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Topic: Dido destroyed (Read 37965 times) previous topic - next topic
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Dido destroyed

Reply #50 –
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The Australian release is 0.00013815% faster.


Odd, that makes it about 6 Hz faster, perhaps they thought Dido had too low a voice...

Dido destroyed

Reply #51 –
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Anyone here like Corsten stuff?

I have globaltrancemissions 1 and 2 by Corsten and they are awesome.

Dido destroyed

Reply #52 –
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The Australian release is 0.00013815% faster.


Odd, that makes it about 6 Hz faster, perhaps they thought Dido had too low a voice... 

You can't convert % in Hz.

0.0001 % is 0.00002 Hz at 20 Hz, 0.001 Hz at 1000 Hz, or 0.02 Hz at 20000 Hz.

When I did an analog copy from a CD Player to the soundcard, I got a 0.002 % speed difference : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=25&#entry70536

So 0.0001 % is well beyond the speed accuracy of CD players or soundcards.
In theory, a crystal clock can't be more accurate than 1 second per month, that is 1 per 30x24x60x60= 1 per 2,600,000 = 0.0000004 = 0.00004 %, that is half the deviation you found.

Thus the speed deviation is explained by crystal clocks inaccuracies. In order to keep a better accuracy in an asynchronous copy, or an analog copy, one should drive the player and the recorder with atomic clocks, or more easily, like in any properly setup studio, using a unique external clock generator for all digital devices.

Dido destroyed

Reply #53 –
Which, if you think about it, means my result is wrong!

The speed increase was by a factor of 0.00013815, which is actually 0.013815% faster.


Pio, I tried re-ripping the disc, using EAC copy range burst mode. It seems that the C2 errors cause visible (not audible) clicks at random. So, where there is a C2 error, there might, or might not be a click. Where there is not a C2 error, the clicks are either always present (bad recording) or always absent. Though I haven't exmined every second of all the rips to prove this - it's just a guess.

If my drive doesn't report C2 errors correctly, then all this is wrong. But it appears to. Finding a click in today's rip in the exact location where there was a C2 error (but no click) in yesterdays rip suggests that something is right. But how can a fixed error (due to copy protection) cause a different result? Is it the drive? Is it expected? I know real errors cause a different read value each time, but pressed errors?

Cheers,
David.
 

Dido destroyed

Reply #54 –
Quote
But how can a fixed error (due to copy protection) cause a different result? Is it the drive? Is it expected? I know real errors cause a different read value each time, but pressed errors?

It can have two explanations.

-The inconsistent errors (Tigre and I already found some in our CDS200 CDs), are not pressed, but occur because nearby pressed errors have destroyed a part of the error corection codes that were affected to these data.
-The drive changes its error correction strategy according to the reading speed or C1/C2 error rate encountered, that can itself vary a bit from rip to rip. Thus they are pressed errors, but more or less corrected (=affecting more or less samples in the final stage).

Dido destroyed

Reply #55 –
Well, no more experiments, because I've returned the CD to the shop for a full refund. I told them it didn't play at all on one of my CD players, probably because of the copy control. They're returning it to the manufacturer as faulty.

Cheers,
David.

Dido destroyed

Reply #56 –
I live in the US, and my father recently purchased a copy of this album (I assume at a retail store.) There is definitely no copy protection on his copy of the CD, as it copied flawlessly in burst mode and contains the "Compact Disk Digital Audio" logo on the inside of the case (although not on the outside.) I feel sorry for all you guys in the UK  .

Dido destroyed

Reply #57 –
All my CDS200 CDs (three) copied flawlessly in burst mode using the Memorex drive. But still they were protected. Only after having carefully listen to all tracks, I found several clicks, one or two per track.

Dido destroyed

Reply #58 –
Did you get rid of the clicks using deglitch?
-=MusePack... Living Audio Compression=-

Honda - The Power of Dreams

Dido destroyed

Reply #59 –
just a quick question: where did you get the "original" file, without the copy protection from, so that you actually could do the comparison between both files
--alt-presets are there for a reason! These other switches DO NOT work better than it, trust me on this.
LAME + Joint Stereo doesn't destroy 'Stereo'

Dido destroyed

Reply #60 –
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where did you get the "original" file, without the copy protection from, so that you actually could do the comparison between both files

I suppose that this question is for 2BDecided. Here's his answer (quaoted from above) :

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I received my Dido CD from CD-WOW this morning. It's the Australian version, and it cost me £8.99. (Now available from CD-WOW for £6.99!!!).

