Do 'zeroes' and 'ones' "sound" better when on a gold disc, and if so how is this even possible?

I saw on Amazon that they are selling some old Pretenders albums remastered on gold CD's. There was some techno-babble about the sound fidelity which I pretty much ignored. Isn't this much like the Monster speaker cable baloney? How would digital information sound any different on a CD with gold particles or on one purely polycarbonate or whatever they're made of? Isn't a zero a zero?

i think it's like everything else: it depends. some probably sound amazing. the one and only one i ever bought ( a jam album) sounded like shit.

But isn't that sound dependent on other factors, i.e. mastering, what source was used, etc.? What seems like bullshit to me is the claim that a digital stream of zeroes and ones would theoretically sound different based on what material they're contained in. I ain't buying that idea.

You are good to go with not buying that idea.

i always thought the best thing that could be said for them is that they were less likely to corrode if there was some problem with the polycarbonate.

Gold CD's are just less vulnerable to some causes of degradation, theoretically.

i mean, i ain't no metallurgist, but i'm sure there is some fancy justification for gold being a better metal than aluminum or whatever for transmitting digital sound. who knows? someone may know.

yeah, there you go.

But "transmitting digital sound" is an oxymoron, right? Sound isn't actually "transmitted" at all - it's converted out of the digital bits and interpreted as sound.

Also, I have CD's that are over 20 years old now, and there's no degradation. I've had some that got scratched and wouldn't work, but the ones in good shape that are old like that play just as well as when they were new.

my understanding is that unlike data CDs, the audio CD format has no error checksums, so you are at the mercy of whatever readout mechanism is at work, hence the justification for crazy high end CD players, but the reason there's no error checksums is they originally thought no one would notice every odd bit being off? Are they wrong? (In some sense you will get more reliable fidelity coming from your mp3 player)

re: "play just as well as when they were new.", haha maybe they were right!

less thermal runaway & heavy diffraction w/gold cds

guys these CDs are made out of GOLD

less thermal runaway & heavy diffraction w/gold cds

― a full circle lol (J0hn D.), Monday, September 21, 2009 12:55 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

is this kind of lol or mostly sad

it's a reference to a scharpling and wurster routine

yeah, "transmitting" was the wrong word. think of the right word and then use that.

encoding?

in the short term, I'll bet those SD cards in your camera are probably more reliable than gold CD audio discs for accurately storing and playing back music data. Dunno about a million years later when aliens find gold abba golds on voyager.

o i c!

Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

^^ classic thread btw

it's all Greek to me.

unlike data CDs, the audio CD format has no error checksums

Per wikipedia: "In the compact disc system, error correction and detection is provided by cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code. CIRC adds to every three data bytes one redundant parity byte."

Obviously, the more the data stream is error-corrected, the more the sound quality degrades. The question is whether a reflective layer made of gold can be proven to deliver a consistently cleaner signal to the read-head. I haven't seen any impartial scientific research on that topic.

Whoops! What makes the Audio CD checksum system deceptive? From the article, it seems like it is devised to trick you into thinking you've got the audio off OK whereas with a regular checksum it will tell you if you've read bad data, so you can go back and get it right.