CD De-Emphasis

Posted by: Mr Paws on 22 November 2018

Good Evening all,

I ripped a CD today ( TOTO Isolation 1984 first pressing) sent it to my NAS and played it only to find it sounds so bright I couldn’t listen to it at all so I did a bit of research and it’s seems that some CD’s from the 1980’s had a de-emphasis tag written onto the disc and if it wasn’t picked up by the laser the CD will sound extremely bright.

My question is, is there a way to get dB Poweramp to sort this problem out or any other way? I do remember back in the 90’s I had Cambridge Audio Dacmagic which had a de-emphasis light which did light up when I played the Toto disc and very few other discs.

I don’t really want to buy another ruddy remastered CD and I do remember this particular disc sounded very good at the time.

Any ideas or info very much appreciated.

Thanks.

Posted on: 22 November 2018 by TallGuy

From the dBpoweramp forum (user mville):

"Go to CDRipper Options >> Meta Data & ID Tag >> Write ID Tags

and tick Pre-Emphasis."

Alternatively use iTunes, which recognises pre-emphasis and rip as a lossless format, then convert to flac/wav with the dBpoweramp converter.

Posted on: 22 November 2018 by Mr Paws

TallGuy posted:
From the dBpoweramp forum (user mville):
"Go to CDRipper Options >> Meta Data & ID Tag >> Write ID Tags

and tick Pre-Emphasis."
Alternatively use iTunes, which recognises pre-emphasis and rip as a lossless format, then convert to flac/wav with the dBpoweramp converter.????

Hi TallGuy, Thanks for taking the time to reply, I had a feeling DBP would have a fix somewhere.

Kind Regards,

Mike..

Posted on: 22 November 2018 by TallGuy

Re-reading the dBpoweramp forum it may be that the tag is just that ripping with dbpa adds a "I need de-emphasis" tag to the metadata, but dbpa doesn't apply de-emphasis.

So, with that in mind, it looks like iTunes is the easiest thing to use, rip to Apple lossless then use dbpa to convert to wav/flac.

Alternatively you can use the tagged rip from dbpa with SOX to remove the pre-emphasis (google "dbpoweramp cd ripper pre-emphasis" to find articles on what to do and how to do it).

If iTunes doesn't pick up that it needs de-emphasis you need to rip with dbpa, with the pre-emphasis tag set to "yes", ripping to WAV. Then either burn an audio CD using Nero (or similar), or, if you can't do that (no Nero...) mount them into a virtual ISO (google it ) and use iTunes to rip from that new CD/ ISO image. SOX may be quicker/easier looking at the guides. Note that SOX appears to over-write the original files so keep backups should you need to try again.

Note, I've never used SOX, or tried any of this as, as far as I know, I have no disks with pre-emphasis, though reading Steve Hoffman's forums suggest my original Toshiba pressing of 'The Wall' may have it, but it doesn't sound bright enough to me for that to be the case.

Finally, you could try ripping a pre-emphasised disk and seeing if it sounds that bad ! You may find it's okay.