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Examples; all the Roxy Music albums (1999-on remasters), Beck's "Sea Change", and others.Always seems to be the same - when ripped they 'replay-gain' in Foobar at -9 or -10 dB (i.e, they're LOUD) and generally sound like shit through my outboard 16-bit DAC .
Ferry's vocals on the Roxy albums, for example, are particularly gritty and unpleasent.
Follow Ups:
HDCD is a form of dynamic "compansion", which involves compression near the peaks, encoded on CD. So it depends on how "hot" the signal is on the media.That said, I personally think HDCD sounds mostly decent (and some superb) via non-decoded playback. If it's not decoded, whether it's 16 bits or 24 bits doesn't have much bearing, for it's the digital filter, not a condition that would further affect the HDCD playback. The sonic effect of non-decoded HDCD playback is very similar to that of dynamic limiting.
HDCD has a feature called "Peak Extend" which compresses peaks by 6dB. An HDCD player will re-expand the peaks, non HDCD players will not.However, Peak Extend is an optional feature - I don't know if the Roxy Music HDCDs use it (I know the Joni Mitchell ones do).
A far more likely (but depressing) reason is that the remasters employ a lot of compression. Unfortunately that seems to be the norm these days.
The Roxy Music "remasters" are credited to Bob Ludwig, which is why I bought all 5 albums (on trust - I DO know who he is) in one go, despite a pact with myself to never buy a CD mastered after 1998 again, with certain exceptions.They sound absolutely horrible.
I assumed the compression/limiting practices used on contemporary CDs would have been mutually exclusive with "HDCD" mastering standards (20-bit resolution?).
But having listened to "sea change" and "lateralus" again (having put them away soon after buying them), It seems I was wrong.
*** I assumed the compression/limiting practices used on contemporary CDs would have been mutually exclusive with "HDCD" mastering standards (20-bit resolution?). ***No, unfortunately applying compression is almost as easy as pressing a button (and completely independent of the HDCD encoder), and you can even compress 24-bit recordings to the max :-(
It's very hard to buck the trend - I'm using compression in my recordings as well, otherwise it's hard to achieve a particular sound or have average levels that are "reasonable".
But I try and limit my compression to around 3.5dB, occasionally 6dB for very problematic material.
But why - WHY sell CD's with a "HDCD" logo on them (and further, with such doyens as Bob Ludwig's name on the credits) when they are .... just more of the same over compressed/processed shit?A rock recording that replay-gains at -10dB in Foobar is barely 12-bit resolution (if that), let alone the "extended resolution" of HDCD!
These are all classical music, but sound great through my mod'd Assemblage DAC 1.5 with HDCD decode and very nearly as good ripped and played by via my M-Audio Audiophile USB and then the Assemblage without the HDCD decoding
Bill Bailey
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See my stereo config ... but always looking for cost effective improvements
Flat, muddy - generally not worth listening to.
Ah, but play it thorugh a decent player with HDCD and it sounds great! Not incredible, but better than most "rock" CDs...
"David! You can KILL a man with a chopstick!" -Keith Charles, Six Feet Under
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