It has no copy protection on it. Well, at least, it has no sticker on the front, or text on the back. There is no Data Track on this version - it's pure CD-DA.


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Did you get rid of the clicks using deglitch?


I didn't tyry deglitch, I played the CD in a CD Player and recorded the SPDIF output. That got rid of the inconsistent strong clicks, but not of the small permanent ones.

Dido destroyed

Reply #61 –
To add a post script to this sorry tale...

In the December issue of Hi-Fi News and Record Review (a respected UK audiophile publication, see http://www.linkhouse.co.uk/hifi/ ) there is a review of the Dido album.

It says it is wonderful, and deserves to sell 20 million copies. The review closes with the following summary...

Sound: Top Quality


And people wonder why I don't believe Hi-Fi magazines. I'll probably email HFN&RR, but they I doubt they'll publish it.

Cheers,
David.

Dido destroyed

Reply #62 –
after listening to it closely at least 100 times by now, it doesn't sound that bad to me, but i agree that some of the post production and mixing work is shoddy to say the least.
Be healthy, be kind, grow rich and prosper

Dido destroyed

Reply #63 –
Yesterday I got this album too. I was tempted to make a rip from this album since this was my first copy-protected one.
After 4 hours messing with
ISOBuster - useless output, only nulls,
EAC - can't rip anything, the buttons were disabled, however, the tracks were listed...
Alcohol - made a perfect copy of the CD, which unfortunately was still copy-protected 
I have tried EasyCD Creator. I was surprised, that in spite of the COPY PROTECTION Easy CD Creator 6 was able to simply copy the tracks as mp3/WMA to the HDD. Interesting. I did a short test (track 1 and 11) and the resulting audio did not contain anything like glitches. But since I don't trust the FhG encoder, i wanted to get the wav's out of the CD, which EasyCD Creator did not want to allow. After a short while seaching for the workaround I was happy to find out that EasyCD Creator is just a stupid program, that can be easily tricked:

1. Create a New Audio CD Project.
2. Drag the cracks from DIDO's album to the project.
3. BURN

At this point EasyCD Creator starts to cache the data (since I have only one CD drive - TEAC W540E). That means the audio can be found somewhere on the HDD 
%TEMP% is the place you have to look for the clear wav files :-)

4. After the caching completes, its time to compress the wav's using FLAC/LAME/AAC or whatever you want.

Easy, isn't it? So much about CDS200.

Dido destroyed

Reply #64 –
Copy protections may indeed be counterproductive (they annoy/chase the audiophiles, their most valuable customers    and do not have the slightest effect on the amount of illegal MP3s, which is only limited by the cumulative amount of harddisk space of the filesharers).

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the recording industry needs to focus on stopping illegal file sharing, but not by stopping the copying of the CD (...) they need a good dose of [span style='font-size:12pt;line-height:100%']logical thinking[/span].

"logical", that word touches the essence.

Remember this whole story is not rational at all. The music industry panicks  at the sight of the low sales. They don't have an answer (!), so they just try out everything they see, they shoot around like madmen, even if it harms their own business in the medium term. Of course CPs don't work: if you can play it, you can record it. Sooner or later - probably the latter  - they will get their common sense back and realize that.

Dido destroyed

Reply #65 –
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they annoy/chase the audiophiles, their most valuable customers

I think they see that differently,  except for a few small labels, they go for the mass market (Hit me baby, one more time  ).
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Dido destroyed

Reply #66 –
Finally I got this album, too. (Of course I didn't buy it, I don't buy modern CDs).
I listened to some tracks and analysed their waveforms in CEP. The decreasing peak level in track 2 looked indeed very strange. On "Life for rent" I noticed many clicks (not only in this song), but it's not like some frequent clicks in the album, rather like a constant crackling. I'm pretty sure that the clicks are on the album, not due to the copy protection. They don't sound like Dido opening her mouth.
On "Don't leave home" the overcompression is obvious. It sounds like Dido increases the distance between her mouth and the microphone during the chorus and every time she should momentarily sing louder.
Heavy vocal distortions on "Mary's in India", they seem to come from the single vocal track. Distortion in other tracks.
The whole CD features a typical, undefinable mixture of compression and clipping, surely not all due to mastering.
The gain values are only around -9 or -8dB, 'normal', but not very bad, for modern CDs.
So, for me this doesn't especially look like a victim of the loudness war, it looks more like idiots at the mixing console.
I know that I know nothing. But how can I then know that ?