Does this weird simple hack make compact discs sound better?
I remember a period in the 90s when people swore that there was an insanely simple way of making any compact disc sound better. All you had to do was take a green marker–a Sharpie would do–and run it around the edge of the CD. That green ink (allegedly) improved how the CD player’s red laser read the pits on the disc’s surface, making it sound better.
I tried it, of course. I wanted to hear a difference, but I don’t think I did despite going through a lot of discs and Sharpies. It was all very weird.
Here’s a hack I’ve just encountered: shaving discs. (Via Rick J)
I appreciate this guy’s methodology, eventually. But what a stupid concept.
I think the only grain of truth to the Sharpie thing is that people were accidentally blocking some sh***y DRM stuff in a particularly awkward time in CD(-ROM) history.
You could also achieve the same effect by holding the shift button when loading one of these DRM-protected CDs into your Windows computer. Holding shift would disable autorun in Windows, so it behaved like a normal audio CD instead of loading sh***y proprietary drivers and music players.
I never heard the sharpie thing was for improved sound. What I remember, and this is around 2001-2003. When Napster was exploding and everyone started “ripping” CDs, some record labels put a safe guard on the discs so you could not convert them to MP3s. If I remember correctly, you couldn’t even play them in computers. So, the sharpie trick was a way to circumvent that.
I think the CDs that had that were so sensitive that some CD players wouldn’t play them and the whole thing was scrapped. This is so long ago and everything has changed so much, I don’t even remember if any of that is true.
I do remember using a sharpie on discs for something though.
Like others have said, it was not to make them sound better, it was to block software from being installed (like Sony’s rootkit that later got them in big trouble).