• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

Up Sampling

The stable platter was flawed for several reasons.

The platter wasn't terribly high mass at all, but it was driven by low quality brushed Mabuchi motors and driven very hard to achieve reasonable start up and stop times, especially for the eject when the disc has to be stationary. The motors had a short life.

15 years worth of people putting CDs in, label side up was a tough habit to break and most customers thought it was strange.

Track access times (due to the mass of the platter) were poor compared to the linear motors etc on upper range competing brands.

Worst of all, the laser objective lens (which was glued on) would fall off in warmer climates/summer as it was suspended above the platter. Many machines failed that way. The lens could be glued back on, if you could locate it inside the machine...

They were physically chunky- short front to back and tall- not elegant at all.

The Legato link was poorly thought out too- bringing a machine to market that tested poorly was a bad idea.

Pioneer weren't alone in trying anything and everything to re-invigorate CD sales which had stalled- even Sony did an equally stupid fixed laser mechanism (CDP-XA5/7es) where they moved the entire operational disc drive with respect to the laser block. I shake my head.
 
Last edited:
I still have one of the CEC's. Belt needed replacing, but it was very reliable as it was my main machine for 8 years prior to ripping to hard drives.
 
Do they have sea lions at the zoo where you live?
 
The stable platter was flawed for several reasons.

The platter wasn't terribly high mass at all, but it was driven by low quality brushed Mabuchi motors and driven very hard to achieve reasonable start up and stop times, especially for the eject when the disc has to be stationary. The motors had a short life.

15 years worth of people putting CDs in, label side up was a tough habit to break and most customers thought it was strange.

Track access times (due to the mass of the platter) were poor compared to the linear motors etc on upper range competing brands.

Worst of all, the laser objective lens (which was glued on) would fall off in warmer climates/summer as it was suspended above the platter. Many machines failed that way. The lens could be glued back on, if you could locate it inside the machine...

They were physically chunky- short front to back and tall- not elegant at all.

The Legato link was poorly thought out too- bringing a machine to market that tested poorly was a bad idea.

Pioneer weren't alone in trying anything and everything to re-invigorate CD sales which had stalled- even Sony did an equally stupid fixed laser mechanism (CDP-XA5/7es) where they moved the entire operational disc drive with respect to the laser block. I shake my head.


I have Pioneer PD-8700 (stable platter, no legato) since 1992 and still working good (now as a transport). Couple of years ago the laser lens felt off but I glued it back, it was the only repair for all these years. Stable platter is very silent (in play mode), not too fast, not too lazy, error correction is still quite good. Thanks to platter, CD is always centered, it's very helpful after couple of beer ;) The downside is (for me) the after 26 years of putting CDs into the Pioneer, label side up is a little strange to me :)
 
Still regret selling my JVC XL-Z1050TN player, after I started ripping all my CD's to a hard drive there was no further need for it but----.
It was an awesome player in its day, weighing 17 lbs and beautiful as hell. Built like a tank, the drive opened and closed smooth as glass and almost totally silently. Advertised as a Bitstream 8x-oversampling CD player and having some type of secret K2 Interface, a circuit that reduces jitter by resampling the pulses with a short-duration gate just ahead of the single-bit JVC JCE-4501 DAC chip.?
$800 was a LOT of money for me to spend in the early 1990s but it got great reveiws and always sounded beautiful in my system. ;)
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/jvc-xl-z1050tn-cd-player#OEpAxxBFmfIagVOH.99
IMG_0963.jpg
 
I have Pioneer PD-8700 (stable platter, no legato) since 1992 and still working good (now as a transport).

The PD-8700 was the pick IMO. I sold a lot of those. It was a dual transformer model IIRC (well at least it had two voltage selectors on the back panel) and one step up from the PD-7700. It had a nice motorized volume pot for line out too. Still made in Japan at that time with a Pioneer 3 year warranty.

