Does anyone still use the green pen?

Whatmore said:

Remember the green highlighter tweak of many years ago.
I'm wondering if anyone still uses it. If not, what happened ? Did it stop working?

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no they switched to purple

Try lipstick

On vinyl?

ack said:

Try lipstick

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Like most "tweaks," it eventually went out of fashion.

Then let's try mascara ?!?!? How come the cosmetics industry has not invaded high end audio yet???

Whatmore said:

Remember the green highlighter tweak of many years ago.
I'm wondering if anyone still uses it. If not, what happened ? Did it stop working?

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I still use it. CD Stoplight is what it's called (by clear image audio). It's beneficial. I can hear when a CD/SACD has it or not...seems to reduce noise, allow music to emerge with more resolution but more relaxed. I've used it for years. Cheap. Easy. Results speak for themselves.

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue43/green_pen.htm

Black Jumbo Sharpie is the genuine answer for cd, dvd, b-ray.

CD Stoplight became popular in 1990 or 91 or there about from a write up in Stereophile by Robert Harley.
I was just starting out as an audiophile and I got caught up in it back then, imagining that I heard a slight difference, but stopped not long after when I realized that I was just imagining something because I wanted to "believe".
Interesting to note that none of them (the writers at Stereophile) ever mention using that product in any of their reviews.

I was building speakers of all kinds & kept hearing the MDF I was building them out of coming through even almost taste it. I know that might throw some of you but in my cabinet making & furniture building as a living I have worked with a lot of different woods & sheet stock over the years. What was baffling me was this haze to the sound coming from my various speakers & no matter how much box deading I did or stuffing the sound was flavoured with MDF. So I started researching different types of materials to make them out of & was starting to get depressed about the cost of tooling & the cost for exotic materials. One day as a whim I coloured a cd like the advertisements of the day said but with a black sharpie as just green to counteract red light seemed to focused for my way of thinking, why not cover all the spectrum? While at it rather than just edges why not all of it? Because light is traveling around in the plastic same as the edge of glass that I often handled so...soak it all up! I tossed the cd in the transport & couldn't believe what had happened, all of the colouration was gone! Great!! No need to fret over expensive materials & their complication of working anymore!!! So out I go & buy myself a couple of decent classical cd's that were the same, brought them home & listened to them for any differences & none were detected. Coloured just the edge of one & compared the two, there was definitely a change for the better with the coloured one. So I coloured the centre also & again the gains were very much noticeable. Then I didn't bother with even trying to keep the label exposed as with the 1st one I saw that if you turn it 45% to the light you can read the label just fine. Anyway it is a very positive gain noticeable on a boombox even. Everything is clearer across the range with way more focus, detail, depth & width of stage. So off to the dvd player serious gains again & now with the B-rays also. A scuff-up with a 440 grit is advisable for the B-rays as their surface is so glossy but inking alone still is a noticeable gain in audio & video. I got myself a cd lathe but didn't find all that noticeable a change with it but the flat black marker with it would be my choice ultimately as the Sharpie is gloss black but the sharpie's jumbo size for speed of blacking a disc out is a compromise I am willing to settle for Also, a disc with a black or very dark coloured label does not reveal the same amount of gains but the white label & thin papered one that you can almost see through with all sorts of clear plastic around the edges gain the most from black inking.

I don't use the green pen, I follow the regular flow.

* Your post is interesting; more scientific evidence is needed to optimize the compact disc (materials, coloring, stamped label, etc.).
The LP is going through a new process to improve its sound quality; I believe the CD is in dire straits as well, as we know it.

Most speaker's enclosures are made of MDF. I think it's a flaw, and some speaker manufacturers have noticed it.
I agree with you that we can hear the MDF's "echo chamber", and it's not natural in the tree of life...
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If scientific evidence was presented to me regarding what you just said about the "flat black marker", I would start a business right away and get a patent in order to get better sound. ...Not for the money, not for the company, not for the workers and investors, just for everyone to be happier with a better sound from the compact disc in the year 2016 and beyond.
Then, why start a business with a patent? Because it's the North American way. ...Free enterprising, free trade, free oil, free people...in a material world...Madonna.

