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. |
@kijanki nicely done. |
All this just underlines the difficulty of re-creating an accurate and satisfying sound once you break up the signal into billions of pieces. And the lengths you have to go to in corrupting the sound further in an effort to undo the undoable. The old omelette question for digital engineers. Their work has achieved a lot in 40 years but dither will always be with us. |