Still regret selling my JVC XL-Z1050TN player

Should have kept that one! They were a nice machine. Very reliable and that series was a showpiece for JVC at the time. The face panel symmetry and brushed dark silver/titanium finish was lovely.
 
Ah..... no. garnering headroom is not "a lazy recording engineer". And certainly not mosquitoes. (facepalm)
Please feel free to investigate thoroughly before making disparaging comments, especially about something that is standard practice in the industry. Like the Q fools say, do your research. Except in this case it is to become informed, not to become craaaaaaaazy lol.
Did you just come here to troll the site or do you have something of value to contribute?
 
The background sound level in my room is 35dB. Adding the 93dB or real 16-bit audio would need a capability of 128dB which is not only deafening but completely beyond the capacity of most domestic sound systems, though I have horns which are 109dB/watt.

You can not just add these dB numbers together.
background noise of 35dB does not mean you can not hear any sounds < 35dB in that room.
My background noise levels are in 25-30dB range but I can clearly hear tones played at a much lower level. (Try it!)
 
Ah..... no. garnering headroom is not "a lazy recording engineer". And certainly not mosquitoes. (facepalm)
Please feel free to investigate thoroughly before making disparaging comments, especially about something that is standard practice in the industry. Like the Q fools say, do your research. Except in this case it is to become informed, not to become craaaaaaaazy lol.
I did.
50+ years of recording.
24-bit makes it very, very easy since levels can be a bit out, a long way out even, and you still pick all the music up.

It is perfectly possible, but not a doddle to make pretty nice recordings on a tape recorder if you are extremely careful with levels, I used several before moving to digital.
On wide dynamic range music it is a balance between the loud bits overloading the tape just enough to still be reasonably pleasant (tape overload emulators are popular limiters even today) and the quiet bits dropping into noise. With most pop music just blat ahead, except the quiet bits when musicians stop playing, tape has plenty of dynamic range.

My first recording with a digital recorder was very informative 48/16 and two things were clear, firstly setting levels were a doodle. As long as one avoids overload everything audible in music went on the recording. One still had to take a little care of course because overload is unrecoverably disastrous but 16 bit is such a huge amount when one has been used to analogue tape it did seem idiot proof!
Secondly it was also the first time the recording was indistinguishable from the microphone feed. Off tape the overload on loud bits and hiss on quiet bits were always audible and between that often audible distortion, with digital, 48/16 StellaDAT, nada, no noise, no audible distortion. Splendid.
This was about 30 years ago I suppose.

Now 24-bit. As I wrote the only real benefit of 24-bit is that it has such a big dynamic range - hugely more than any music - setting levels is a doddle, anybody could do it.
There aren't many (any?) bits of analogue kit with 24-bit dydnamic range to go before or after a 24-bit recorder anyway, 21-bit perhaps? but if you are multi track recording it does mean the recording engineer can be lazy (or incompetent) and still get all the music on the recording and if all the channels are going to be mixed and level adjusted on the DAW later it will be fine. I have Metric Halo LIO8-4P and ULN2 which are brilliant and easy for anybody to get all the music in, requiring negligible skill compared to tape (which I still have to play back my old recordings).
For the dynamic range of real music 16-bit is plenty.

If somebody wanted a device with no level control capable of recording all audible sound (mosquito to Saturn V at 2 miles) a matched microphone and 24-bit recorder could do it, but nobody does, we record different microphones at different locations and of music with way less than 24-bits of dynamic range and we have level controls on the recorder.

You are perhaps young without decades of sound recording experience and have perhaps only ever had 24-bit recorders and a DAW????
 
You can not just add these dB numbers together.
background noise of 35dB does not mean you can not hear any sounds < 35dB in that room.
My background noise levels are in 25-30dB range but I can clearly hear tones played at a much lower level. (Try it!)
I have. I am not talking about what is just audible but what is enjoyable. I don't want the quiet bits of music to be at the level of the background noise in my room, and just test tones are purely academic (IMHO) what I am interested in is an enjoyable music recording which can be played by real equipment in my room.

