Lenehan Loudspeakers & Cryo'ed CD's

[DaleRoyce]

Ok, So as some of you may know i've been on the hunt for some new midfields for mastering (not tracking)
and yesterday i demo'ed a pair of these http://www.lenehanaudio.com.au
I did the usual "take your own reference cd's" and got quite a surprise.
First of all.. has anyone else heard a set of these.. If so, what were your impressions.

I'd spent about and hour working my way back and forth thought my reference tracks on these
Lenehan M1 plus's. What short coming i heard were outweighed by the amazing detail, depth
and ease of listening of these bookshelf size monitor style speakers (wow, i could write for HiFi OZ, if there was such a mag)
Look to put it plainly.. Once i stop focusing on that 'very' narrow low mid freq that i thought was missing in the Vocals,
I started to hear the bigger picture about these babies. I mean, where was this sound coming from..
I had to keep reminding myself that it was coming from those little red numbers over there.
I absolutley agree with whatever his name is on their REVIEW's page about the M1's being like larger electostatics.
I'm a hard man to pry cash (credit) from, so i will have a listen to a few others on my list,
but right now i feel these guys, in my space, hit the mark, In a different space a sub would be required (imo).

Secondly... The REAL surprise of the day/week/year and almost decade... The difference between my copy of 'Ray Charles and friends'
and the other guys cryogenically treated cd.
F@#k me, Hardware/cables/coverters and systems aside, when it comes to how the signal changes based on the
commercial CD/DVD's plastic short falls is nothing short of eye opening.

...........I have been schooled.

[rick]

all i can say dale is becareful of the path you are going down , trust me it will get very confusing very expensive and
it will be full of the kinds of guys you dont want to spend your dinnertime with !

some audiophile stuff is truly sublime , some is truly criminal the great thing is you get to work out which is which all by yourself :)

i know all about cryo stuff - i dont need to freeze my cds, you might want to - i dunno ..
it makes no sense to me... i have much more crazy things to worry about

[DaleRoyce]

Understood.
Your on the money about the philes, This guy had it all.
But i know that a great bit of kit is worth more to the sound
than a 1000 esoteric cables, two bits of great kit 10000 times so..

Head screwed firmly on my shoulders......... Not.
But i do hang on tight. ;-)

[Kurt]

I hope to god you're taking the piss.

Secondly... The REAL surprise of the day/week/year and almost decade... The difference between my copy of 'Ray Charles and friends'
and the other guys cryogenically treated cd.
F@#k me, Hardware/cables/coverters and systems aside, when it comes to how the signal changes based on the
commercial CD/DVD's plastic short falls is nothing short of eye opening.

...........I have been schooled.

[jkhuri44]

im sorry...

Cryo'd CDs???

CD's are digital...what would freezing a CD do to the 1's and 0's? if there's no skipping, thats how the cd should sound?

[Chris H]

Well Dale is in good company.....Bernie Grundman in the video link below asserts that a digital clone won't sound as good as the original so prefers to master from the original hard drive the audio file is on.......:)

http://www.nme.com/video/id/VSJ-33hDtTE ... b%20Ludwig

[chris p]

what would freezing a CD do to the 1's and 0's?

Because the CD does not actually have 1's and 0's. It has reflectors that direct a laser beam one way or another, which the CD player detects and then interprets as either a 1 or a 0.

Now according to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the state of a system is unknown and unknowable until an observation is made (in this case by the laser striking the CD surface). What cryogenic freezing of the CD achieves is to reduce this inherent degree of uncertainty about whether or not the beam will be deflected the correct way as intended by the master recording. It does this by reducing the CD fabric's vibration at a molecular level and the fixing it in place. So rather than the laser hitting a surface whose molecules are jiggling around all over the place, it hits a surface that is stationary, producing a more accurate reading by the player. You will immediately notice the extreme depth and realism of the soundstage, and the clinical warmth that radiates from the accuracy of the digital medium. And of course, this entire paragraph is nothing but audiophile bullshit designed to take money from the credulous.

I've no heard or tried this at all, but knowing how CD's work, I simply cannot see how freezing the CD does anything at all, other than perhaps to freeze off any dust or oils on the surface (which can cause real errors in the playing). It sounds like expensive detergent to me.

[jkhuri44]

well, what i mean is that if the cd's being read wrong/or inaccurately... shouldnt u b hearing crackles or harsh digital artifacts?


sorry, i laughed my balls off at this phrase:

"clincal warmth"???.

[chris p]

Yeah, I should trade mark it.

[mylesgm]

I think you forgot "holographic soundstage that reveals glowing images of the musicians leaping from your speakers to perform air guitar solos in your bedroom"

m

[jkhuri44]

I think you forgot "holographic soundstage that reveal glowing images of the musicians leap from your speakers to perform air guitar solos in your bedroom"

m

lol

[Kurt]

Not to mention that cds get warm just from being played..