There is some humor on what I've just said above. But nonetheless your post is interesting of pursuing a new direction. ...No more MDF and better laser capability from better materials and stamping and coloring of our CDs. In Germany they know some and they act upon; some of their CDs you can see the care they apply.
Also, top grade CD-R/RW are much better to record music with higher quality sound from their superior build with more layers.

Mass market CDs are for only one thing; financial profits.
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In Japan they have the Crystal discs. They cost more though, much more.
Today we have Blu-ray Pure Audio discs, with high-res stereo and multichannel audio tracks. Should we paint them too with black/green/purple markers? About SACDs?
Those are legit facts and questions. We're here to discover the BEST alternatives in order to get the BEST sound quality.
We have no business to espouse and restrict ourselves with the lesser products of inferior quality sound, including the medium and the source of its making and music recording engineers.

Here's what I think: Our CDs that we can see through, just buy dark CD labels and stick them to them. The laser is going to track better and less berserk in its music rendition...less erratic. What you think? Makes sense?

Yes I have blacked-out lots of SACDs also, gold foils, all the formats & the improvement is there too. All black CD-R's are the way to go as there is no reflection on the working end of things that way. I black from the info face at the outside edge up over the outer edge across the label down through the centre hole & up to the inside edge of information/foil side (into the barcode area there), if I end up on the foil a quick wipe with the edge of my finger or thumb gets it off before setting up, wipe away from the foil towards the centre (or outside if outer edge) to keep from spreading it further across the foil. A little wipe with some cd cleaner & all is good. If you miss the fact that there was a foopah in the 1st place a little toothpaste on a soft cloth or your finger will polish it off. People don't seem to be aware of light pollution & the effect it has on your signal chain from the get go. I have been ridiculed by many claiming I don't understand the laser systems & how they work or the industry standards but when I press them about how they went about their testing of what I am explaining here I never seem to be able to get exact parameters of how they went about it or their systems? I have a life, I'm not in need of recognition or an ego boost of any sort, just trying to share of real life trials that work & are so easy to do. MDF sound in my boxes is not a problem now that I discovered (so long ago) that it never was MDF I was hearing it was light pollution & the time smearing it causes in the signal, in the form of echoes returning from bouncing around inside of the cd plastic, I was hearing & (again for those whom might think the diy loop antenna for my stereo is really for getting ahold of the mother ship) literally it was causing me to taste the MDF in recordings accusing the speaker boxes. I couldn't understand because I had them made of 2" MDF or 3/4" layers, 45 degree chamfered clear pine or poplar trim around the insides glued in with PL premium types for no right angles & extra bracing effect it allows for. All sides plus tops & bottoms at angles to one another for the standing wave stuff, then internal braces thick materials or dowels & tops, bottoms & sides covered with thick sticky backed roll tar type sound deadening materials heat gun applied for maximum adhesion covering the entire inner surfaces even ports or chambers. Yet this MDF colouring, till I tossed in that 1st black-out cd (wish I could remember which one it was now?) & the haze just like as if I had been cutting out a kitchen's worth of the stuff & it was hanging in the air despite my air extraction equipment & of course on/in your body essence of MDF was gone! I mean like stepping out side from the heat of the wood stove into the fresh winter air GONE!!! Just like how the fresh air all crisp & densely packed with oxygen molecules to the max came all of this information from my speakers too because the light pollution had been removed so there was bass extension, midrange clarity & details in space with the highs sparkling off the way they should just like the moon shimmering through the crystals on the snow. At the time I was using....I don't know, some cd player for my transport, DAC was an Erno Borbely thing, I'm pretty sure it was a NAD amp to foil wound type crossovers 'n such mounted outside of the box with Focal drivers in an MTM setup all hardwired with....I think I was experimenting with DH Labs stuff at the time silver with foam dielectrics I believe. I have been through much equipment since, wire, solder, drivers some connectors though I am a hardwire nut for the most part, another thing I am ridiculed for often on these sites .
You mentioned sticking dark labels on the disc's, personally I am not comfortable with that only in the sense that it could add to error if not perfectly centred but one could argue that earlier I said I didn't see much advantage to the CD Lathe in my time with it but a fresh Jumbo Sharpie makes a much better cover in my experience.

