The most fascinating element of the player’s design is the blue LED that rides outboard of the dual-rail linear-tracking three-beam laser read assembly. Most Stereophile readers are digitally up to date and aware of today’s requirement to dither down (or noise-shape) from the typical 20+ bits of the master tape to the 16 bits of current commercial media. In a similar process, YBA treats the data to a massage of sorts as it is read—a form of pre-dithering, if you will. The additional LED bathes the underside of the CD in an eerie blue light while the red read laser does its thing.

According to Yves-Bernard: “It’s been observed that the phenomenon of stochastic resonance allows random noise to amplify signals of small amplitude. This paradox, used in biology, astronomy, and physics, can also be applied to opto-electronics. It provides a quality of sound similar to analog and produces a level of information never achieved before. The blue laser diode actually permits better extraction of information from the digital medium with less reliance on the error-correction algorithms.”