mswlogo;542402 Wrote: > I was listening to some mp3's on our common server at work and really > liked one I had listened to a lot. So I bought the CD and ripped it to > FLAC. It sounded aweful. Then I asked my coworker to bring in his CD. > The one I bought was remastered as HDCD. Then I found out dbpoweramp > can process the hdcd. After that it sounded great. Unprocessed HDCD is > listenable but in no way sounds good. It's amazing how just a small > shift of where the resolution is used can make significant difference. > It's effect does vary per album and per song. > > If you believe half the crap in this thread that you can attenuate 3 or > 5 bits with no harm. HDCD would not work. But it most certainly does. > You can think of HDCD as optimizing the gain dynamically. Don't confuse > that with loudness.
(ahem) I've got over 150 HDCD's - I used to make a point of buying them when I got an HDCD-capable CD player. Now they are all ripped as 24-bit flacs via DBP. I have yet to hear an HDCD that sounds bad without decoding - on the other hand they all sound better (to differing degrees depending on which features of HDCD have actually been used) when decoded. I can't believe anyone would say that Sailing To Philadelphia by Mark Knopfler sounds bad in non-HDCD replay... There are various components of HDCD, one of which is the peak extend function that is a compander, making the peaks louder on playback than their 16-bit value would otherwise imply they should be. However, when this happens everything gets louder, it's exactly like momentarily lifting the volume control. On normal playback, the peaks are not made louder. Not every HDCD uses the peak extend or the filter switching. HDCD does not optimise the gain - it simply boosts the level for loud bits making them louder than they otherwise would be, which gives an apparent increase in dynamic range. ripped HDCD playback (which is 24-bit) is completely the same as normal 24-bit playback and thus the 5-bit limit holds. Just to be clear on what you perceive to be "crap"... all I am saying is that in practice at best you can perceive 19 bits of DR and (for 24-bit) the only time you get to hear all 19 is when the music is near full scale - and the bottom 5 are inaudible at that point. As the music gets softer - ASSUMING YOU DO NOT TOUCH ANY VOLUME CONTROL - you'll be hearing the "middle bits" only, because there's now nothing in the MSB's and the LSB's are STILL too quiet to hear anyway. When mixing, a 30-40dB cut in level of a track is effectively the same as muting it... Try it for yourself in Audacity. Generate a ful scale 90 second sine wave then apply a fade out effect to the whole of it Then on a separate track generate a click track of say 128 measures at 80 BPM Then try reducing the level of the click track - 10dB, -20dB and so on. To what level does the click track have to be reduced to before you never hear it, even when the sine wave is nearly completely faded...? (DO NOT ADJUST YOUR REPLAY VOLUME) This is what real-world LSB audibility is about. -- Phil Leigh You want to see the signal path BEFORE it gets onto a CD/vinyl...it ain't what you'd call minimal... Touch(wired/XP) - TACT 2.2X (Linear PSU) + Good Vibrations S/W - MF Triplethreat(Audiocom full mods) - Linn 5103 - Aktiv 5.1 system (6x LK140's, ESPEK/TRIKAN/KATAN/SEIZMIK 10.5), Townsend Supertweeters, Blue Jeans Digital,Kimber Speaker & Chord Interconnect cables Kitchen Boom, Outdoors: SB Radio ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=77725 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
