Eric Clapton 461 Ocean Boulevard DTS HDS-4419

QuadraphonicQuad

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Joined
Feb 2, 2016
Messages
10
Location
Michigan
I listened to this store purchased disc last night and whereas the sound/mix is superb, the first few seconds of each song are just not there. It's like they start a few seconds into each song. I notice that there are several versions of this DTS disc. Not sure if it's an HDS incompatibility issue with my Oppo player or if there may be a known issue with this disc. It's the PolyGram jewel case release with lite blue trim color in the packaging scheme. I was dying to hear Motherless Children and it just starts abruptly a few seconds into the tune. Then I realized that every song was like this. Seems to decode normally through my AVR and the odd thing is that it's not like you can see the disc start and just hear silence as the count begins. The count for each track starts at 1-2-3 but you hear it begin abruptly a few seconds post the normal beginning of each song. I did purchase it used off eBay but the disc itself looks to be in great shape. Poop. :(
 
Well, I see that this post has had numerous "look sees" but no responses, so please let me do my best to clear up my own mystery for you. When I run into quandaries of a tech variety, soft or hard, investigative avenues begin to pop into the ol' noggin and I pursue them as I am able. Last night I began by looking into the BDP105's internal settings. I immediately found some settings that I found suspect. By default the players HDCD encoding is turned off. I turned it on, and I also elected to turn on the gracenote and the BD internet facilities. I didn't put the EC disc in right away but rather chose another DTS disc that I hadn't listened to yet called Studio Voodoo. That disc is a trip, and is extremely cool! I noted that each track seemed to start from it's beginning so I put in the 461 DTS disc. It played flawlessly from the beginning of Motherless Children, starting out in the left channel speakers as it should. HOWEVER, I learned something that may or may not have been left the same in future SACD and DTS releases of the same material. When you hard forward or reverse to the beginning of track selections, the songs do start with a second or two chopped off. There is a reason for this. When you soft reverse back through the disc's track selections so that you are a few seconds prior to the end of whatever previous song you choose, the tracks segue flawlessly as the upcoming tracks tend to start immediately as they initialize their transition at the very tail end of the previous track! Possibly this was a mistake?

Whatever, problem solved, BUT seeing as how I don't like the gracenote or bd facilities being turned on due to copyright interference while playing burned discs, do you think it was the HDCD encoding being turned off that was the real culprit?
 
Not sure, but with a DTS CD, there is always the chance the the processor won't "recognize" that it is DTS quick enough to decode it and missing a 1/2 a second or so is not uncommon, especially on the first track of a DTS CD. Most processors will "stick" in that mode enough to not miss the beginnings of subsequent tracks played straight through, but too many variables with how the CD player handles track breaks, how the decoder interprets/locks dts mode, etc. You play with things until you find settings that work for your setup, which it look like you have.
 
Not sure, but with a DTS CD, there is always the chance the the processor won't "recognize" that it is DTS quick enough to decode it and missing a 1/2 a second or so is not uncommon, especially on the first track of a DTS CD. Most processors will "stick" in that mode enough to not miss the beginnings of subsequent tracks played straight through, but too many variables with how the CD player handles track breaks, how the decoder interprets/locks dts mode, etc. You play with things until you find settings that work for your setup, which it look like you have.

This is very true. Back in the early days of DTS conversions, we used to have to put 2 seconds of silence to the 4 channel wav files before we encoded them with SurCode DTS, because if we did not, there were a ton of CD players that would not activate the DTS decoders before the music started.

You could tell by how the disc was authored. If it were authored by doing each song as a separate track, in other words you created the CD by using a DTS wav file for each song, then every song would start with a few seconds clipped as the decoder came back on after turning off when the previous track ended.

If you made a huge wav file of the entire album (which is how most converters did it), then encoded it with SurCode, then then only stuff you would miss would be the first few seconds of the first song.

In fact, many people originally believed that the DTS CD of "Band on the Run" was missing the first few notes for this exact reason. However, that was quickly disputed when the DTS audio was ripped to wav files with TSMUXER and we saw that there were indeed a few notes missing from the start.

(See the QQ thread on "Band on the Run" for more details on this)
 
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