Question about "pre-emphasis" for Abbey Road (Black Triangle)

Taken from another thread, and it makes sense to me.

Is this not correct?

 

Is there any CD player which plays a CD with PE correctly if the PE flag is not set in the TOC (e.g. The Beatles - Abbey Road Black Triangle).

Is this prebata 3 version still available for download?

 

All CD-players I've checked play them correctly - even some cheap modern DVD-players.
My impression is, that most of the mid-80s CDs carry the pre-emhasis flag in the subchannel, and not in the TOC.

I found EAC 0.95 prebeta3 here.
When you're using it, you get the corrected TOC via the menu Action/TOC Alterations/Detect TOC manually.

Martin

 

Martin,

it must be that there are three different possible cases regarding PE:

1) PE flag set in TOC (most CD players recognize and play these correctly)
2) PE flag set sub-channels (most CD players recognize and play these correctly)
3) PE flag is not set anythere, but the audio data is pre-emphasized (these CD's are basically authored wrong and don't get recognized by any CD player)

Examples:

1) the 1986 Castle Black Sabbath CD's, Pink Floyd The Wall Columbia
2) Abbey Road Black Triangle (just my assumption, I don't have the CD)
3) the Creative Sounds Black Sabbath CD's, at least the first album and MoR

 

I can confirm Andreas' conclusions. I compared wavefiles that I made run through Sox, WaveEmph and an FFT-filter in Adobe Audition and they sounded quite similar to each other but... the original wavefile that was de-emphased by my digital audio converter sounded the best, maybe because this unit uses an analog circuit.

My concern is: will emphasis still be supportet by playback gear in 10 or 15 years? If not, the only decent way to listen to CD's with pre-emphasis is convert them to un-emphased wavefiles with these little tools and burn a CD-R.

 

Hi,

Note on Abbey Road black triangle PE. Our elderly Studer players play this correctly. Ingrid has a copy as does her brother. Her McIntosh players and Sony SCD-1 players play this CD correct. That Sony can read this most reliably. There is supposedly a last batch authored with the PE in the subcode. This one can be played on virtually all machines. A friend at EMI tells me that the 3/4" U-Matic 1630 master was made on a misaligned U-Matic deck and that was why the subcode glitched.

 

Wasn't the Sony 1630 released in September 1986? How could the Toshiba Abbey Road made in 1983/84 be made with a 1630?

 

Hi ChristianL,

Pardon, I meant to say Sony PCM 1610. This unit was in use then. They were first made in March 1982. The follow-on to the PCM F-1 processor. The PCM F-1 had better A/D and D/A converters. Sony began installing these on later PCM 1610 units and all 1630's.

 

Hi Kent,

thanks for the clarification.

 

It is correct.