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Topic: Too much treble playing or ripping music (Read 5174 times) previous topic - next topic
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Too much treble playing or ripping music

Using Foobar 1.2.5 I can go to File/Open audio CD to play my favorites, but it does not sound right. My problem is that there is way too much treble, in the order of +10db, it is absolutely impossible to listen to this.

My output is through either Airplay, Usb, Toslink-optical or Hdmi to an audiophile digital preamplifier (Hegel HD20) and other high quality equipment.

Windows 7-64.
Ripping or just playing is no different.
No dsp's of course.
I have spent weeks on this; I have gone through every menu, disabling Replaygain, and disabled every possible sound-enhancement on my audiocard. (Which happens to be a Realtek card standard with Asus V Gene.) .. I have tried ripping on other machines, all Win7 I'm afraid. Same result.
Yes I use Accurip.. of course this says everything is quite dandy.

I did manage to persuade ITunes to rip my music in a way compatible with my taste, ie. I can hear no difference A/B playing the music either directly from a CD-player or from my computer. I have tried two high-quality CD-players, both sound the same and the same as only ITunes. I am however a little sceptical to I-ownz-u, I'd prefer Foobar to be my main platform. Playing ITunes-rips in Foobar is quite interesting, because using the spectrum-viewer I SEE there is way too much treble on the Foobar-rips.

Using Windows-Media-Player is no different, ripping/CD-playing-quality is awful. WMP even sounded awful playing ITunes rips, until I found the "3D-'enhancement'-thing" that I disabled ... why do these guys think I need that stuff?

Playing my music through Wimp is unfortunately not a happy experience either.. too much treble.
I can upload ITunes & Foobar rips for your testing pleasure, if I thought that would be legal. Maybe it is a meta-data thing, but this I know nothing about. I tried once to r-click on my Audio-CD track in Foobar, then properties/tools/remove tags, and HEY! It sounded fine! Then I did a Tools/Reload info, and the quality was bad again, and I never got the good quality back.
Thanks for your assistance!

Too much treble playing or ripping music

Reply #1 –
Some mainboards come with this weird dolby program (home theatre or something?) that is supposedly there to enhance your sound, but actually distorts it beyond recognition. It is a standalone program unrelated to the actual realtek sound control panel. If you have something like that installed, kick it into the can.

Too much treble playing or ripping music

Reply #2 –
There is nothing like that installed. And the problem only comes when playing or ripping music off a cd, not when playing ITunes rips in say Foobar. Playing a cd in ITunes is also fine.

So only ITunes can read my cd's, what is going on?
 

Too much treble playing or ripping music

Reply #3 –
Seems like you are testing with a rare CD that uses pre-emphasis. This component should be able to help. Note that you need to rip and add appropriate tag into the files for the component to do its job.

Too much treble playing or ripping music

Reply #4 –
Cheers Case, that worked.
But it did not work well enough, automatic de-emphasis surely is required if I am to rip my 100's of mostly 80's and 90's CD's.
Another issue is putting the de-emphasis into the bitstream, but I guess that is quite solvable.
So I'll keep looking for the ultimate solution. (I'm a professional C++ developer, maybe I'll just write my own plugin

Too much treble playing or ripping music

Reply #5 –
Quote from: raskepil on
But it did not work well enough, automatic de-emphasis surely is required if I am to rip my 100's of mostly 80's and 90's CD's.
I'd think that you won't find many CDs which need deemphasis. You could check out some online databases like this one.

Quote from: raskepil on
Another issue is putting the de-emphasis into the bitstream, but I guess that is quite solvable.
As per this thread you can just add the appropriate tags to the relevant files, and then convert them using the converter, using either the post-processing plugin or the DSP plugin.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

Too much treble playing or ripping music

Reply #6 –
There are some pesky CDs where pre-emphasis is flagged in subchannel only, not in TOC. dBpoweramp and more recent EAC's do not read subchannel, unfortunately.

cdda2wav reads subchannel, and according to http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=611427 , CUERipper should do it as well. (I have not checked whether Gregory actually implemented this – I have not yet found a CD which carries the flag only in subchannel, though I was unaware of the issue when I did my ripping, so I haven't tried more than a very few suspects.)

(And ... there are some CDs which simply have wrong EQ without it being flagged anywhere ... and vice versa. Black Crows + Jimmy Page: Live at the Greek, anyone?)



As for tagging: I also use a different audio format for pre-emphasis CDs. A good excuse to finally use WavPack :-) Why a different format? To foolproof myself against accidentally deleting tags.