Pretty much all the early 35DP series of CDs have PE. Same thing with the early Japan for USA versions on Sony/Columbia. A couple I have found recently are Loverboy "Keep It Up" 358P-27 (same as Japan for US with 358P in the matrix) and Survivor "Eye Of The Tiger" catalog number ZK 38062 and matrix DIDP 20239 11A3
I'm actually wondering if this is a mistake? (The CD has the PE flag but maybe it shouldn't.) Give me a few days to try and prove why. Would be curious if anyone out there has an MPO France or a German blue face, or any other mastering that might be the same as the England Nimbus we could double check against. I have the Elektra US, and since I didn't catch that the PE flag was there, my original comparison was without it. In the TD thread, I made the comment that the EQ moves of the US Elektra were "odd" (or something) vs the England Nimbus. If the England Nimbus is de'emphed according to the PE flag, the two are even more "oddly" different. Just in case the readership is different, I'm going to link the TD thread to here, and then most likely continue there since this is sort of just supposed to "list" them.
I recently obtained a "Thriller" 35-8P-11 from Ebay for an excellent price of about $49. Expecting it to have pre-emphasis, I was really irritated when I found that Exact Audio Copy said "Pre-emphasis: No" in that column. Nor did iTunes apply pre-emphasis. I was puzzled, since my "Off the Wall" Japan disc (which was a later pressing) had pre-emphasis flags that were read by both EAC and iTunes. The thing was, "Thriller" REALLY sounded like it was mastered with pre-emphasis. The upper range was SO tinny... almost gave me a headache. Then I read somewhere (I think in this thread) that the pre-emphasis is sometimes in the audio stream itself, and if it is, neither EAC nor iTunes will detect it. After unsuccessfully trying to use an older version of EAC to see if the pre-emphasis flags were in the TOC (which crashed the program), a thought occurred to me: Could my old Philips stand-alone CD Recorder that I bought in 1999, now stored in my garage, perform the "de-emphasis" when copying the disc? Maybe I could somehow get it to put a pre-emphasis flag on the copy? Gave it a try. Weird and wondeful things happened. First, when copying "Thriller" with the Philips recorder digitally with the "high-speed" dub (high-speed meaning 2x, ha ha), the finished copy HAD THE DE-EMPHASIS APPLIED TO THE AUDIO ITSELF, WITH NO PRE-EMPHASIS FLAG ON THE COPY. Seriously. How this works, I don't know, since I'd read that pre-emphasis decoding happens in the analogue realm on CD players... but this couldn't be an analogue copy because I copied it at 2X "high speed," with both the CD and the CD-R in the Philips unit. I don't think it's possible to copy analogue with the Philips decks unless you're taking it from an outside source. Then I tried "Off the Wall," the one with the pre-emphasis flag present on the disc that iTunes can read. Very strange. It ALSO applied pre-emphasis directly to the audio, but in addition, it copied the pre-emphasis flag onto the CD-R, so when I loaded it in iTunes, it basically was DOUBLE "de-emphasised," sounding very dull. Finally, since these two CDs have no gaps between the songs, and the Philips CD recorder normally inserts a two-second gap between songs, in order to copy "Thriller" with no gaps I had to create a program list in the recorder of the songs on the album, then record at 1X. (According to the instruction manual.) Here's what happened: It did NOT apply the pre-emphasis decoding to the audio this time. Instead, it created a pre-emphasis flag ON THE COPY where there was not one on the original CD... except for the first track on the album. I loaded this CD-R copy in EAC, and it said "Pre-Emphasis: Yes" for all tracks except the first track. Weird stuff, huh? Anyway, glad I finally got a good-sounding copy of the original Japanese "Thriller" that is now properly "de-emphasized" (I had to trim the WAVs in an audio editor to get rid of the gaps, but that's okay). Just thought I'd chime in here that there is at least one other way to perform proper pre-emphasis decoding on these early CDs. These old Philips CD-R records will do it.
One really cannot trust modern software to reliably detect and report preemphasis on CDs. There just seems to be too many quirks in the way it's implemented. (It might get handled properly most of the time, but there are always these exceptions popping up.) But, in my experience, my 1990-ish Denon player does seem to detect and report it reliably. I think that back in the good old days they just engineered CD players to be more thorough in detecting it -- whereas today, software developers just can't be bothered to put much thought into it.
EAC95pb3 [via manual TOC] and my old TDK and Plextor CD only burners always detect the pre-emp if it's present. You can then rip burn and manually add the pre-emph flag to the cue file. EAC95pb3 is the key as manual TOC detection was removed after that due to threat of legal action, for reasons I fail to understand. A great point.
That's why I was so excited to find out my late '90s Philips CD recorder properly de-emphasizes the copy, in the player, before burning the CD-R copy. I will add that I tested it with a CD that I know does NOT have pre-emphasis, just to make sure the copy didn't sound "different" on ALL discs I copied. The copy sounded identical to the original. So the Philips deck really is doing de-emphasis on these CDs. (Though I will also add that it sounds about the same as the iTunes de-emphasis on discs with a pre-emphasis flag... maybe a hair less bassy.)
I wish I could use that, but I can't get it to work with Vista. Every time I try to run "Detect TOC manually," it crashes EAC, and on one attempt it actually crashed my entire computer.
Brian if you have the Thriller cd which you are certain has pre emphasis, and also has been confirmed by other people that have the disc you can rip it with the latest version of EAC and just decode the pre emphasis using software, or you can also add a flag in the cue to burn an exact copy that will be decoded in a cdp that decodes pre emph. Best thing to do would be just rip the cd as any other disc and run it trough a de emph curve to have files ready to play on the pc or a cdp that doesnt decode it. With cds that other people havent confirmed have pre emph the older version of EAC is useful but with a suspected cd one can always try decoding and see if it sounds correctly
I actually did do what I think you're saying, alfeizar -- I put a "fake" pre-emphasis flag on it with EAC and burned a copy. Then iTunes did de-emphasize the disc. I was just pointing out with my other posts that the Philips deck will do pre-emphasis decoding in-deck when making a copy. I've tried a couple different de-emph curves in other audio editors (there's a plugin for Foobar and another one for a trial version of I forgot what program), but neither sounded right to me. I still think de-emphasis in my Philips recorder sounds best.
I've got a decent workflow now for CDs I acquire with PE. I rip the data, straight off. I run everything through SoX to apply (what I think is) a correct DE curve. I save both the original PE data and the DE data onto a disc so I (hopefully) never have to do it again. I put the lossless DE data into iTunes so I can stream it, burn MP3 discs, or whatever.
If this is the case I am all over your solution. I will buy it ASAP. What's the model number for your Philips?
