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Propeller Head Plaza: A test that I did. by jsm

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A test that I did.

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FWIW, here is a rather simple test that I did. I have a rather good outboard ADC that puts out its digital signal to the USB input of my Mac laptop computer. I made three different kinds of recordings. Using my Ayre CX-7e, I took the analog signal out, passed it through the ADC and made a CD-R. Using my TT and the output of my phono stage (an ARC PH 5), I made CD-Rs of some vinyl discs. Finally, using a Sony SACD player (by no means a high-end SACD player) in two-channel mode I did same thing with SACD playback, taking the analog out and converting it to CD-R. I listened in all cases to the CD-R with the Ayre, since the Sony is obviously much poorer on RBCD- no surprise there. The rest of the chain consisted of an ARC preamp, a Plinius amp, and Vandersteen 5 speakers.

The result: The CD-Rs of both the vinyl and CD recordings were very close in sound quality to the original, though I could hear the differences without a great deal of difficulty. At times I found it difficult to hear differences between the vinyl and the CD-R of it. I was a bit surprised how close the copy of the CD was, with the extra ADC steps, but it was quite good. However, it was very easy to hear the difference between the original SACD and the CD-R made from its analog signal; the CD-R was obviously inferior. This is a rather ordinary SACD player. My conclusion: RBCD encoding is capable of doing very well with the information content in vinyl and CD playback, but it clearly falls short in handling a signal derived from a SACD source. One can easily hear the difference between the RBCD standard and SACDs. One can debate all sorts of things about how I did this, but it was a comparative test. Using exactly the same setup to make RBCD recordings of analog signals, those derived from SACDs were obviously not as good as the original, while the other two were much closer to the original. One can argue about the vinyl result and what it means, and I won't get into that here, but I think the SACD result is pretty clear, and it agreed with what I was hearing directly.

Joe



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