The reality is HiFi equipment fanatics going on about the last technically achieveable minutae of possibility forget two important facts.
Firstly almost nobody owns equipment or a room in which a recording with 120+dB of dynamic range coud be played and secondly there, luckily, aren't any.
 
Sorry I am young with new fangled electrobits and baffles and flimflams and the hat to match. Sadly I don't have your scorn to match.

I do love your explanation. but I'm not seeking your garbled explanation of recording formats. It's highly inaccurate. Also I hate mosquitoes.

I am all about 16/44.1, but in the studio I prefer 24/96 and lazy is not the word I would use.

Any moron is perfectly capable of managing input levels with current tech to an appreciable level. I am guessing even back in your day it was super easy. I mean if I think of really solid fails I would probably go back to Ray Charles I guess.

But there are plugins now that recommend the extra dynamic range just to use their processing, before considering any other advantages to extra headroom processing... but I don't wanna get started on this bs with anyone so defensive or uninclusive. Mostly I just don't get the need for derogatory comments. Sorry man, it's just not about levelling insults. I guess this forum is a pretty exclusive club and I will butt out in the face of...well...no comment. I'm gonna restrain myself. All apologies for jumping in at all. Maybe wind yourself back to 1970ish, perhaps your mind wasn't so closed then. I just don't get the need to be so patronising - what is the point? fuck debate right? Something about a dog and tricks..

Okay toodle-oo I have shit to do. Some unscientific critical listening. Like young ears can do..glad I entered the conversation here and it was so welcoming and open heh
:facepalm:
Your original post was insulting, offensive even.

You seem to have been upset about something you think I wrote, rather than what I did, maybe you didn't get the point that I was trying to make. Sorry if my explanation wasn't clear enough.

I know there are plugins which operated at high bit rates, which is obviously worthwhile for the maths.
 
Last edited:
About noise shaping, and sampling rate of DSD (PDM) and how it compares to PCM and translate to other electronic audio components and classes and why and when you might want or not want it (in reproduction). Very complicated (even more than represented) but informative.
Most will agree how 41100 24 bit (Integer) PCM (150 dB SINAD) is more than enough but they actually may change their opinion after reading.
Note that bit size of DSD 64 ((64 *44100)/16) is exactly equal (bit per bit and size only!) to the size of same bandwidth 16 bit PCM.
Disclaimer; today we have much more advanced math in a lossy formats that are either bandwidth limited (as Opus at 20 KHz per channel) or not (Wave-pack lossy) that use mixed precision 8/16/32 bit, impulse response samples (and multi samples) and response correction graphs (of original) in order to minimise/hide difrences and they do it great regarding me to a point that lossless HiFi moderate compressed formats as Apple losseles and Flac lose sense when it comes to streaming or storage for listening purposes (master copies will remain in those however). For example I couldn't either hear or point on response graph a difference between 620 kbps Wave-pack (hybrid with response correction graph) and 96 KHz 24 bit Flac and it had 5x higher resultsing compression ratio (and no change the bandwidth which remained the same).
 
I have. I am not talking about what is just audible but what is enjoyable. I don't want the quiet bits of music to be at the level of the background noise in my room, and just test tones are purely academic (IMHO) what I am interested in is an enjoyable music recording which can be played by real equipment in my room.

The reality is HiFi equipment fanatics going on about the last technically achieveable minutae of possibility forget two important facts.
Firstly almost nobody owns equipment or a room in which a recording with 120+dB of dynamic range coud be played and secondly there, luckily, aren't any.
You want to be right..
I give it to you....
 
You want to be right..
I give it to you....
Don't give a tuppenny f*ck whether I am right.
I just share my experience which may differ from that shared by others, that is all.

The limitation on sound quality for music is more the recording than the equipment and whilst I like the equipment I bought it to listen to music, not to test.

Maybe I am unusual here.
 
Back
Top Bottom