Accidental AudioStrobe?

[jcarruth]

I put a Kip Mazuy CD into my old Mind Gear Zen Master CD player. He is an artist that makes meditation CDs. The CD is not encoded with AudioStrobe or Turbosonix that I know of. It still fired the glasses and made for a meditative experience.


Is there something in the CD that is firing the glasses - accidental frequencies high enough to trigger the glasses, or does the Zen Master have its own little program running internally that is firing the glasses?


I?ve noticed that whenever I am listening to a CD on the Zen Master, there is a high frequency left and right sandpaper sound I can hear that sounds like it could be a trigger track. But I don?t hear this sound when I put my AudioStrobes through my Photosonix machine, which is set up to decode a real AudioStrobe CD. The Zen Master is not using AudioStrobe, but something called Turbosonix instead.


Any ideas as to what might be going on here?


Thanks,
jcarruth

[Andy]

Hello jcarruth and Welcome!

Here is some info on that.

[jcarruth]

Thanks, Andy.

Any idea why the Zen Master "reveals" a little pulse sound over the music (on both AS & regular CDs - the sandpaper sound I mentioned) and the AudioStrobes played on a regular CD player do not?

jcarruth

[Andy]

Any idea why the Zen Master "reveals" a little pulse sound over the music (on both AS & regular CDs - the sandpaper sound I mentioned) and the AudioStrobes played on a regular CD player do not?

I have no idea. I know nothing about the Zen Master device.

[neuroasis]

Any frequencies in the range of 19.2khz will trigger AudioStrobe. Many times cymbals and hihats will trigger for instance. I would guess on the Zen Master that its DAC (digital audio converter) or amplifier section is clipping at very high frequencies and that is what you are hearing. It is a defect in the audio chain. That is the most likely scenario.

Of course, if the cds are not commercial, that is you made them from CDRs, then that could be a factor. I had a cheap portable CD player that would do this with burned CDs but not commercial ones, for whatever reason. I suspected it was iTunes encoding but never really investigated fully.

[Robert Austin]

"Turbosonic" uses somewhat lower frequencies than AudioStrobe to encode the lights; Mind Gear chose this approach at the time as it was commonly believed that AudioStrobe had a patent on the use of 19.2 kHz, but only on that carrier frequency. The Belgian company Psychomed used a similar approach with their Dreamer and other devices (17.5 and 18.5 kHz). So, that lower carrier frequency means that it was more likely to produce false triggers from cymbals and other high frequency audio content than AudioStrobe.