Weird problem with my Yamaha BD-S681 BluRay Player

[AshBuchanan]

Happy new year QQers! I have just bought a Yamaha BDS681 universal disc player, and have been playing my surround albums on it. I was playing wish you were here quad mix from the immersion box, when I noticed that the 4 note guitar riff that comes in at around four minute mark on ...crazy diamond is missing! I put the disc into my ps3 and it is there! Any ideas what might be wrong with the Yamaha? I have tried other blurays/dvds/sacds and they all seem to be fine.

P.S The 5.1 mix sounds fine on the same disc

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Happy new year QQers! I have just bought a Yamaha BDS681 universal disc player, and have been playing my surround albums on it. I was playing wish you were here quad mix from the immersion box, when I noticed that the 4 note guitar riff that comes in at around four minute mark on ...crazy diamond is missing! I put the disc into my ps3 and it is there! Any ideas what might be wrong with the Yamaha? I have tried other blurays/dvds/sacds and they all seem to be fine.

P.S The 5.1 mix sounds fine on the same disc

The likely problem is your new Yamaha won't play a 4.0 surround track. They reproduce only the front stereo channels. Your PS3 apparently doesn't have this issue. The gear will play 5.1 however. Its a common problem with new gear and there are other threads on the forum that discuss it. It can happen in disk players and AVRs.

 

[AshBuchanan]

Thanks for the reply. I just listened to a new SACD copy of Tail Spinnin' by Weather Report, released on Vocalion, which is supposed to be a quad mix, and it seemed to work fine. Have they doctored the mix so that it will work on a new disc player?

 

[LuvMyQuad]

Thanks for the reply. I just listened to a new SACD copy of Tail Spinnin' by Weather Report, released on Vocalion, which is supposed to be a quad mix, and it seemed to work fine. Have they doctored the mix so that it will work on a new disc player?

To avoid the problem you have run into, what DV (and some others) do is include an empty center and LFE channel along with the 4.0 mix. The player sees it as a 5.1 track and plays it. But there is nothing but silence coming from the center and LFE channels. Its a quad mix in a 5.1 "wrapper".

 

[AshBuchanan]

To avoid the problem you have run into, what DV (and some others) do is include an empty center and LFE channel along with the 4.0 mix. The player sees it as a 5.1 track and plays it. But there is nothing but silence coming from the center and LFE channels. Its a quad mix in a 5.1 "wrapper".

Thanks. Hopefully Wish You Were Here and DSOTM are the only discs that don't work in Quad. At least I have the PS3 to fall back on. Happy New Year to you sir/madam

 

[AshBuchanan]

Have tried other discs and it seems to be only 4.0 pcm that won't work. The 4.0 dts-HD of Atom Heart Mother and the 4.1 dts dvd of This Was work fine.

 

[timothyemerson]

AshBuchanan, I experienced a similar problem last night!

I've had a Marantz SR7013 AVR for just a few days to replace my old Yamaha and noticed the following last night:

1. It wouldn't play most of my 4.0 FLACs/DSFs (e.g., Best of the Doors, Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here, etc). Nothing. Just the sounds of silence, Simon and Garfunkel-styles.

2. It would play only a handful of my 4.0 FLACs/DSFs (e.g., Best of the Doobies, Poco - Seven/Cantamos).

3. It would play the original 4.0 SACDs/BDs/DVD-As/DVD-Vs that I ripped the FLACs/DSFs from which suggests that it's the Marantz's lack of recognising a 4.0 FLAC that's the problem.

4. It wouldn't play Andy Jackson's Signal to Noise 4.0 DVD-A at all.

5. I thought adding a silent centre channel might solve it and this thread confirmed it. I opened a 4.0 FLAC in Audacity, added a new track that will be the silent centre, moved it so it's under the left/right tracks and above the 2 surround tracks, exported it and it now plays correctly!

Now I need to figure out how to convert my DSFs to FLACs so I can do the same process in number 5 above with Audacity. I see that some QQers have used Foobar to do this DSF-to-FLAC conversion but when I downloaded Foobar, added the converter packs, it still doesn't recognise the DSF when I right-click to try and convert it.

Is anyone able to help me with how to get Foobar to convert DSF to FLAC?

Anyone? Bueller?

 

[atrocity]

Is anyone able to help me with how to get Foobar to convert DSF to FLAC?

This doesn't directly answer your question, but if you're comfortable with the command line, there's a version of SoX out there that works with DSD: https://www.audiofaidate.org/sw/sox-dsd/README.html. On Linux, this converts DSF (or DFF) to 24bit/88.2kHz FLAC:

sox-dsd-linux-gnu-amd64 --no-clobber "infile.dsf" -b 24 "outfile.flac" rate -v 88200 dither

It's also easy to pad out 4.0 files to 5.0 or 5.1 with SoX--you just submit the command and walk away. This will "remix" a 4.0 file by adding a silent center and LFE channel:

sox "oldfile.flac" "NewFile.flac" remix 1 2 0 0 3 4

 

[HomerJAU]

Is anyone able to help me with how to get Foobar to convert DSF to FLAC?

You need to install the Foobar SACD component. Do a Google search.

if you are using Windows my Music Media Helper app has a tool that auto finds all 4 channel FLAC files in sub folders and adds a silent centre channel (or silent C and LFE) to all. Extreme speed! Look ma, no hands!

 

[timothyemerson]

Thanks for the replies, atrocity and HomerJAU!

 

[atrocity]

if you are using Windows my Music Media Helper app has a tool that auto finds all 4 channel FLAC files in sub folders and adds a silent centre channel (or silent C and LFE) to all. Extreme speed! Look ma, no hands!

I keep forgetting that you've done this. I need to stop telling people about finicky and obscure command line options when you've already produced a much easier method!

 

[HomerJAU]

I keep forgetting that you've done this. I need to stop telling people about finicky and obscure command line options when you've already produced a much easier method!

No problem. Some prefer the command line and some don’t like downloading ’unknown programs’ for security. Always good to have alternative methods! Keep ‘em coming!