Best recorded CD's - Best sounding

[Iain McNeill]

I just enjoyed listening to Bela Fleck & Flecktones The Hidden Land (Columbia 82796 96417 2) Great ambience, 3D image and clean instrument mic'ing. Then I discovered that it is not compressed at all!! The waveforms look more like classical recordings.

There may be hope for the industry yet?!?

[jpak]

Any of the Ray Charles albums on the DCC label. Absolutely amazing sound

[audiotux]

Hi gvr4ever ,
can you more specifying the CD
A Charlie Brown Christmas.
cant find the CD here in germany.

Greetings from Germany
Jürgen

[elac310]

Quote:"can you more specifying the CD
A Charlie Brown Christmas.
cant find the CD here in germany.
Greetings from Germany
Jürgen"


I too was intrigued by that album. I did a research on Amazon (.com, .de, .fr, .co.uk can't remember which one); seems to be quite easily available.

[Tranceformer]

This is a small selection of music I am using to test the sound of a system:

Long After You're Gone - Chris Jones >>> a very clean recording with crisp guitars and very deep bass

For Heaven's Sake - Grover Washington Jr. >>> slow jazz with cool atmosphere male and female voice (left-right) should not sound harsh on the high notes on the end of the song

Junior B - Yello >>> good studio production. I would say a HighEnd club sound

[TerryO]

I've taken the liberty of copying this posting by me from another forum and will just re-post it here. It's a little redundant, some of this is contained in an earier post but it helps to keep things in context.

Anyway, here tiz...


Re: Best mastered Cd's
« Reply #28 on: September 28, 2008, 01:07:04 am »

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So far the best that I've heard is "Passion" by Mercedes/AMG, which unfortunately isn't for sale to the general public as it's only available when you buy an AMG. It's a sampler format, produced to the very highest standards in the world, the BLER or Block Error Rate has been documented and verified as being no higher than 10. The best Audiophile labels on the market are between 50 and 20.

There is one other CD that is at this time, the "best" mastered CD in existence (TTBOMK). It's "The Puget Sound! 2008 DIY Speaker Contest" compilation. This is a special edition of the music available to the judge's for evaluation of the entries. While the Judge's only listened to 2-3 minutes of the choices they selected, this disc has the complete piece. It was produced as a joint effort by Winston Ma of First Impression Music, Gary Leonard Koh of Genesis Advanced Technology and Bruce Brown, Mastering Engineer and owner of Puget Sound Studios.

All the stops were pulled to produce this disc and it has a BLER of between 0.5 and 0.3, which is perhaps the lowest ever produced outside of JVC's R&D laboratory in Japan. It utilizes a proprietary multi-step mastering technique that is not yet economically viable and was burned onto a MAM-R Audio Master 1x-12x mastering disc after special preparation and a proprietary damping material was applied to the top of the disk. The disk was also balanced and trued to prevent vibration prior to recording.

There is only one copy in existence and it was the Grand Prize for "Best Sound in Show" at the speaker contest, going to John Nail for his 3-way speaker entry ("The Purple Puppies.")

Just in case you're wondering, I haven't sent it to John yet and have listened to it twice myself

Best Regards,
TerryO

[SimontY]

I hope it has some good music on it then

[peranders]

Jennifer Warnes "Famous Blue Raincoat" in the 25th anniversary edition. Really nice

Jennifer sings Leonard Cohen.

http://jenniferwarnes.com/

http://jenniferwarnes.com/index.html...og_albums.html (Frames)

The album "The Hunter" is also very good.

[scott wurcer]

Originally posted by TerryO
the BLER or Block Error Rate has been documented and verified as being no higher than 10. The best Audiophile labels on the market are between 50 and 20.

What does the BLER have to do with the quality of the production values on the CD? The BLER has little or no corellation to the number of uncorrectable read errors. I would assume once a CD is transfered to memory or hard drive the BLER would become 0. Kenny G with no errors is still Kenny G.

[TerryO]

Originally posted by scott wurcer


What does the BLER have to do with the quality of the production values on the CD? The BLER has little or no corellation to the number of uncorrectable read errors. I would assume once a CD is transfered to memory or hard drive the BLER would become 0. Kenny G with no errors is still Kenny G.

Scott,

I don't claim to be an expert by any means, but I take it as an indication of the quality and care that has gone into creating a disc.

Here's some info (from discdupe.org) that correlates with what my general understanding is:

Types of Errors
Various discs were tested using a Clover CD Analyzer.
The tests are not intended to be comprehensive, but cover only Block Error Rates. This is nonetheless a good indicator of whether or not the disc is good.

WHAT ARE ERRORS?
Block errors on a disc are not a physical thing. They are a manifestation of how a disc interacts with a player. So different players can produce different error-rates from the same disc. Although there are rigid specifications that define what a CD should be, there are no such specifications for players. Therfore, to ensure wide compatibility, discs should have low errors. Additionally, a disc that is unreadable on one player, may seem to perform well on another.

The CIRC error correction used in CD players uses two stages of error correction called C1 and C2, with de-interleaving of the data between the stages. The error correction chip can correct two bad symbols per block in the first stage and up to four bad symbols in the second stage.

BLER
BLER, or Block Error Rate, is the number of data blocks per second that contain detectable errors at the input of the C1 decoder. The "Red Book" specification allows BLER up to 220 per second averaged over 10 seconds. These days, with high speed readers commonplace, the generally accepted maximum is 50.

E11, E21, E31
An E11 error means one bad symbol was corrected at the C1 stage. An E21 error means two bad symbols corrected at the C1 stage. E31 means three or more bad symbols at the C1 stage, and is uncorrectable at C1 and so is passed on to the C2 stage.

Because the data is de-interleaved between the stages, each of the bad symbols is now in separate blocks, and so they can be handled by the C2 stage. As a result of the interleaving, one uncorrectable symbol at C1 can become up to 28 bad symbols at C2, which is why E12 is often much higher than E31.

E12, E22, E32
An E12 error means that one bad symbol was corrected at the C2 stage. E22 is two bad symbols, and E32 is three or more bad symbols at C2 and therefore cannot be corrected. It is theoretically possible for C2 to correct four bad symbols, but not all players can do so. To allow for high compatibility, we consider E32 to be uncorrectable, even though some drives may be able to correct it.

Best Regards,
TerryO