absolute fidelity
In Quest of Absolute Fidelity:
The Saga of the Black CD – Finding Black Gold!
Ver 3.0 November 2004
Gary Leonard Koh
Preface
It’s been over two years since I first published the “Black CD Paper”, and we
have had feedback ranging from “just upgrade to SACD you cheapskate” to
“the color of a bit doesn’t make a difference you moron” to “Thief! What you
are doing is promoting illegal piracy of music”.
I am
not
advocating music piracy. What I am doing is trying to make CDs
sound better so that you will all rush out and buy more CDs. After all, with
289million CDs shipped in the first half of 2004 against 300,000 SACDs and
DVD-A’s, the CD format is here to stay. If they sounded better, audiophiles
will go out and buy more CDs.
Gratifyingly though, the majority of the feedback came from readers who
have had great success and were surprised by how good these black CDs
sounded:
“My wife came running in from the kitchen irate because she thought that I
spent another $20,000 upgrading the system. This is truly one of the best value
for money tips I’ve ever had.” M.L.
“Amazing how a copy is improved, by using black cd’s. I did a blind test with my
son. He picked the black as better within 3 seconds! I find the top end opens up
and is more detailed, musical with added height to the image.” M.F.
“It does make a dramatic improvement of CD sound (takes away much of the
stridency but gives more detail, particularly on voices and piano!), even when
done on a non top of the line black cd on a computer's internal cd-rw drive.” T.G.
“This is the single greatest tip in my history of buying and modifying gear.” G.A.
“After trying Memorex’s black CDRs on the (Yamaha) CFW I am seriously
jazzed, this is the most significant tweak that I’ve ever heard.” K.T.
Over the past two years, hundreds have written back to us to tell us how
much better the black CD sounded, and Genesis dealers all over the world
regularly use black CDs to demo systems to customers. We now use the
Black CD exclusively when doing our two-channel demos at shows. There may
be still a few skeptics out there, but we do believe what our ears tell us.
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absolute fidelity
More importantly, there were a number of readers who had great critique,
inputs and contributions as they had been doing something like this for
sometime. So, this update includes all I’ve learnt from these, the true digital
music-philes who have been experimenting for years.
I also want to thank the real computer experts who think that I am a
“complete idiot” because bits are bits. I am always reminded of the quote
from F.A. Clark, “We find comfort among those who agree with us – growth
among those who don’t”. From those experts, I have also learnt a great deal,
and this paper is all the better for it.
Nevertheless, I have taken out a lot of the conjecture and speculation for
why I think that the black CD sounds better. The important part is still here
– how to do it – and that’s all you really want to know anyway.
Summary of Updates
•
•
•
•
Dye formulation and factory important in Black CDs
Cyanine-based Black CDs sound the best but deteriorate rapidly
New drive and software – Plextor Premium-U and PlexTools Pro
Good non-Black CDs found that sound fabulous
1 The Story
Back in mid-2002, when I was contemplating buying the assets of Genesis
Technologies, one thing bothered me: I believe passionately that I had to
bring something useful to the table. Despite my past experience in business,
I wanted to be sure that I could contribute something else to the audio
community (besides reviving the Genesis brand).
To find this contribution, I turned to my own frustration as an audiophile (or
music-phile!) – I much preferred records to CD’s, but yet a lot of material I
couldn’t find on LP’s. CD’s were taking over, but I was still dissatisfied with
the quality. I wanted CD’s that sounded more musical and less harsh. I
bought an SACD player (the Sony SCD-1), and lots of SACDs, but the result
was still musically unsatisfying.
I guess testimony to the success of the black CD process after 2 years is
that my own music-buying habit has changed. I have bought may be 10 LPs
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Copyright Genesis Advanced Technologies Mar 2003 & Nov 2004. All rights reserved.
absolute fidelity
over the past 2 years, and hundreds of CD’s – most of which I’ve backed-up
to a Black CD. Besides, most of the new (and old) music is still being released
in CD format.
1.1 Relying on Rumours
When I first started looking into this process, I had already heard from
audiophiles in Singapore that when they copied a CD, the copy sounded
different from the original. How can that be when the copy is digitally
identical to the original? To test the theory, I made a backup copy
1
of one of
my favorite pieces of music from Jazz in the Pawnshop (JatP).
Then, I listened – yep, it sounded different, but why? I did a bit-by-bit
comparison using the computer. Again, identical.
So, I took a different blank CD-R. This
time, a gold disc, and copied JatP again.
Again, a different sound. Again, identical.
How can three seemingly identical copies
of a piece of music sound so different?
