How High the Fi? . . . Exploring the Case of the CD and the Green Pencil

I got a good laugh out of Patrick Goldstein’s March 4 Pop Eye column on the supposed salutary effects of green marking pens on CD sound quality. Yeah, and if somebody takes a picture of you, it robs you of your soul.

What gullible and technically illiterate “CD fanatics” fail to understand is that compact discs are fundamentally different from vinyl LPs, where the precision with which the stylus tracks the squiggly grooves has a direct bearing on sound fidelity.

The information on CDs is computer data, pure and simple--nothing but long strings of 1’s and 0’s. And like all computer data, it’s either there or it isn’t; there are no “in-between” gradations of playback quality.

CD players also have sophisticated error-correction systems that can restore the data from a damaged disc or a less-than-perfect pickup. This restoration isn’t “pretty good,” or “almost perfect.” It’s perfect. If you hear any deterioration of the sound, something is drastically wrong.

The chance that a marking pen can improve CD sound isn’t minuscule. It’s zero. People who claim to hear a difference are suffering from wishful thinking or hallucinations.

If I was, say, the Lipton company, I’d start a rumor that CDs sound better if you rub them with a tea bag!

ROB LEWIS

President, Musonix Ltd.

Burbank

Lewis is a computer engineer and his company deals in electronic products for musicians.

In response to a question from Calendar about green pencils and CDs, Larry Archibald, publisher of Stereophile, the nation’s largest magazine dealing in “subjective” reviews of high fidelity equipment, said:

“I groaned when I first heard this idea, but I have to admit I’ve heard a difference (in CDs treated with a green marker designed for CD use).

“In the high-end audio portion of the most recent Consumer Electronics Show, almost everyone who heard the CDs treated with the green marking pencil heard an improvement.”

Archibald added: “CD is not perfect; neither is analogue. Engineers have come to appreciate that getting perfect realization is extremely difficult.”