Compare: Direct CD listening v. Apple lossless listening - Page 8

I've found that with out of spec disks, some drives will play them and some won't. I haven't detected any rhyme or reason to it... maybe because it's hard to tell exactly what form the damage takes in a bad disk.

See ya
Steve

With these the damage was fairly prescibed, originally caused by poor choice of materials for the reflective layer in pressings from the period 1988-1993 by Philips Dupont Optical's UK plant. Bronzing CD's

The reflective layer oxidises causing audible mistracking to begin with and then eventually holes appear as the condition gets more extreme.

The DVD player could play discs even with holes via it's analogue outputs because it was merely interpolating data which was actually no longer there.

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I meant what sort of data is damaged in a bad disk. It could be redundant data that makes no difference, or catalog data that makes the whole disk unreadable.

See ya
Steve

Granted but in this case it always starts at the outer edge so effects the last track rather than the TOC, audible as a kind of low level crackle a bit like shellac!

I must be a lucky boy. I've ripped hundreds of CDs to hard drive and I've only run into a couple of errors - complete dropouts. These errors were, of course, on the original CDs as well. Thing is, a few problems that I know were on the original CDs, didn't make it to the drive. They just got corrected away. Ain't life grand?

Tim

Looked at the paper.

I looked at that JAES paper. Assuming one doesn't question their experimental design (I don't), the results indicate that people apparently cannot distinguish unfiltered "high-resolution" signal from the same signal passed through a 16-bit/44.1-kHz "bottleneck". These results do not tell us we shouldn't buy SACD players because playing SACDs on them won't give us any SQ benefit.
So, we have these ~5,000+ titles on SACD that, unless everyone has been totally fooled by the industry and their own snobbism, sound better than a typical CD, let's put it this way. Maybe only because of mastering - sure, very possible. Now, the only way for one to access this selection is to buy a SACD player. Can't play them anywhere else. So... ?

I imagine whenever the industry wants to sell us something new, they like to have some nice numbers in the pitch. "65 times higher sampling frequency" does read good, even if the person did not have any idea what the SF is just a few minutes ago, prior to hearing the PR release...

And then, couple years later - did they just notice vinyl keeps selling really well?..

Fact 1:
Digital sources basically can sound different even if having the same DAC and exactly the same bit streams injected into them at same jitter specs and levels. Cause of difference? Different final analog output stages.

Fact 2:
Mastering makes a difference.

Fact 3 (Corolary 1 from facts 1 and 2):
Some CD players playing the lower quality CD format can in some cases sound better than a high-res player playing the high-res version of the same music, because of either the CD having better quality electronics/circuitry than the high-res player in the analog output stage, or because the high-res format mastering was poorly done compared to the CD's.

Fact 4:
Current inexpensive players (whether CD players or DAPs) may have surprisingly high quality DACs, decent jitter levels, and competent analog output stages.

Fact 5:
Anyone who reads this will be suddenly eager to send me $1000 through PayPal

Most SACDs are hybrids. You can play them on a regular CD player. The DSD hybrid SACD I compared sounded exactly the same on the redbook layer as on the CD layer. Why buy two machines?

See ya
Steve

I've lost count of my CD collection. It's somewhere around 8,000... I've been working my way through ripping all of them and so far, only two CDs had unreadable portions. One had a huge rip through the mylar from a sticky sleeve. The other played fine in a CD player but wouldn't work in my computer for some reason. That's pretty good odds.

I haven't found any bronzed CDs yet. I have a few laserdiscs with laserrot though.

See ya
Steve

I agree with points 1 and 2. The better the design and components, the better the sound of the player, e.g. more analogue sounding.

Point 2:

you bet mastering makes a hell of a difference! Try a cd version and a xrcd, xrcd2 or k2hd version of the same album and you'll find out how much more you can get out of a cd by good mastering! Any xrcd or k2hd cd i've got is superieur to the normal cd! Even some k2hd cd's are up to notch or even better then sacd! And you can play em in normal cdplayers!

As of now i only try to get high quality cd's like xrcd or k2hd versions. Only if i really want a cd of a certain performer, i'll buy the cd version.

point 4: if you mod the players, you'll find out they even can sound much better, the same or comming close to high cost players for a much sensable investment!

My take on this is: there is no good standard component, if you md it, only then you get the maximum out of that component, even expensive stuff is much better when modded!

Conclusion:

a good mastered cd, like xrcd or k2hd cd's are much better and as good as sacd! The problem is that most recording studio's are too lazy to try their best and only make low cost high speed recordings (albums made in a few days!).....all crap. Sacd is used as an excuse not to try to get the maximum out of the cd! JVC proves that a good mastering is all it takes and can easally compete with sacd! All you have to do have good equipment and put some effort into it!

Almost all modern albums are crap and way to loud, compared to the good older recordings...especially pop.

they don't tell ya that sacd suffers from high frequency compression. They use only 6 bits for higher end frequency and people started to hear differences between the cd and sacd versions in favour of the cd, wich didn't compress the higher end. It sounded more open! This is now also recognized by most professionals and seen as a flaw in sacd! If you have some good speakers and especially with a high frequency ribbon it should be quite obvious.

Isn't DSD a 1 bit format, except when it is DSD-wide (8 bits). Blech and Yang, 2004 did some blind listening tests of PCM vs DSD in their tests only 4/110 subjects were able to detect any difference between DSD and PCM and then only by 4 Tonnmeister students using headphones with single instrument musical samples, they did not say whether one format was preferred over the other and they also hinted that the detected difference may just have been a digital switching artifact.

I don't know what xrcd, xrcd2 or k2hd (speed, perhaps?) are, but I think BigShot was talking about the quality of the mastering from a human craftsmanship perspective.

Did the mastering engineer take the time to find the best (hopefully the original analog masters, not copies) tapes to master from to digital? Did he/she use noise reduction and, if so, how severely and to what effect? Did he digitally compress the master to maximize the loudness of presentation, squeezing out all of the dynamic range in the process?

These are the real issues, and loud compressed masters with the trebles and sometimes the bass boosted are what is hard to listen to over time and makes cds sound harsh. Well mastered cds do lack the unique color of vinyl, but there is no need for them to be hard or bright or etched. This is done to them. Deliberately. And the ultimate irony is now, when digital audio technology has reached the point at which it should be able to exceed analog, loud, compressed, bright masters seem to be all the rage among pop/rock record producers who seem to be in a competition to determine who can make the loudest, brightest, most obnoxious record. Ever notice that digital sounds better on jazz and classical? It is being done right.

What's even more ironic, is that "Digital re-masters" sold to us as improvements on the simple transfers of the 80s and 90s from analog tape to CD are, more often than not, anything but improvements. They could be. They should be. But they're not. Sometimes they even sound good at first, just as a slightly louder or brighter presentation is almost always heard as better initially. But they wear on you after awhile.

That grating, harsh glare that bothers you so? It's not your cd, it is your record company. They are doing it to you on purpose. Next time you consider going to the record store to pick upt that $70 digitally re-mastered box set, don't. Go to the used CD store and find the old cds from the 80s and 90s. Your ears will thank you for it. So will your wallet. Here they're running about 50 cents on the dollar.

Tim

Thanks, that's something I haven't heard yet. Well, I won't be investing in decent speakers any time soon, and I don't even know what the "high frequency ribbon is", so...

x2. Exactly describes my impression from the recent Led Zeppelin's Mothership (and it's not the worst!).