Bugzilla – Bug 2684
Implement De-emphasis
Last modified: 2008-02-08 23:34:05 UTC
Contrary to popular belife some modern CD's (classic) still come with the RedBook standard "pre-emphasis" flag on the CD tracks. It was found on some pop/rock CD's mostly before 1986. Ripping these CD's with EAC, and then playing through the Slim hardware does not sound the same as from a CD player. Only solution at the moment is to apply a software deemphasis on the audio file itself, and thus destroying any notion of it being lossless.
P.S. See this thread for some background/comments: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18738
Not sure if we have the CPU power to do de-emphasis, but it's worth examining.
Untargetting for post 6.5 assessment.
Dean asserts we do not have the CPU available to do this.
Does the Squeezebox have the ability to set the Preemphasis flag on the digital outputs? That would be the natural way of dealing with this I think. Then de-emphasis would take place in my receiver or separate D/A automatically. This is one of the biggest flaws (that and no fast forward with flac+cue...). So far pre-emphasized CD:s in my collection are: Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (1975, Japan) Pink Floyd - The Wall (1979, Columbia) Dire Straits - Alchemy (1984) Electric Light Orchestra - Discovery (1979) Electric Light Orchestra - Secret Messages (1983) The Beatles - Abbey Road (Japan) Toto - Turn Back (1981) Toto - IV (1982) Toto - Isolation (1984) Genesis - Genesis (1983) All these sound horrible through Squeezebox, and performing de-emphasis in the digital domain is a bad idea.
i had a denon cd player that on the display indicated if the cd had emphasis or not. that was many years ago. since then i have ripped literally thousands of cds with eac. how would i even know if a cd had it? and if it did, if i rip to mp3 with eac is it still there? basically how does one handle this issue? and if a cd player can handle it on playback, perhaps new SBs should add the same chip to do so as well.