Rip it to a USB flash drive in WAV or lossless compresion (no mechanical parts to complicate things). Then treat the disk and rip again, in the exact same way to the same drive. If you rip 20 minutes each time and you leave it in .WAV you'll need at least a 1GB drive. A 2GB if you do the whole process described below. Or put it on a hard drive. It should also work if you rip it to a CD-R but that throws in a big variable that someone is going to use as an excuse to say the test is invalid. One thing I have noticed about old CD-Rs that I have been ripping recently is that their readability if much worse in the outer part of the disk then in the inner part.
Back to the test. Play the two back through whatever PC based player you choose. I hear there is a company called Slim Devices that make a couple of nice ones. If you can hear a difference then I'll be very amazed. It would almost have to be a digital artifact. And then bits ain't bits. To go further. Get two identical CDs. Compare them, if they sound the same then treat one and compare them again. If you can hear a difference, and can't hear a difference between the ripped copies then you can almost be certain that there is something in the nature of CDs and CD players that cause the difference. And it isn't digital. It somehow gets carried through and probably made audible in the D to A process. I wouldn't use only one disk. The time lag between listening and the fact that you couldn't go back and forth would pretty much render this test invalid. You could make a copy, but you would have to be sure that the copy sounds identical (to your ears) to the original. If you do use a copy treat the commercial one and keep the copy untreated. I think that would be more useful since a CD-R uses different technology altogether. If you can't hear difference the test is over. Snake oil will be seen dripping out of the device. But if you can hear a difference you can really make this interesting by adding a third test. Rip both of the CDs you just A-B'd, the treated and the untreated one. Use the same procedure described at the beginning. This is a good reason to use commercial disks so no one can claim they ripped differently. Now compare the ripped versions. Again, I really would be surprised if they sound different. If you do hear a difference I'm going to become a member of the church of the most holy snake oil. By the way, make sure you do all of this during same phase of moon and under the same astrological sign. Better not to do it during a full moon. You never know. -- regalma1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ regalma1's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6658 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32993 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
