate at natural harmonic Frequencies (based on carbon at a body temperature of 37℃ - hence the name). We must admit that if you coat your speaker cones with this stuff, it’s bound to affect the sound quality. Herr Ennemoser’s site also has various links to sites with descriptions of treating amplifiers and the like with this varnish. Even coating the ICs on a circuit board is supposed to lead to a perceptible improvement in sound quality. But you should first read what various people have to say and draw your own conclusions.

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