They spin at around 500rpm near the start of the disc, whilst constantly being bombarded with additional energy from the laser.

Bernie Grundman may have some grounds for his claim... CD players have built in error correction, if the player can't read a bit or two it will interpolate and guess what should be there. Data storage doesn't do this, if even one bit is unreadable the file is broken. This would only make a difference if mastering from playback of an audio cd, not a data cd used for file transfer.

[Thirteen]

If any of this was true, and data reading from a CD changes or improves when the CD is cryo treated, then I have to ask, why does it only apply to music? If you read an application such as Protools, Windows or Mac OS from a CD/DVD to a hard drive, the application runs. If ANY data was not transferred the same as the data on on the disk the application would not run, it would fail. As far as I can see the whole thing is absolute audiophile bulls^*t, because applications do not run better if you cryo their CD/DVD, and they do not tolerate incorrect data at all, so clearly the non cryo disks that applications are shipped on work perfectly at room temperature of you would never be able to load an application from a CD or DVD.

Even considering that there may be different error correction systems on app disks compared to "audio" CD's, the reading of the disk surface is identical.

[jkhuri44]

If any of this was true, and data reading from a CD changes or improves when the CD is cryo treated, then I have to ask, why does it only apply to music? If you read an application such as Protools, Windows or Mac OS from a CD/DVD to a hard drive, the application runs. If ANY data was not transferred the same as the data on on the disk the application would not run, it would fail. As far as I can see the whole thing is absolute audiophile bulls^*t, because applications do not run better if you cryo their CD/DVD, and they do not tolerate incorrect data at all, so clearly the non cryo disks that applications are shipped on work perfectly at room temperature of you would never be able to load an application from a CD or DVD.

Even considering that there may be different error correction systems on app disks compared to "audio" CD's, the reading of the disk surface is identical.

thats what i was trying to get at...its digital, it reads...or it reads sounding fucked up...if it sounds good, and normal, thats as good as its gonna get! until the plastic wears out in 20 yrs. but when that wears out, its not gradual, its a sudden sorta thing, from my understanding...

[jkhuri44]

in addition, that Ray Charles cd probably sounds better coz its remastered....not coz of Cryo.

[DaleRoyce]

To be blunt, and fair i'll say this.

I know what i heard. Listening is what i do. And i can listen hard, but this was @ the end of a listening and i thought to myself, Its been an hour of listening
and i'm not buying any eclectic snake oil, i'm an hour from home, I dont F@#kin fly this far away for a holiday, man its time to go... But then, I heard what i heard.

"The Ray Charles Genius love friends cd was released in 2004, the track was "it was a very good year" w/ Willie Nelson. (No remaster issued) They were the same.

>>>What cryogenic freezing of the CD achieves is to reduce this inherent degree of uncertainty about whether or not the beam will be deflected the correct way as intended by the master recording. It does this by reducing the CD fabric's vibration at a molecular level and the fixing it in place. So rather than the laser hitting a surface whose molecules are jiggling around all over the place, it hits a surface that is stationary, producing a more accurate reading by the player.<<< (apparently if you cool plastic quickly it causes distortion)
I DONT KNOW! I'm in Listening not Fabrication.

Ok, But I did notice the EXTRA depth in the "soundstage" also what seemed to sound like a more dynamic freq' range. (quite noticeable to my ears)
But to term a Audiophile phrase " Less wooly..."

All other well known digital audio info aside (you know one's and zero's are one's and zero'o). ......I say all this with no explanation..

Oh.. Anyone heard those speakers.

[DaleRoyce]

And Bernie's on the money about the digital cloning.. No doubt in my head...phones.

[rick]

cryo changes the molecular level of anything it freezes , so the actual 'crystal' of the fabric of the polycarbonate of the cd changes after cyro treatment

how does this change the sound ..? i dunno really ..dunno if it does either!
i havent and cannot a/ b .. it

but there is a whole level of audiophile releases i do for japan insist it is real

and they use a special cryo system and discs that are pressed in "crystal clear" cd media thus avoiding normal laser focus errors

the inference is common cd plastic is cheap arse cloudy crap where you want error free optic light transmission

so before you guys kick dale too hard
there is SOME science to the efforts - now is there any "sound" to the science ?

well i will let you guys work that out

i am busy :)

[jkhuri44]

so u can just buy a cryo cd and stick it in a CD player?

any normal CD player will do?

[rick]

thats the sales pitch

[DaleRoyce]

The Phile that demo'ed the speakers for me also played me a burnt cryo cd with some sax/jazz combo, through his $2000 High end Blue Ray/DvD/CD/everything player.
I did not ask him for a price to supply me with cryo'ed blanks but he said he can if i want.
Does my GE freezer go down to 300 below ;-P

[Thirteen]

The implication is that a non cryo CD delivers corrupted data and the cryo process corrects the data transfer error. (Unless of course you believe that the data is already correct and that the cryo process somehow improves perfect data?)

