Audio Desk's CD Sound Improver Is a Lathe for Your CDs

In case you're the kind of guys who know one or two things about how music should sound, then you know that nothing is (and unfortunately won't be) perfect, not even CDs, which are "round" by nature. Now, in the discerning audiophile world, the less-than-round shape of a CD produces a wobble when it comes to spinning the disc at high speeds, and this wobble induces jitter, thus wrecking havoc through the purity of your sound and rendering the rest of your high-price audio rack simply useless.

Something had to be done to eliminate as much as possible from this menacing wobble-thing. And since the audiophile world is full of surprises, a solution was quickly born.

Given that the CDs aren't at all that round as some would want them to be, they had to be trimmed. And Germany-based Audio Desk was the first to create a CD trimmer that could correct this situation. The Gläss CD Sound Improver is a desktop tool anyone can use to make the CDs rounder and thus improve their quality.

We're actually talking about a miniature, high-end CD lathe: you put an optical disc in it, fasten well the knurl, give it a 9000 RPM spin and then manually move a swing arm onto the edge of the disc. The tungsten carbide blade will trim the disc edge so that it is as round as possible, at the same time beveling it to a 36-degree angle, supposedly destined to eliminate the laser scatter. Even more, after the disc is precisely cut, you get a felt pen to "seal" it off, applying a layer of black ink on the freshly cut edge.

Everything looks neat and makes sense, including the hole in the back of the apparatus, meant to allow you to connect a vacuum cleaner to drive away the thin plastic spirals resulting from lathing the CDs. A blade should be enough to trim as much as 2,000 CDs, and Audio Desk is also selling spares. Some tests made by Hi-Fi magazine revealed that CDs and SACDs do sound better after being lathed and brought to a truly round state.

Now, in pop-physics, this whole thing makes perfect sense, especially as we're talking about the inherent vibration and wobble of CD players, which causes the laser beam to move and read the wrong data. The Audio Desk Systeme Gläss CD Sound Improver retails for a rather hefty $900 price, but if you are really into your audio CDs and are also looking to get the best possible from them, then this gadget is definitely worth your money.


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