Help with a de-emphasis list?


WOW! I just popped an old CD, that has always sounded crappy, into one of my players that happens to have a de-emphasis circuit and this thing sounds like an LP! I don't see any way to identify this in/on the packaging. Anybody have an idea how much music was coded this way? A list of favorites? The CD of mine is Tom Petty "Southern Accents". Is this niche worth rediscovering?
zieman
This was more common at the dawn of CD but there were fewer and fewer CDs that utilized it and, gradually, the number of players that could implement it reduced to very few, as well. You can effect a similar effect with a gentle HF rolloff.

Kal
PRE-EMPHASIS: pre-emphasis increases the magnitude of some frequencies with respect to the magnitude of other frequencies in order to improve the overall signal-to-noise ratio. A corresponding de-emphasis process is required on playback so as to restore the original signal. It was used early on in the manufacturing process, but advances in digital audio rendered pre-emphasis obsolete; however, some have claimed that some pre-emphasized discs, when played back properly, sound superior to subsequent re-masters that don't have pre-emphasis. Your experience seems to indicate that SOMETHING good is going on.

I was somewhat concerned with this issue as I own a Linn Majik CD Player, and in his measurments for the Stereophile review, John Atkinson noted: "However, when it played back pre-emphasized data, there was a slight positive error in the treble, which will be just audible with those few CDs that were mastered with pre-emphasis."

So I did a little reading on the subject and this is probabaly the best threads I found: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34336 http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/archive/index.php/t-76710.html

Bottom line: From what I gather, only a very few CD's were mastered with pre-emphasis, and none since the 1980's. From what I can tell, very few CD players had an indicator light that the CD was mastered with pre-emphasis, and that this information would not be on the CD packaging/liner notes.