This is clearly not the case, as I pointed out, applications do not tolerate data errors. It stops them from working.

So, if the cryo process does in fact work, and the disk does read better, then it points more to a gross defect with the Cross Interleaved Reed Solomon Code error detection/correction system that audio CD's use. The error correction that data CD's use must be far more robust that CIRSC in that case.

I can burn an application to a CD on my burner, put it into a computer and the application runs fine. I burn an "audio" CD in the same burner, and somehow the disk no longer produces accurate data transfer because it is an audio CD, and it needs to be cryo treated to transfer data accurately. Not making sense to me I am afraid... So if you are hearing an improvement it points to some very disturbing problems with CIRSC, because the AFAIK the CIRSC spec is that a CD must be able to play a CD with a 1mm hole drilled in it with no DATA loss whatsoever.

[chris p]

I'm with Steve on this one. CDs have error correction, so its just not that important to have "error free optic light transmission". CD's are sort of like Suduko - there can be a whole chunk o'stuff missing and you can still work it all out - if fact they're better than that, because they can actually work out if a data bit is wrong and correct it. So its got to be a whole lot of data wrong before that gets stuffed up. Errors and sound problems are FAR more likely to arise from the player (especially the use of underpowered opamps in poorly designed circuits) than the CD.

Dale, I'm sure you know we are not having a go at you, and we all accept you heard what you heard. We just doubt whether the CD being frozen had anything to do with it.

[rick]

so you guys that think cds can actually sound ok with a 1 mm pinhole in them...? (trust me they dont )
you know all about bler rates right .?

the ideal pcm data playback involves NO error correction , not just not much
cd cannot give NO error correction pcm playback and thats kinda lucky because the cd spec says it doesnt have to !

when they invented cds i think i remember that dinosaurs still roamed the earth .. and i was around helping out on the buttons the day they made the first australian cd !
anyway realtime 16 bit pcm audio playback WAS a big deal then
and they made sound assumptions on what was good enough based on the available technology

all these audiophile schemes ( cryo , coloured pens ... vibro pods etc etc ) are just trying to minimise the bler rate from the real time (actually its buffered... ) pcm playback off cd

less errors = better sound thats the theory - and frankly thats the truth

the weiss/maya converter i have goes to extreme effort to make the pcm data error rate statistically ZERO
even though it has no moving parts they still chase that ideal .. so the digital geniuses know its worth chasing
who are we to argue its a non issue ?

Compact Disc transport technology is very different to the mega drives found in computers today even though it seems the world assumes they are the same because they take cds and play them i am sure you will find that everything from the speeds to the laser size, colour shade and focus is vastly different

i dont think the "my computer program never has a problem with optical data" argument is very strong
nor is the "i froze my cd" and it sounds better argument .

use you ears , use you head , use your money , but dont assume todays magic is not tomorrows technology

sometimes it actually is .

(i have frozen every cable in my place on a whim and i know the actual metal is better off for it - but i am still waiting for that metal to start talking and wish me happy birthday )

oh yeah steve you can just summize the above as "yes in fact the CD error spec is not as good as is made possible today with newer data drives"

[rick]

i just stole this off dave collins on another forum
its a ancient mitisibishi x850 32 track recorder still going strong using frozen storage technology !

[mylesgm]

I think thats the wrong sort of coke for a 'real' studio...

[jithknot]

I think thats the wrong sort of coke for a 'real' studio...

hahaha +1 lol

[Thirteen]

So it sound like the solution is simple - Make your own CD player from a computer data drive and some reasonable converters, and you no longer need cryo CD's.....

[rick]

ermm they do !
ever seen some of those $60,000 audiofool cd players ?

[heathen]

I won't discount cryogenics in the audio world, though I'm not gonna run around freezing everything with liquid nitrogen in my sound system either.

Residual effects are proven such as atoms in crystaline structures becoming more alligned after cryo treatment.

Solids are weird even though they are solid to feel and touch they can still behave similar to liquids over a long period of time. That's why really old glass panes in really old buildings look a little warped when you look carefully, the glass is still behaving as a liquid and slowly being dragged toward the ground by gravity. Plastics such as CD's may be even worse for these effects, maybe not I dunno, but it seems reasonable that they would.

Really weird things happen as the temperature drops down near absolute zero, super conduction is a good one and also "Bose-Einstein condensates" are another really really weird one.

Also most physicists can't even agree as to whether light is a waveform or a particle or both, (I'll actually say light "IS" a particle :)) which definitely relates to CD's as they are played back via a laser, better understanding of light may produce a better medium with no chance of errors eventually. A friend of mine I about to release a book on this very subject of wave-particle duality and why it is nonsense.