"You mentioned sticking dark labels on the disc's personally I am not comfortable with that only in the sense that it could add to error if not perfectly centred but one could argue that earlier I said I didn't see much advantage to the CD Lathe but a fresh Jumbo Sharpie makes a much better cover in my experience."

No problemo here, the kit comes with a machine that takes care of it...centering the dark label.

By the way all your points are very valid. All there is left to do is to come up with measurements that confirm them. And the path to the entire CD manufacturing and speakers transformation of the industry will be only one step to the next higher/better one.

We need more people like you with a high degree of awareness.

Weeeellll, really the way to go now is SD cards & get right away from the spinning disc's & all of it's noise injection, yet any disc gains from a black sharpie

SD cards better than USB sticks?

And how many black markers (Sharpies) do I need for roughly 5,000 discs?

The measurement guy's are all over me for they say they can't measure what I am expressing....blacked-out cd's, Pledge furniture wax on the foil side (that one really throws them, lol), hardwiring, some even argue low mass fittings do not qualify as they don't show up on a scope or graph somewhere. Type of solder, type of wire or heaven forbid remove the fuses & their holders to hardwire with a bare wire or cotton/silk covered??? Eeeeew, he's one of them other worlders, hahaha but I ask is their equipment hooked up with crappy fittings & wire? Or how about the guts of it? I just don't get how we can find so much comfort in a piece of simple machinery's graph when the simple machine has nowhere near the the amount of computing power or hardwiring the human body does. There are things we need our machines to educate us on & help us to understand what we are hearing for sure but are we really needing to be replaced or thought for by simple scopes or even computer programs? They aren't reproducing themselves yet & putting us into cages....or are they? I better stop now before the Troll comments start

NorthStar said:

SD cards better than USB sticks?

And how many black markers (Sharpies) do I need for roughly 5,000 discs?

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I suppose 30"ish" per marker for max coverage but really now, how many disc's do we have that need to be absolutely perfect, really? I am sure it's been 4000 disc' for me thus far....
USB's are usually tied to a computer & not a simple sd card reader but I am not the authority on that one & guts of stuff have to be improved upon usually for to get things to market there are usually resistors in the way & crystals buzzing in tin boxes with lousy power supplies....

The only card (SD) readers I have are from my laptop (Sony, yes it has that), and an older BR player (Panasonic that don't play BR discs anymore).

Question: Why CD manufacturers are not making a better product with a dark label and black ink @ the CD edges, inside and outside?
Why CDs don't come with instructions telling us that we have to do it in order to have a superior sound quality?

No, don't answer those two questions; we already know why.

* You have a pic of a black marked CD?

I actually experimented with the official Stoplight pen a few years back when I was trying to find the optimal combination of blank CD-Rs and an associated burner drive - two things that most definitely do influence the sound (along with burner speed). As for the green pen however, I never really came to a clear conclusion. The problem is that, for example, the "sound" of an otherwise identical CD can even be influenced by fine physical balance variations from one to another and even the quality of the clear playing surface and reflective substrate. That is why, for example, expensive audio mastering disks such as the TY SPMPT-CD-R disks sound closer to the sound of the actual CD master file than the 50 cent disks you'd get at the local store (which incidentally have now gone up to $2 thanks to the relative scarcity of the format these days).

On cheap disks I thought I heard an improvement but because this was not like other tweaks where I am always able to blind test results I had to put it down to the placebo effect. And in some cases I thought it sounded worse - the nocebo effect is just as valid an effect in audio as the placebo effect. Anyway, with no conclusion, the fact I felt it was my imagination and that - along with the cost and pain-in-the-arse method of application, it never got past the experimentation stage.

I do, however, remember reading an article where a very well-known audio guru experimented with the green pen, found it did change the sound and went to find out why. Turns out it changed the jitter "profile" of the disks that were treated. In other words, the noise floor attributable to the jitter effect changed in appearance after the treatment. The only thing is that it wasn't for the better. It was for the worse! But sometimes worse jitter can subjectively improve the sound in a similar way on certain recordings in certain conditions and that probably explains why I and others could not obtain any reliable or consistent results.