Does coloring the edges of CD's help the sonics?

An audiophile sits in his basement day after day, carefully coloring the edges of his entire CD collection with a dark green olive marker.

One day his wife comes down, "What you doin' that for - does it sound better?" she asks.

"Nah, sound has nothing to do with it. Olive on the edge - that's all!"

Good one, Shadorne!

I'll tell ya what does make a difference: trueing the runout of CDs via an Audiodesk lathe. I had a dealer do this to several of my CDs while auditioning some gear a couple of years ago with my wife; we did A/B (before and after) listening and in every case there was an improvement in clarity and depth. My wife confirmed and she is a huge audio skeptic with WAF at a constant "11"

One of these days I'm gonna break down and get one.

I'll tell ya what does make a difference: trueing the runout of CDs via an Audiodesk lathe.

There may be an explanation for this - power to adjust the laser tracking will be sinusoidal/periodic if the CD wobbles and the laser is constantly readjusting - to keep tracking.

If the power supply ioslation to the DAC is less than robust/adequate then this signal may affect jitter. Ed Meitner demonstrated years ago - that if you blasted a CD player with a speaker that you can get the CD's to resonate at around 1000 HZ - which then created feedback and jitter into the clock. Random jitter is ok - but precise periodic jitter of specific nature is MUCH more likely to become audible.

On the other hand - if you place your CD player inside a cabinet with a closed door and protect it from high frequencies then you should not have too much cause to worry about what Ed Meitner discovered.

The wobbly disc is another matter - as equipment designers can and should deal with this issue as laser readjustments will be periodic and related to disc rotation speed - in essence something that would be expected to happen. A DAC completely separated from the transport with a decent PLL algorithm that reduces jitter may help and the good news is that it will probably fix everything - whereas I have my doubts whether a lathe can be precise enough - those CD tracks are awful narrow...

Shadorne, everyone thinks the AudioDesk trues the radius of the cd. It doesn't. It puts a angle on the edge that extends only half-way through its thickness. It thus is really just directing the light diffused through the plastic downward. You could trim both sides. That would true the radius. I did that with several discs with some benefit, but you need to be very careful not to scratch the disc and it takes too much time for the additional benefit.

With improved cleaners, as for the painting of the outer edge, I found little benefit, which again suggests that it is not disc wobble.