One (offtopic) piece of advice would be to not use kitchen paper to clean anything, paper can contain wood fibres which can cause scratches. If possible always use a soft cloth for cleaning cd’s, screens etc…
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Doe anyone else feel that @NigelB should get a Forum Award for most comical replies to posts?
Jeez mon … he’s consistently hilarious!!
I’m still chuckling at this one. (Post #180).
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I could do with a sonic boost some mornings!
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I’ve been in many old English pubs, and a good few have a tin of brasso on the spirits shelf.
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Perhaps that’s not an avatar and his posts are in fact ghost written.
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And lockdown has resulted in me hitting the Brasso more than usual. Mixed with a splash of tonic does help…
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(as an aside, it’s strange when you read something at the top of the thread and decide to reply to it, and when you get o the bottom of the thread the topics seem soooooo far away 
)
One interesting thing to remember about expectation bias is that it is perfectly ok for you to have it and decide something based on it. If the expectation is that it makes things better, and you hear it as better, then, for you, it really is better, and that’s fine. It is only not ok if you are claiming it is objectively better. But since listening is subjective, maybe that doesn’t matter…
What is nicest is if you can use this to convince yourself that cheaper kit is better (or at least, no worse) than expensive kit - if you then can’t hear the difference, then you’ve saved money.
It’s a little like expensive wine - for some people they feel expensive wine is just snobbery, and are proud of the fact t that they can’t tell the difference between the £££ stuff and the £ stuff - which is great, for them, as they’ll get more enjoyment out of the cheap wine (it tastes the same, and they are saving money over the fools that are buying the more costly stuff). For those that can tell the difference, there are prices that are worth paying for (272/555/statement levels, depending) and those where the benefit isn’t worth the cost (or, where they can’t tell the difference again…)
So if you’re wanting to make objectively better systems, you need to address expectation bias. If you want to improve your system, embrace it (but try to focus on expecting more from cheaper kit if you can!)
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Are you a Psychologist? Cause you’re good at this …
Kudos, for the very clear thought processes.
I think I have an idea that will make me a lot of money …
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The affects of treatments like this seem weird, but I agree that some of them make an inexplicable difference to the sound of things. However, I can’t explain this one …
Can you rip a CD twice to WAV, with AccurateRip, once with and once without L’Art du Son treatment and then checksum the two resulting files?
No. But I’m sure someone here could, and I can lend them my spray.
Hahaha. I guess it might be overdoing it to send it to Germany
When I first came across this product reading an article in a hifi magazine, the writer went some way to explain it could be down to getting rid of substance residue used within the manufacturing processes of CDs.
As a student working during the summer holidays at vegetable factories. It was common to see a large flow of fresh vegetables in chlorinated water to keep bacteria at bay - perhaps why there is often a suggestion on the label to wash before use.
That laser mechanism could perhaps be reading the data more easily after treatment ?
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If that would be the case, then it could only influence the number of read-errors during playback, which could otherwise translate into digital artifacts (pops/clicks etc) if the disc is very dirty. But it wouldn’t have an influence on tonal qualities such as bass or sound staging. There is no relationship between those qualities and whether the disc can be more easily read by the laser. That is both in a practical and i would reckon a theoretical sense impossible.
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Your not doing a good job explaining why I can hear these differences. More a way of disproving it, and I’m not just making it up.
I have done many AB listening. My partner can also easily hear differences.
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Completely guessing here. If a ‘cleaned’ disc is easier to read, could this take a load off the processing circuitry, and if this processing is working more efficiently, could it be introducing less noise?
Noise reduction could manifest itself in improved tonal accuracy.
As you might be able to tell my background is in mechanical engineering rather than electronic design so am more familiar with the deployment of sledgehammers than oscilloscopes!
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I’m not saying there is no difference! There very well might be, i trust your report on this…
I only meant to say that a difference in tonal quality (bass etc) would not be related to the laser being able to read the disc more easily. So in that case there might be another explanation we can look for.
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To explain it in a bit more detail: every second there are 44100 samples used to reconstruct the sound. If the disc cannot be properly read, then it’s possible that soms of those samples fail and those are interpolated with the other samples. If too many samples in a row fail, for instance due to a scratch, then you will hear a click, pop or silence, since there is not enough data to successfully interpolate the values. In all cases however, the samples that are read correctly will be ‘perfect’ and will represent the correct frequencies.
If you hear a difference in tonal quality such as bass, this means that instead of certain samples failing, a large number of samples (and perhaps across the entire track) will have to be actively changed to different values. This is impossible with digital audio, samples can fail or succeed, but their values cannot be increased or decreased by a certain margin as a result of the laser reading the disc more easily.
This doesn’t apply since we are talking about ripped cd’s. Any (theoretical) circuit noise during reading would not propagate to the ripped file.
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Yes. I thought the same.
I’ve been using this product since I first started ripping to the Serve. Every now and then I’ll do a before and after rip just to test whether I’m wasting my time or going crazy.
In fairness some CDs seemed identical regardless no matter how hard I listened for differences, yet other times has been - not so night and day - but more morning to afternoon obvious differences.
Perhaps just down to the quality of materials used to make the cd ?