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.
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. |
Well, it was to INCREASE the signal to noise. As I recall it had something to do with the early anti-aliasing filters not being great. AFAIK, any CD player should automatically detect and enable/disable the matching de-emphasis as should most audio playback systems. However it's imperfect. According to this, it's not on a lot of CD's so maybe you don't care?? https://studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasis_%28release_list%29 |
