Propeller Head Plaza

Posted by EBradMeyer (P) on September 24, 2007 at 01:00:38

In Reply to: RE: Wha? The player was Pioneer? That wasn't in the paper. posted by John Atkinson on September 12, 2007 at 03:54:24

For the record:

(1) The Pioneer player mentioned on the BAS site was used for a few early tests. It certainly did have a lower noise floor than the CD link and clearly revealed this by being readily detectable, because of the higher audible noise in the CD link, at elevated gain levels we used for a few tests. This is described in the paper.

(2) The high-gain tests also revealed that the Pioneer player had a slightly grainy-sounding nonlinearity in the left channel, audible only with this extremely quiet recording, and only during the room tone. We then tried an expensive ($2000) Sony player, which was clean, and did most of the tests with a Yamaha DVD-S1500.

(3) Our tests had no desired outcome. We searched diligently for, would have been happy to find, a combination of a recording, playback system and test subject that revealed sonic differences at normal listening levels, and even happier to learn how to pass that test ourselves.

(4) I did set up a double-blind test of a good cassette deck (using Dolby C) against a CD original at an AES convention in New York. There was no desired outcome there either, except to show people that if you really adjust the deck carefully (which I did frequently throughout the day), passing that test is much harder than you would think. A number of people did pass it, and the set of those that did was in interesting one (to me, if not to TDK). -- E. Brad