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Digital Tweaks and Audiophilia

This forum has turned into a lot of people bickering about the current set of digital tweaks (intellichip being the most obvious) so I want to start a technical discussion about digital tweks in general. From my perspective (electrical engineer, I do a lot of software but have also done a lot of large scale data acquisition measurement and analysis systems) a lot of these digital tweaks claim to do something with the data on the disc or improve the readability of this disc.

My thoughts on this are:
1) Trying to change the data on the disc would generally be disastrous (except for upsampling with a damn fine digital filter - see threads from a couple of weeks ago :-)
2) In this day and age, getting the correct data off the disc on time is NO PROBLEM. Redbook is not the best format, but with the transports and buffering these days you do not need any tweaks to get the correct data off the disc in plenty of time for the clock pulse, even with a cheap player. The times I see data reading become a little unstable is when my computer DVD drive tries to extract audio data at 24x the strandard data rate. You get some errors then, but at 1X or 2X it is always perfect.

So the real places for differentiation lie in the clock, filter, and analog circuits of the digital device.

The analog filters don't come into play much with up/oversampling since they operate far away from the audio band so drift with time (or differences between different players of the same model) are no longer an issue as their digital filters are 100% repeatable (well not 100% with ASRC but thats a different issue). The digital filter is where I see a very large differentiation in players.

If your disc has magnetic particles on it as it spins it will produce a varying magnetic field which will induce current in any wire/trace in its path. The motor will also produce varying magnetc and electric field but there is shielding between these and you other circuits, and generally there isn't beween the disc and circuits. This includes the clock and analog portions of your player, so jitter may be the result as well as some other analog distorions. Demagnitizing your discs may have some merit if you look at it this way (don't know if thats what a "clarifier" actually does but from the other posts it sounds like thats not what the inventor thinks it does).

If the "chip" claims to improve the reading of data, I have a hard time believing this would improve the sound since I don't think data reading is really a problem these days. Does it do something which prevents clock or analog circuit interference? (and the power supplies I consider part of the clock and analog circuits) I have no idea but if any improvements result I would think there is some effect in that realm instead of with improving data recovery.

Lets get a real technical discussion going about digital tweaks.

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Topic - Digital Tweaks and Audiophilia - macaque 05:32:57 05/15/05 (90)
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