Demagnetizing CDs?!

Today we're in familiar territory because I'm taking a look at another device that claims to improve the sound quality of a compact disc. Now this is the last device I had that claimed to do the same thing, i.e. shave the edge of the disc. CD and then repainted it with a black marker, of course, that would negatively affect the aesthetics of the CDs, any potential resale value and had the potential to alter the structural integrity of the discs in the long term, so the device. What I'm showing today has none of those drawbacks, in fact your discs will come out completely unscathed, probably not affected at all either, but this device claims to degauss your compact discs.

Yes, they didn't know magnetized CDs were a problem and there's probably a good reason for that. I have three questions that immediately came to mind as soon as I heard about this device. The first was: What is a compact disc? It is composed of a transparent polycarbonate plastic substrate and a reflective metal. layer and a clear protective layer of acrylic plastic, okay, that leads to another question: what is the reflective layer on a compact disc? The metal layer is usually pure aluminum which is spread over the polycarbonate surface in a layer that is only a few molecules thick, so eventually that leads to the key question: aluminum or aluminium, as we say in the UK , is a magnetic metal and under normal circumstances aluminum is non-magnetic mainly due to its crystalline structure, so there you have it.

Case closed, you can. It does not magnetize a compact disc, but as you can imagine, the manufacturers of the compact disc degausser have a different opinion on this. I got their old website back and this is what they had to say about it. Why do optical discs, like a CD, become magnetized? Firstly, it is believed that the ferrous ingredients contained in the printing ink on the label side of the disc are one of the causes of the magnetization of discs, for example, iron oxide is used for red, yellow ink or brown. Cobalt is used for blue or green ink and nickel.

Used for silver ink, these materials iron, cobalt, nickel are called ferromagnetic substances and are relatively easy to magnetize. The second problems are caused by the use of aluminum used for the recording side of the CD. Currently, the Japanese industrial standard JIS states that the purity of the aluminum used. must be 99.0 percent, the other one percent contains ferromagnetic substances such as iron, nickel and cobalt. Aluminum is a weak magnetic material, so it is easily influenced by magnetism. CD players contain magnetic substances when a disc is played, the rotation of the mechanism, magnet and motor generates a flow that causes the discs to become magnetized quickly.

The RD3 Multi-Purpose Acoustic Audio Degausser is an innovative device that can easily treat and completely degauss all types of optical discs, CDs, DVDs, etc. If you degauss your drive with RD3, the sound and picture quality improves greatly. and they will be able to hear aspects of the recording that were inaudible to the magnetized discs. Let's continue with the idea that one percent of a compact disc can be magnetized and let's say on this particular occasion that this compact disc one percent super magnetized oh that's so magnetic what's the problem what's the problem with that the information they gave on their website they just didn't cover the middle part by that I mean they went straight from a magnetized CD sounds bad a demagnetized one sounds better but they didn't explain what the problem was that the magnetized CD was causing, what the problem was that it created , other than it just didn't sound that good.

I went to look up some reviews like last time and just looked. through that wider soundstage, greater separation between instruments, deeper bass, better high frequency response, you know, the usual kind of things that are really subjective, one person may hear it, another person may not, but again they seemed happy with the results, I mean these things. It cost $399. I didn't see anyone say that's complete rubbish, it's a scam. He didn't do anything with that $399. They could have bought some nice gold plated optical cables, so I think I'd better test this out to see. What a disc degausser can do for me could at least prevent my CDs from sticking to the refrigerator, so I looked around for a suitable test CD and this one seemed to fit the bill, but in case ultramagnetic MCs aren't already magnetic. enough, I took this a step further by studying a total of three magnets on the top of the disk and then left it overnight.

Yes, it's a bit silly, but I wanted to give this a good crack of the whip, so this CD will surely be magnetized. If any CD could ever be good, it will be the next day and we should have a heavily magnetized compact disc here, so what I'm going to do is record it as it is now on a PCM recorder that's playing back at normal speed. and then we'll put it in the disk degausser and then we'll record it again and then I'll compare those two recordings to see if there's any difference. Well, now it's time to play the compact disc.

I am using this HD. vmd player yeah, a bit of a strange choice but I'll explain why in a second, but if you don't know what hdvmd is, I made a couple of videos about it a while ago, it's the HD video disk format that very few people have . I've heard of that loss on both Blu-ray and HD DVD. However, the reason I am using this machine today is because the laser just failed on the small CD player I normally use for this type of testing and it has been having difficulty reading the discs for a while and today it finally occurred. given up, so to make my nice clean recording from compact disc I needed a record player that had an optical output and this machine stepped in at the last minute to help now with the technique I'm using here. comparing the before and after on this compact disc is pretty much the same as what I used in the previous video where I compared another CD enhancer device and in the comments to that video many, many people suggested that I should have ripped the CDs on a computer and I compared the checksums, yes that makes a lot of sense, if the checksum is the same the audio output would be the same, the problem is that it makes sense to you and me, but when we want to talk about a product of audio file type, you have to try to keep things as much as possible in the audio space because as soon as you start moving to that, we'll talk about copying things to computers, you know the first comment I would get would be that someone say, well, The reason you didn't notice any difference was because you logged into a computer and they'll say things about fixing errors on computers.

Units of different colors. Different reading speed. All that kind of stuff. They come up with a million excuses once you move them. that area so as not to move it to that area, keep it in the audio area as much as possible to get a device that plays the CD audio at normal speed and that audio is recorded in a PCM recorder and then we look at that audio in a recording tool. audio editing and imagine if those checksums didn't match. I copied the CD twice and they disagreed. What does that tell me? It's not the same, but I don't really understand. the kind of detailed information about what the problem is or what the problem is, that's why I do it this way.

