CLV Smear is often mentioned when discussing laserdisc players. I’m currently in the process of writing an enormous article comparing various NTSC comb filters. As part of that I’ve been comparing my various Laserdisc players. After reading about CLV smear I wanted to explore it a bit more and confirm a few facts. I can best describe CLV smear as a tendency for high contrast areas to faintly smear to the right during playback of CLV discs on most Laserdisc players. I’ve seen this being attributed to high frequency boosting applied to the signal from CLV discs by players to increase high frequency response. This boosting is generally not applied to CAV discs (except at the very start) since the high frequency response is generally much better. So – Is CLV Smear real ? Does the player make a difference ? Is it baked into the disc ? Read on… Continue reading →