How do I handle pre-emphasis with EAC?

Can some kind soul please tell me whereabouts the "FLAGS=PRE" goes in the EAC cue sheet?

I'm keen to try this out!

Thank you.



Nobby.

 

I just tried a little experiment of my own using the FLAGS PRE trick with EAC.

One of the most painfully, ear screeching bright CDs in my collection is the EMI "A Hundred Pounds Of Clay-The Best Of Gene McDaniels". I have always suspected that this disc had something wrong other than overly bright mastering. I mean, this CD is so bright and shrill it can peel the paint off your walls.

I copied an image file of the disc with EAC, opened the cue sheet and added pre-emphasis flags to all the tracks, and burned a copy. Well, wouldn't you know that the burned copy sounds a hell of a lot better than the original CD. I can actually listen to the disc now and not run from the room screaming. Now I'm wondering if the pre-emphasis flag was SUPPOSED to be on the original CD, but somehow got edited off the CD master. I believe it was released in the early 90's, and I don't think they were using pre-emphasis by then.

My next project will be performing this trick on the EMI Timi Yuro CD, which was released about the same time, and suffers from the same ills.

I believe someone on the forum mentioned a few months ago that they had used the same trick on the Stevie Wonder "Songs In The Key Of Life" remaster and got rid of some of the shrillness as well.

 

OK figured it out using Cool Edit... it has a pre emphasis tick box in the beta burning plug in.

Here's something weird - or maybe not.

I have a Surround amp and a Pioneer 656 DVD/DVDA/SACD/CD player.

If I listen from the analogue output of the CD the pre emphasis kicks in, but a digital feed goes straight to the amp without being corrected.

Just tried it with "The Nightfly", which I always thought sounded bright, but the de emphasized (?) version just doesn't sound right. So I guess that how Donald wanted it!

 

Does that mean that outboard DAC's just don't do de-emphasis at all? Can a player just not pass the pre-e flag out of the player to a separate DAC?

I wonder if that's the same thing I experience on a computer with the cd-drive doing the de-emphasis in-drive and out the analog, but not passing the flag out digitally.

 

More on Wings Greatest

O.K. I made a CD-R of the Wings Greatest disc with the pre-emphasis flags on. I don't like it. It does NOT sound like the original, aluminum disc. Sorry. The original disc is bright in spots, but that's the way it is. The CD-R made with the pre-emphasis flags on has a sense of warmth around McCartney's vocals, but the music is muddy. It sounds like the resolution was lost. The music is much more lively on the original disc. As far as I am concerned, the CD-R I just made on EAC is a coaster.

As I said, the original, aluminum CD is bright in spots. The opening vocals on "Live and Let Die" have an edge to them, but the instrumental sections sound great. On the EAC CD-R, the vocals sound subdued, but the instruments are closed in. It just doesn't sound right. The aluminum disc is not ideal since it is bright in spots, but that's how it was mastered, and that's how I want to hear it.

I will continue to listen to my Roxio Easy CD Creator CD-R, as it sounds like the original disc. Of course, if I want to go nuts with this, I could make a CD-R on EAC with the flags off for comparison.

 

The 2-disc set is fairly old(1988) and it was made in France. I believe I got it free with a subscription to STEREO REVIEW or AUDIO magazine. But it's very comprehensive and essentially a CD player/audio system torture test with built in CD defects and test tones. I

 

Thanks, Charlie. I'll keep my eyes peeled for a copy on eBay and in used CD shops. I'd love to hear those tracks with and without pre-emphasis.

 

I remember in the old "CD Review" magazine they used to list pre-emphasis errors in their player test specs. I wonder if they used the Peirre Verany test disc?

 

OK, I'm lost.

So EAC is not reliable in detecting pre-emphasis. Is there any utility or ripper that is reliable with this feature?

 

I have yet to find an early Japanese pressing in my collection that EAC says is encoded with pre-emphasis. Two of my Japanese pressings of Thriller clearly are encoded with pre-emphasis, but EAC says they aren't. I'd love to find a program that is reliable in this regard. Otherwise, I'll try to get an older CD player that detects pre-emphasis.

 

I can recall only 2 CD players that had a front panel indicator for "emphasis", one of them being made by Revox in the mid-1980s..

 

Well there were more of them than you recall then. Back in the 1980's Cambridge Audio produced two players with pre-emphasis indicators, the CD1 and CD2. I can only remember the pre-emphasis light on my CD2 coming on once, and that was for Hand of Kindness by Richard Thompson on Hannibal.

 

Interesting results. Given this information, I'd say the Japanese original was made from copy tapes a couple of generations down, or maybe a copy tape EQ'd for LP cutting. The non-flagged Japanese WINGS GREATEST sounds much brighter and thinner to my ears than the original Parlophone release that was sold in the US.

Thanks for doing the experiment. Sorry about the coaster.

 

No problem! I've made coasters before, so what's another?

The black-triangle Wings Greatest is bright in spots, but I still prefer it to the black-label Parlophone disc. The black-triangle disc sounds more alive to me. Just my preference.