I'm going to take track six of this compact disc because it's somewhere in the middle of the CD and it's nice and short so it doesn't take me long to record, okay, now I have the magnetized version of this disc, let's demagnetize the CD , okay, here is our disk degausser. Now note this is a rd1, most documentation revisions etc. I'll find reference online to RD3, which appears to be perhaps a slightly later revision or the international version. The rd1 I have here came from Japan. The RD3 has a different color, but other than that, it appears to be functionally identical.

Looking back here, that's our 100 volt input fuse, turning it over, there's a little bit of information at the bottom, a very small amount. I don't know if that serial number says that 810 of these have been sold at that time. one came out not very sure now as far as the controls go well, very simple, we have a power button here that lights up when it's on and a delete button. Now erase, of course, I should say demagnetize, but anyway it doesn't matter, let's just put the disk on top here, it just sits in the middle there, it's quite high up actually, it's got a lip here that keeps it quite away from the bottom, so it should have a strong degaussing function here to be able to break that gap, but now, if we press this clear button, you'll notice that this light comes on and then it fades away and, uh, it's almost like a placebo type effect, I think now because you imagine, oh yeah, there you have it. the magnetization goes away, but maybe it's also there to be used as a timer because once it's done, you know it's done its job.

In some reviews I've seen online they did both sides of the album, regardless of whether that makes a difference or not. I don't know, but I don't have any instructions with this, so if that's the official thing you're supposed to do, you can do it too, so I'll apologize for degaussing the other side of this disk as well. waiting for that green light to go off again and voila, our CD is completely degaussed, yes, okay. I immediately put this record in the player and played it on track six again on the PCM recorder, so now I have my two recordings. before and after, so I put both in bold.

I spent a little time making sure they were both lined up at exactly the same starting point and then I reversed the second recording, merged the two into a new track and that would show all the differences that existed between the two recordings and guess what, there are no no surprise, yes, both recordings are identical, made a day apart, one before being demagnetized, one after there was no difference, the most magnetic compact disc ever shown showed no change after being demagnetized. I mean, did you really expect anything more? I was expecting a bit of a surprise this time, but I didn't get it.

I think we all knew where this was going, time and time again just to prove that this technique would have worked. and would have identified any differences between the two recordings if there had been any. I went back and on the second recording, in a small section, I increased the amount of reverb, so then I'll go through the The same process is done with most of the two tracks together to create a third and, as you can see here now, the section where I increased the reverb is clearly identifiable and could in fact be reproduced now in a recent video that I was using various methods to erase. compact cassettes and one of those methods was an electromagnet degaussing unit.

This will effectively be the same, but one way to find out how strong the magnetic effect is here will be to see if you can erase this compact cassette, so just press play here to show some audio here, this is a blue apple cart, like this that we're going to place them here now, it's a little awkward of course, hopefully, there we go, we can put it over the center axis, so I'm going to turn on the power here and I'm just going to press the delete button and I think we'll just turn it over and we'll do it the other way around too, so once it's faded and hopefully this will indicate how strong of a magnetic force this thing is emitting because if it could erase a tape, then hopefully it could degauss a compact disc.

If this tape still has a lot of audio left, you can tell it doesn't have that much of an effect, so just Listen to This, although it hasn't affected me at all, it hasn't even faded into thin air or anything. I think what we should do is open it up and see exactly what's in here, the part that's under the CD and you know. They weren't making it up, there's something here, so yeah, we're just going to roll up some copper wire and that bit of circuit, of course, just to do the timer function, that kind of thing, you know, I actually had the CDD.

The magnetizer sat in a box for a couple of years because when I first saw it I thought there wasn't much I could say about it, maybe I'll have to add a few things to it, maybe make a video about unusual CD accessories, which is why I bought the CD shaving device a few weeks ago and proved that as it is, it turns out that I can talk about things for longer than I imagine, but as far as these two devices are concerned, they are rather in the same line. things that claim to be able to improve the audio of a CD, which is slightly different than being able to get better performance from a CD.

By that I mean you get better speakers, better amplifier, maybe adjust yourlisting environment of all that type. of things so you can hear better what's there, but you're not altering what's there, which is what these things almost say they do a CD is a CD is a CD the audio that's recorded there is set up and just It will sound as good as when they put it in there, if there is any problem with it it will start jumping and clicking and all that kind of stuff, this idea that someone can get more out of the recording is a bit silly to me , but I understand people's desire to tinker with things I mean back in the days when the best possible audio equipment you could have in your house was maybe a record player and maybe you were trying to improve it. a little bit you put a better stylus on it, maybe you put a non-slip cork mat on it, some insulating feet to prevent vibrations and all that kind of stuff and you might notice some improvements when playing with it, you say, oh, you can, that's a little better and I think people wanted to adopt that analog way of thinking. to the digital world because they just didn't like the idea of ​​a CD player being a sealed box or that the record went into it and it just played it perfectly every time and there's nothing you can do about it that you can't improve.

They were already there and they wanted to have that ability to play with it a little bit to get a little bit more performance and in fact there are a lot of other people selling these disk degaussers. I have a screen behind here of just the current models. I don't think they are making the RD3 right now. I'm not too sure, but there are many alternatives you can get. You can even get a vinyl record degausser if you want, but I personally don't think I'm going to do that. Be a demon magnetizing more of my CDs because I just don't see the attraction.

Oh, sorry anyway, that's all for now, as always, thanks for watching the foreigner.