Well, it did take the whole of my time over
the next two months, but by the next time
I went to visit Arnie Nudell in June 2002,
I had a couple of new CDs to demo to him.
He was floored by how good the “Black CD”
sounded. I knew then that I was on to
something.
1.2 The Results
Arnie with first Black CD: June 30, 2002
Now, with over two years of research,
testing over a hundred different types of CD-R media, eleven different CD
burners (including DVD burners), and two different software for Digital
Audio Extraction, we can now
consistently
make a copied CD sound
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I am
against
music piracy, and make back-up copies of only CDs that I own. If you use this
process, please respect this. Also, it is tantamount to piracy to make copies of CDs to give
away or sell.
Copyright Genesis Advanced Technologies Mar 2003 & Nov 2004. All rights reserved.
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absolute fidelity
spectacularly better than the original. We would like to share this discovery
with you.
The CD copy is more
musical
, in particular, the high frequencies ring with
trueness that I used to experience only from records and live performances.
The air and the image stability are much better, and instruments and vocals
sound more dynamic and true-to-life. And most importantly to me, the sense
of timing and “foot-tappity-ness”
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of live music was there. The music was
definitely more involving, and the sense of being transported to the musical
event was real.
This made the music on the Black CDs sound much more like a “live”
performance than on the original. Our quest for Absolute Fidelity is getting
somewhere!
The benefit of this Black CD was evident not only in high-end audiophile
systems, but it made the music CD obviously better on
all
playback systems
that I tried it out on: in my car, a mini-compo system, a mid-fi system, and
even over headphones on a Sony CD Walkman!
However, we have found an increasing number of players having problems
with the Black CDs. Many of the older CD players would have problems – but
this was not restricted to Black CDs, they were not designed to play CD-Rs.
Some of the older Wadia transports seemed not to like the Black CDs
(although they had no problems with other CD-Rs) and would skip tracks.
Players like the Sony ES9000 would not play them at all due to the built-in
copyright protection system. Readers have also written to tell me that many
Marantz and Rotel players wouldn’t even recognize a black disc.
Nevertheless, we managed to find two non-black CDRs that sound fabulous,
and one black Audio CDR that played even on players with built-in copyright
protection systems. (More in the Appendix)
2 The Technology
Once I found that there was a difference in sound, I researched some of
the technology of the music CD to try to understand why this was happening.
What I found out was pretty astounding – to me anyway!
Some readers have told me that this is called PRaT – Pace, Rhythm and Timing. Well, it
makes my foot tap in time to the music!
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Copyright Genesis Advanced Technologies Mar 2003 & Nov 2004. All rights reserved.
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absolute fidelity
Firstly, the precision needed to write the data on to the CD is incredible!
Space between tracks is 1.6µm (one millionth of a meter). That’s about one-
fiftieth (1/50) the width of a strand human hair! The data on these tracks is
written as pits and lands, and the pits are 0.8µm to 2.8µm in length and
0.56µm wide.
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The tracks are written in one long spiral and read at constant
linear
velocity
(CLV) with your typical CD player. This is in contrast to a record, which is
also one long spiral but read at constant
angular
velocity (CAV).
Theoretically, this means that the distortion on the whole CD should be the
same, whereas the distortion on an LP increases as the stylus reads towards
the inner grooves of a record.
In order to achieve CLV, the angular speed (rpm) of the CD has to be slowed
down continuously when data is read from the inside of the disc to the
outside in order to maintain constant linear velocity. To do this, all CD
transports have a rotational servo to provide the correct disc speed.
However, it is almost impossible to control speed infinitesimally steplessly.
Which means that the disc decelerates in tiny steps, so, in reading or writing
the data it would go: too slow, a bit too slow, a little bit too slow, just right,
a little bit too fast, a bit too fast, too fast, decelerate, too slow, a bit too
slow…… This speed difference is theoretically “smoothed” out by the read-
ahead buffer and the bitstream regulated by the digital clock on all CD
transports. Theoretically.
2.1 Jitter Creation
A CD writer creates discs by a process of transferring audio data to the
disc’s surface via laser irradiation creating “lands” and “pits” (digital 0’s and
1’s) on a layer of organic dye. The laser has to turn on and off within the
time that it takes the disc to turn 0.8µm and still be able to make a “pit” of
consistent depth, width and position. Unfortunately, this is also extremely
difficult, so these lands and pits end up not being of a uniform length or
For those of you interested in more detail, Robert Harley, in The Complete Guide to High-
End Audio, gives a precise and concise treatise on the technology of digital audio. On the
web,
http://www.howstuffworks.com/cd-burner.htm
gives a great description too!
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