I've finally managed to do the comparison! I borrowed a NAD C 542 HDCD player from a local HiFi shop yesterday to do the comparison. Unfortunately I did not have much time so I could not do any serious listening.
This is how I tested: - "Festival day of Seville" track from Reference Recordings HDCD Sampler RR-S3 (HD)CD - EAC rip of the 16bit CD track - 24bit 44.1 kHz WAV output from WMP10 via Cronotron plugin - 24bit 44.1kHz recording of analog output from NAD C542 CD player via M-Audio Transit The JPG's are screendumps from Adobe Audition showing the right channel of the track. In addition I created two images of the last 40 seconds of the track from the Cronotron WAV and EAC rip files where the dB scale is zoomed in to display the detail of the recording levels. The output from WMP/Cronotron is identical to the output from the NAD HDCD player and dynamic expansion is used. Note that the recording from the NAD is about 1 dB "hot" compared to the WMP/Cronotron WAV. That was the closest I got... Also, the file sizes I got indicate the same: Cronotron - 136,716KB and NAD output 136,443KB. I also briefly tested Paul Simon's "You're The One" album and Mark Knopfler's "Ragpicker's Dream". Here the the HDCD encoder seem only to be used to downconvert from whatever resolution the studiomaster is in, to 16bit 44.1kHz for CD production. The peak level ends up at -6 dB both in the Cronotron WAV and the analog out from the NAD. So, in addition to being mastered "loud" with peak clipping, these albums are not really HDCD's... Here are links to the jpg's. http://www.ii.uib.no/~olavs/Cronotron.jpg http://www.ii.uib.no/~olavs/NAD.jpg http://www.ii.uib.no/~olavs/EAC_rip.jpg http://www.ii.uib.no/~olavs/Detail_Cronotron.jpg http://www.ii.uib.no/~olavs/Detail_16bit_rip.jpg Eric Carroll wrote: > Olav Sunde;184400 Wrote: >> That is indeed my idea. I plan to include all the three versions in one >> >> view to make it easier to see the differences. Problem is I am having a >> >> little trouble finding a HDCD player I can use, but I am working on >> it.. >> > > Olav, > > Another option is to use the version II of the HDCD sampler which has > both HDCD and regular tracks on it. I am going to order it to see what > I can see. > > If you make progress on this let us know, please. > > _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
