On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:34:22 GMT, audiodir wrote:
Cryogenics is a weird thing. The only documented eveidence of any effect is
with ferrous materials. I know of no other documentation for having any
molecular effects on any other material: non ferrous or plastics, etc.
Having said that, though, I did a little experiment that I learned of in
other newsgroups. I made two CD copies of a disc and simply froze one in a
regular freezer for a few days. The frozen disc had a bit more bass and
resolution. The effect seems permanent, too and this is without going to
cryogenic temperatures.

There are more than a few reasons to doubt that there is a real change here.
And it's trivial to extract the song files from that CD, and compare
the two disks.

Perhaps it affects the thermal dyes used in a CD-R,
but even in blind tests, most listeners can pick out the difference.

Do you have an actual study to back that up? The problem is, it's a digital
storage medium. They're either zeros or ones. The bits aren't going
to be come zero-er, or one-er, just because it's been chilled, and if the
bits get flipped, that's going to induce noise, not "a bit more bass and
resolution". I won't even get into the error correction bits built into
the format that also prevent this sort of thing from being plausible.

People were convinced that green magic marker around the edge of a CD
made them sound better too, but that also isn't going to change zeros into
ones, and even if it could, it wouldn't do them in an audibly pleasing
and predictable way.

Seems
to me we need a little more research into this (probably means too much $'s,
though).

You could do it for free, with a Mac and iTunes. Or maybe even the PC
version of iTunes. Or, if you agree that a CD-R is a digital storage medium,
fill it with whatever data you want, freeze one, don't freeze the other,
and run an MD5 checksum of both disks to verify that there's no difference.

Hard to say about the brass instruments. Without a controlled
experiment, people are likely to hear what they think they want to hear,
just like your frozen CD-R's.

Dave Hinz