I read about this years ago and now am using a Audiolab 6000CDT. Before the 6000, I was using an Oppo and never noticed anything saying something was emphasized or deemphasized, so I just ignored that about one in a hundred disks sounded a bit bright.
Learned something new today and it isn't good.
I have been in this crazy hobby for over five decades and thought I knew most of the basic information regarding audio quality.
That was before this morning.
Today I learned about the practise of applying "pre-emphasis" to CDs that was around during the late '70's and early '80's. Apparently this practise was developed as a way of reducing the signal to noise in digital audio. The problem is this was a two-part process and required the CD player to have a "de-emphasis" capability to allow the disk to play properly. Without the application of de-emphasis, cd's would sound "bright".
My question would be, "Does everyone else know about this?"
If you do, "How do you deal with it?"
I still listen to CDs and this is not something I need in my life.
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The other thing that is kind of along these lines was HDCD decoding. I don’t know of any (and I haven’t searched) ripping software which would detect and expand an HDCD Redbook 44.1 / 16 to 44.1/24 so I ended up writing some hack based on old Microsoft C code. HDCD was also weird in that sometimes the HDCD flag was on, but no HDCD features were actually used. |
@kijanki nicely done. |
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