I2S connection inferior to XLR?

I can tell you it is not. I have a few that are not on there like Lionel Richie ‘Can’t Slow Down’ Men at Work to name a couple. I see one listed that does not have PE and does not sound excessively bright.

I don’t think the list of CDs with PE is complete. I have two Bruno Walter CDs that are on the list and I have always been troubled by the strident upper string quality when playing my rips of them. I had no idea this might be a PE issue. I have been able to process the files with the SoX uitility to apply de-emphasis and they do sound much better. But I have other CDs from the same period (early 80’s) that I strongly suspect of being similarly affected - including the other two CDs of Walter’s Brahms symphony cycle. I have not yet succeeded in finding a way of determining whether a CD does or doesn’t have PE applied. Playing the CDs on a Sony DVD player using the coax input to my DSD Snr doesn’t bring up any PE icon on Huron or Redcloud. I’ve tried selecting the option in dBpoweramp to include PE tags but found no way of displaying them to confirm they are there in the flac files.

Maybe what needs to be done is something where you can toggle Pre-emphasis auto / off / on so that you can turn it on when needed if no flag is sent. So leave the icon there all the time but have the auto / off / on under it depending on what you have selected with auto as default

Pre-emphasis is a subcode on a CD. This info is completely lost once ripped. There is no metadata property to capture this.

If DB poweramp doesn’t show preemphasis when you rip it, and you don’t see the icon from your Sony CD player, then the odds are that the disk does not have pre-emphasis, but just happens to be one of those early CDs which could rip your ears out they were so harsh.

Some of those first CDs sounded really bad when they just took the LP masters and created CDs from it. This was a real problem in the early days of CDs because most mastering engineers were in the habit of adding a treble boost to LPs masters to try to compensate for the stampers wearing out over time. But on CD, this just made them sound painful.

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How would dBpoweramp show pre-emphasis? What do I look for? You say that there is no metadata property to capture it, but there is a selectable pre-emphasis option in the Write ID tags list in the ripping options. I would expect the Audio Info codec utility to display it if it was there, but there’s nothing displayed for my CDs that are included in the list of known PE discs. Or is it simply that the master had pre-emphasis applied, but no flags were set in the TOC data etc. to indicate this state?

Unfortunately I’m and EAC user, rather than a DB poweramp user. And EAC will sometimes display this flag for each track, IF your drive is capable of identifying it (many don’t, from what I understand). This flag appears in one of the far right columns for each track in EAC.

Personally I’ve found that EAC correctly identifies about 50% of my pre-emphasis CDs with my chosen drives. I believe that I’m only seeing the TOC flags with it though, so the other 50% probably have subcodes which my drives don’t recognize.

I’ve read that DB Poweramp can do all of this as well. But not being a user of that program, I can’t swear to this feature.

Thanks, that’s helpful - I’ll try Eac. (It’s a long time since I used that). In any case, this is really somewhat OT here in this topic so I’ll pursue the matter elsewhere.

After a bit more listening, I have to report that I don’t hear any difference between aes/ebu connection and I2S connection with the adapter - both sound pretty good! YMMV …

Perhaps I should toss a coin and disconnect one cable.

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Agreed. I used Shunyata Sigma AES/EBU between DMP and DSJ and it was superior to I2S.

There are exceptions. Esoteric SACD transports can send DSD to Esoteric DAC via AES/EBU, which is how I’ve got mine connected.

I suspect you’ll hear a difference if you use one of those fancy Shunyata AES/EBU. Some on open box special on Music Direct here:

Which HDMI cable did you have in I2S ?

PS-12. This one here:

I asked because I’m always interested in the possibility of getting a better sound. I only listen to SACD and CD discs, other sources do not interest me. Currently, DMP and DSD are connected by 50 cm WW Platinium Starlight 7 cable. If it could be better, I am asking for advice.

I was surprised to discover the Shunyata AES/EBU sounded better than the PS-12. It was something that was immediately apparent. It was not a case of “maybe better, maybe not”. It was clearly better.

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Yes that may be the case for the Esoteric but the handshake on the PS Audio is set up for the I2S connection only,

Yes, I understood that to be your point.

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Maxim-

Any issues with your CDT2-MK2? Mine died mid-track last night.

Hi Raymond,

Sorry to hear you CDT died.

I have been using mine regularly and had no issues so far. I am very happy with the sound. After many years of streaming I am back to playing CDs.

Please keep me posted on your experience with Jays Audio service.

Good luck!

M

Maxim-

Alvin responded within an hour and sent instructions (including photos) with a possible fix. Turned out to be a bad CDM4 unit (the laser head assembly/sled/etc) which fortunately is a modular piece. They are shipping a replacement CDM4 assembly to me at no cost and asked me to ship the defective CDM4 back to Guangdong.

Glad to hear yours is working fine. Same here on spinning. I have hundreds of CDs that I never ripped that I am (or was) enjoying again.

Stay tuned.