Chameleon: The Best Of Camel, Japanese Stereo SACD playback issues

[DuncanS]

Does anybody else have this SACD, and does it playback correctly?

It arrived on Friday, and I played it today, well I tried to. Its unlistenable to! The audio cuts out repeatedly yet the SACD is still playing.

I switched my Oppo 203 to generate PCM rather than send DSD to the Amp, and it still did it, but differently. It is not totally consistent where it cuts out on playback, but it is always in the same time region. Every single track does it.

So, my gut feeling it has probably it has been mastered too 'hot' so that the DSD playback conversion algorithm is cutting out the audio to stop damage to the system. The DSD algorithm goes unstable (and can oscillate) if the initial level on conversion is too high and can do a lot of damage. But I could have a bad disc, and I need to return it to CDJapan.

 

[DuncanS]

This is really strange I decided to try again, it failed, I looked at the disc (with a magnifying glass) I could see no obvious issues, I rubbed it on my sweatshirt and stuck it back in the Oppo, it has played with no audio cut-outs, no matter what, I even switched between PCM/DSD decode on the Oppo & Amp. And I've played it through a couple of times for 2 days. Bizarre.

So, for $10k/£10k each I will be selling small bits of my sweatshirt as audiophile disc rubs, well if Genesis can get $300million selling their great music I've got to try something to boost my pension funds!