Congrats Beave! Excellent price as well! I look forward to your impressions of the Arcam to the 205. Need some internal pictures as well .
Yeah, much cheaper buying it from the U.K. saved $488 which is significant, don’t think I could rationalize $1320 for the thing, that’s what I paid for the 205! And I’ll get some pics going when it arrives, that should be fun, but reading that review again a few posts back, the way they describe in detail the nuances of what they were hearing its consistent with the quality of what I hear from the 105 and 205, so it might have the PRO chip in it, or Arcam’s implementation of their own audio section is up there with the OPPO ‘s. Either way I’m looking forward to having some fun with it, now back to the OPPO. Beave
David both my 205 and 105 sound GREAT playing HDCD’S decoded! Just listened to Dave Brubeck’s Time Out last night and man, it’s almost a Religious experience! But remember, you have to go into the oppo’s setup menu and turn HDCD decoding ON. By default it’s turned off. Beave
Beave, now are you saying the 105 or 205, that I have to go into the settings and turn it on? Right now I have the 205. What's a good price on the 105?[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE] Sorry David for the confusion. The 205 doesn’t do HDCD, but the 105 DOES. in its setup menu there is a place to turn HDCD decoding on. Now, you can get a 105, I’ve recently got a near mint silver edition for under $700, which to me is a steal. The 105 is SO close, performance wise to a 205, that I would guess on AUDIO, 2 CHANNEL, most people wouldn’t hear a significant difference between the two. Now on the other hand, if your just looking to play the HDCD discs, consider buying the EMOTIVA CD-100. It’s a very well built and sounding player and it decodes/plays HDCD’S. They go for $299 but I called up EMOTIVA, their culture is like oppo’s, very friendly people, and asked if they had any ‘returns’ or refurbished units and they DID have one for $40 off retail. So you’d have your. 205 and a dedicated HDCD for not much money. I love both my units, in fact just did a shootout between the Emotiva and my 105 with Brubecks HDCD Time Out l last night, they are so close it was way cool, but I WAS pleasantly intoxicated so it wasn’t a real scientific type of thing, but I’ll tell you this, under those circumstances the Emotiva held its own against the 105! Beave
OOP S MY 205 DOESNT PLAY HDCD CDS DECODED! SORRY BOUT THAT. That’s what happens with good Tequila........ Beave
Folks also should be aware that not all HDCDs necessarily sound different played back decoded vs non-decoded. HDCD mastering has a few features available, and mastering engineers can enable them or disable them during mastering. The most notable HDCD feature is "Peak Extend." This essentially allows for the source to be peak-limited, but for the chopped-off/limited peak information to be preserved and hidden in the HDCD encoding, which takes up the 16th bit of the CD redbook data (it's basically mixed in with the dither, I believe). An HDCD with Peak Extend will sound notably different when decoded - it will have its chopped-off peaks restored, and the RMS volume will be correspondingly lower (to give the necessary added headroom for the full peaks). But other HDCD features are less audible. One feature involves using certain custom digital filtering to correspond with the filtering used in the original analogue to digital process made during recording/digitization (sort of an early version of part of MQA's claimed feature set). This feature is of dubious benefit and its audible effects can be quite subtle, often inaudible - just like if you happen to have a CD or SACD player with switchable digital filters on it, you can try the different filters and you might hear slightly different characteristics to the sound, but the differences will be quite subtle, not always even audible, and not necessarily uniformly better or worse - it can vary depending on what music/source material you're playing. And finally, some HDCDs don't use any of the available features. This means they were mastered using an HDCD-capable digital audio workstation, but beyond that this kind of disc actually has nothing to decode. Some others might contend that there are some other HDCD features besides Peak Extend that can have audible effects, and my intent here is not to argue with such folks. My point is only that if you have, say, 25 HDCDs in your collection, it is very unlikely that you actually have anywhere near 25 CDs where HDCD capability in your player will make any difference. As an example (admittedly just one data point), my CD collection is small by forum standards, about 425 titles, and I have a grand total of 2 HDCDs that use Peak Extend. I used to have 3 and recently sold one. And for all 3 of them, I specifically sought them out. Had I not looked specifically for those titles, I would likely have either zero or 1 HDCD with Peak Extend in my collection. So HDCD capability really isn't an issue, unless you're a major fan of an artist whose catalogue is known for having a ton of HDCD titles, like the Grateful Dead (and even then, I have no idea if the Dead's titles use Peak Extend or other audible HDCD encoding features - I'm sure others here know).
Out of curiosity, how do you know what features are enabled on HDCD compact discs? Is there software that can tell you? I've ripped mine with dbPoweramp but it's been awhile and can't recall if that info popped up when ripping the discs.
I have a CD37 in my storage unit somewhere and have heard a few other Arcam players and think you should expect a nice warm presentation. Not clinical, pretty darned musical. Strong bass perhaps (the CD37 really does).
Thanks. Although that post didn't answer my question, it did lead me down a trail and to another website that confirmed Cue Tools is the software that can tell you what hdcd features are enabled.
CUE tools was mentioned and I could have just posted that but @Ham Sandwich posts on the subject are well worth reading.
Foobar2000 is also able to decode HDCD if you add in the right plugin components and configure things correctly. The Foobar HDCD decoding will detect if the track you are playing has HDCD encoding and do that on-the-fly during playback. And if you configure a display string you can have Foobar display if the detected HDCD has peak extend or gain and display that info during playback. I still use CueTools to decode my HDCD titles and find out what HDCD features the discs have. And if anyone is looking for a very good DAC that can detect and decode HDCD look at the Berkeley Alpha DAC by Berkeley Audio. Berkeley Audio is founded by some of the engineers from Pacific Microsonics who developed HDCD. The Berkely Alpha DACs are around $3K used. Expensive. But very good. If I was after an HDCD capable DAC that is what I'd get.
It's the only disc player Arcam now do and doesn't match visually with most of their range. At the price I am sceptical it has Oppo 205 sound quality. It's half the cost of their old top range FMJ CD players.