Green paint inside CD players

[rollo]

  "Green Paint"  Let Tmazz tell the story, AM CBFs now Herbies matt. 



charles

[tmazz]

Gotta love that green paint   


The first time I met Rollo was at an AudioSyndrome meeting at his house. In the course of the meeting he mentioned thatthe hobby company Pactra had a color of paint called Ralley Green that was the color inverse of the wavelength of a CD laser and would therefor absorb stray laser reflection within a CD player. The next day I went down to my local hobby shop, bought myself a spray can and bottle of Ralley green and proceeded to paint the entire inside of my CD player, the case and any part of the transport that I could get to and would not come in direct contact with a disc. Well Ill be dammed if it didn't significantly lower the noise floor of the unit and produce a much cleaner sound. This was a second generation Magnavox CD player that I bought  new in 1984 and it remained in my system as a transport driving an external DAC until it started  to mistrack last year and I had to replace it. (Only 25 years of everyday use from a $179 component, what kind of cr@p is that?).  In all of that time my little Magnavox bested many big buck CD transports (OK, not all, but quite a few of them). It's gotta be the paint????

Here is my current dilemma. I replaced the Magnavox with a Denon Universal player. I would love to do the green paint treatment on the Denon but being a DVD/SACD type transport, I know it uses a different laser wavelength (640 nanometers vs  780 nanometers from a CD laser.) I am sure that you need a different color to absorb stray light from a 640 nanometer laser but I an not sure what that would be. I see that Machina Dynamica sells a product called Codename Turquoise that is proported to absorb stray light in CD & DVD players, but is this the best color for a DVD player? And on a more technical basis when a Universal play does from reading a DVD to a CD does the laser switch wavelengths or do both types of disc get read with the same 640 nanometer light.  If the laser switches back and forth I can use the same rally green paint because I am really most concerned with CD playback. But if both discs are read with "DVD light" I would want to figure what color paint would most effectively deal with that scatter.  Does anybody out there have any thoughts on this.   

Carl?rich - I realize that I kind of hijacked Rollo's turntable thread so if you want to move this to another section and give it a life of its own feel free to do so.

[StereoNut]

FWIW

I think the Codename Turquoise mat from Machina Dynamica is designed to work for CD, SACD or DVD players.

http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina34.htm

If you have a Blue Ray or Hi-Def DVD player you need the "Top Banana"

http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina35.htm

SN

[tmazz]

Bill,
  I've seen their info but my concern is still that the SACD/DVD laser is a different "color" than a standard CD laser so does the Turquoise do the job well for both or is it just a compromise midway between the two and there are better colors if you are doing one or the other. If it was just a peel and stick mat I would say what the heck and just swap in and out some different colors, but if I an going to start painting things I would like to get it right the first time.

[richidoo]

Imagine the face of the guy who buys a CDP from Tom only to have it finally crap out after 25 year during shipping. He opens it up to check if anything obviously wrong.     Besides the green paint, that is...

Henry told me about the green magic marker that was in vogue a while ago, which I assume serves a similar function as the green paint. You color the outer edge and inner hole edge with green magic marker to improve the sound of the disk. Should work as well as the green paint, by absorbing red laser light that goes astray inside the thick plastic disk between the disk surface and the pits. If the drive engineers had half a brain they would cast the CD drive parts in green plastic instead of black. But that's just so much voodoo. The lightnoise is way below threshold, nobody can hear a difference, it's digital you fool!
But we know better don't we, gentlemen?

http://www.snopes.com/music/media/marker.htm

[_Scotty_]

One more thing I don't worry about anymore having switched to playback from hard drive.
I never got heavily into the SACD thing. The whole Phillips SACD 1000 debacle kind of soured me on the medium. That and my CD replay has finally caught up and surpassed the replay quality I used to get from SACDs.
It makes you wish a more complete look at what influences the sound of optical disk replay was taken when the engineering is done on the drives. How much could a coat of paint or change in the color of plastic cost.
Scotty

[StereoNut]

Bill,
  ...If it was just a peel and stick mat I would say what the heck and just swap in and out some different colors, but if I an going to start painting things I would like to get it right the first time.

It's NOT "just a peel and stick" mat.

You get the 2 pc. turquoise mat and a small jar of rubber cement. Kinda a "do-it-yourself" kit.

I know because I ordered and have one in my "possession".  It's just that with all the other recent changes to my system (modded Naim Pre-amp, power supply & custom outboard phono stage) that I still haven't been able to really listen to yet, I didn't want to introduce another variable right now!

If my limited knowledge of rubber cement is correct...  I guess if you just put the rubber cement on the back side of the mat and put it in place "wet", it may be removable afterwards?  (Although, I doubt it would be re-usable.)   If you apply the rubber cement to both the underside of the mat and to your CD player tray, let them dry and then put the mat in place (which is supposed to be the more permanent application of rubber cement - right?) that's it.  It ain't going no-where! 

At that point, you better like the way things are sounding!   Otherwise, you'll have to turn to the next CD/DVD player tweak... "Codename Paint-scraper" 

SN

[Carlman]

Hard drives are a nice (but brief) respite from the nervosas of cd's but they are still mechanical platters.  I have recently replaced my failing Seagate HD with a new Samsung with some kind of vibration control built into it.. and then laid it on some ultra-squishy-rubbery foam substance in my case, isolating it.. and then put the whole case on vibrapods.  And yes, it does sound better than it did before.  It's mainly in the details.. for instance I can hear the oscillations of cymbals, bells, triangles, etc. as they decay now.. whereas before they just decayed nicely.  Bass seems a tad bit more defined too.  It's quite pleasant.  It sounds like it's as good as it's going to get in my room right now.  Oh, except for a tube that's dying.
-C

[BobM]

Actually don't the new players have dual lasers, so they can play CD's at one wavelength and Blue Ray's at another and maybe DVD's at yet another. I think you'll need 3 color camoflage paint inside these new players to cover all three wavelengths.     

[richidoo]

Here you go Bob!
http://www.duplicolor.com/products/mirage.html

I think we need Green paint for the CD laser and orange paint for the blu laser. Like Miami Hurricanes!

[rollo]

 I checked the interior of my Lector CDP. Noticed a black/green color used. I had gotten the idea after reading several manfs use the color to assist the laser in reading discs. So I tried it on an old Mod Squad CDP . Worked well, never did it again as the others I have owned this was considered in the design.


charles

[drews_hifi]

per my limited knowledge of light reflections:

most light at all wavelengths is best absorbed by a matte black finish.  i can think of no reason to try a complementary color, as wavelengths of reflections are not limited to the LED- there is scatter and fluorescence to be considered as well, all of which lower the energy of emitted photons, resulting in higher wavelength.

In my lab we use black finish for maximum quenching of fluorescence at all wavelengths.

regards,
drew

[tmazz]

You would think logically that black would absorb all, but the green paint did make an audible difference. It was one of those situations where it was so chaep to do that I just said what the heck and gave it a try. Perhaps it was the fact that the paint was a matte finish and the plastic it was covering was more glossy. Could be that the matte finish was more responsible for killing the refections than the color  itself. Like a lot of things in this hobby the whats of a given change are often a lot easier to get our arms around than the hows and whys.  It is just like cable, while most audiophile can easily identify an interconnect or power cable that sounds better than another, very few people understand why the sound is different. 

[BobM]

Could be that all it did was provide effective chassis damping 

[tmazz]

Could be that all it did was provide effective chassis damping 

Definite possibility.

At the time I never gave much detailed thought as to why it helped, I was just happy that it did.