DCC Archive 24 Karat Gold Makes a Better CD?

I understand that a poorly mastered recording sounds bad whether it's on a gold disc or not. Does the gold plating have any effect on the sound quality of a properly mastered disc or just the shelf life? I have heard conflicting things.I suspect it's little more than a marketing scheme...

 

Go here:
http://www.netassoc.net/dougspage/Interviews.htm

Click on #1 and scroll down.

 

Oops. Thanks

 

Um, the FAQ didn't answer my question. Steve says the gold makes a smoother surface for the laser to bounce off of. That doesn't tell me whether the plating affects the sound quality or not. It sounds to me like it might make discs that are less likely to skip, but not necessarily sound better than a properly mastered aluminum disc. Anyone know the answer?

[ November 02, 2001: Message edited by: Douglas Chay ]

 

Wow, Doug, no. A gold disc was not made so your musical enjoyment wound't skip. It's all about the way the lazer pickup reads the surface of the disc and how accurately the information is transferred from the reflection to the laser "relay" pickup, then to the DAC.

Plating has some to do with it, but aluminum surfaces of a CD are only "good" at keeping a letter-perfect impression of the original information stored on HD or DAT. Gold is near perfect because of the smooth and sensitive reflectivity of the metal.

This doesn't mean we should all push the record companies to use 24K gold. This doesn't mean that having a 24K gold CD guarantees or even enanbles the disc to be "skip proof" either.

It's just like the heavy and complicated vinyl produced for the audiophile market today. Here...

Aluminum is very easy to control, cheap and takes "pit" impressions quite well
from laser etching. The problem with the process is that the only way to make a cost-effective reflective surface with manufacturing is to make a "flake deposit" film. It looks like grainy silver paint before it's applied to the polycarbonate discs. If you looked at the finished CD product into a high powered microscope, it has the imperfections in smoothness - kinda like your driveway - even if you have thickly oiled tar or concrete. Also, because there are factors in the way "flake" is applied, you might even find some pinholes to "big holes" in the disc's surface.

The disc player you have tries to go over that surface quite quickly, and if a "hole" or "imperfection" is in the data word-length, your on-board data correction will try to repair it to a certain extent, and the output analogue sound is "compromised" for a brief nano-second or longer (usually less than 1/16 second or you'll hear a "chirp").

Aluminum is also natively "flake". Gold is and can be a solid, microscopic film. Solid is gooood. It's also more expensive. They make the 24K gold film so thin, you can see through it, and breathing on it causes it to crumble. Yes, the MFSL and DCC discs are like that, in a polycorbonate sandwich.

Neato fact: I saw on PBS how they used such a thin gold film to put on cakes (for the rich). It's like .000001 micron thin, and the gold is "edible". Don't eat your Joni Mitchell discs!

Now, if you looked at your gold CD in a microsope, you'll find the surface to be smooth as milk, glass, a baby's butt - pick your own discription. This allows the information to be as accurate as possible as a product, and the information that's fed into the DAC is =exactly= what the DAT had when it was in for "disc prep".

That way, you, the listener, are getting the exact information fed to your disc player that the mastering engineer intended, no jitter or error correction should be happening.... just keep your CDs in good shape, especially the gold ones!

Oh, and as long as you're doing CDRs and wondering the same thing, as long as you burn using a high-powered CD Writer like HP or Plextor, the error correction on CDRs are also VERY much lower than aluminums. It's just that CDRs are also very sensitive to elements, dye bleed and abuse

[ November 02, 2001: Message edited by: Sckott ]