Questions about DSP's

[CrusherW9]

Hello! I'm planning on ripping a bunch of cd's using dBpoweramp and I want to rip everything perfectly the first time. I was taking a look at all of the DSP effects but now I'm left with a few questions.

1. What is the difference between the Hidden Track Silence Removal and the Silence Track Deletion DSPs? I get what they are according to their descriptions but yet they have the same settings which makes me think they are the same.

2. What is the Bit Depth dsp for? It says it is needed for any non-live dsp's but is that the only use?

3. Should the Trim Silence DSP normally be used for ripping any cd?

4. Does the order of the DSP's added have any effect?

Basically, I just want to make sure that everything is ripped "correctly" with the highest possible sound quality so I don't end up wishing I did or didn't do something. I'm going to rip 2 versions of everything; flac for archiving and mp3 for listening. Thanks!

[Spoon]

Re: Questions about DSP's

The only DSP effect I use when ripping a CD is 'ReplayGain', the rest are not needed IMHO

[garym]

Re: Questions about DSP's

agree. These other DSP's you mention are used in very special cases (e.g., some sort of special DJ mix) and not for lossless ripping of a regular CDs. I use only ReplayGain DSP in my ripping to FLAC....

[CrusherW9]

Re: Questions about DSP's

These other DSP's you mention are used in very special cases (e.g., some sort of special DJ mix) and not for lossless ripping of regular CDs

A lot of the music is various electronic genre's and mix cd's such as this. In this case, what do you guys recommend?

[garym]

Re: Questions about DSP's

If you can play the CD in a cd player, and you like what you hear, I'd rip with only the ReplayGain DSP. Don't change bitdepth, remove silence, or use any of those other DSPs. What you want is a LOSSLESS version of the CD, nothing more nothing less. If you are not 100% sure what those other things do (for the limited special cases), you don't want to use them. And also consider that if you rip to lossless FLAC without all those DSPs, you can always do a conversion later on using DSPs that you decide you need without reripping.

Bottom line, I've ripped 70,000 tracks to FLAC from thousands of CDs of many different genres, and I've only used ReplayGain DSP (and this just adds some metadata tags...it doesn't change the audio itself).

[CrusherW9]

Re: Questions about DSP's

And also consider that if you rip to lossless FLAC without all those DSPs, you can always do a conversion later on using DSPs that you decide you need without reripping.

This is true. Didn't think about that. Thanks for the help guys!

[mville]

Re: Questions about DSP's

The only DSP effect I use when ripping a CD is 'ReplayGain', the rest are not needed IMHO

Spoon, do you not use the HDCD dsp? If not, why not? Is it not needed?

[Porcus]

Re: Questions about DSP's

Spoon, do you not use the HDCD dsp? If not, why not? Is it not needed?

1) It is not needed if you rip to lossless; you can check for HDCD later. (Some applications will make this somewhat cumbersome on ALAC though ...) Also, a HDCD-able DAC will recognize a HDCD from the bitstream.
The reason is that HDCD is flagged in-signal; it adds some slight distortion to the least significant bit to flag that this is a HDCD. (This in contrast to pre-emphasis, which is stored in the subchannel).

2) There are software solutions that process HDCDs on-the-fly upon playback, working just the same way as the HDCD DSP. If using the appropriate software, you will get through playback whatever you could by the HDCD DSP. (See however point (6) below.)

3) Many HDCD discs don't utilize any HDCD features. They just flag that this is a HDCD, and all the feature switches are off. The reason -- I am told -- is that a fairly common piece of studio hardware would employ the HDCD flag even with no features utilized.
Because of this, you would rather want to scan the entire CD afterwards to see whether there are any features at all. In addition, there are cases where the volume gain is only used on digital silence (Tool: Lateralus being one known example), so even if it technically uses a HDCD feature, it does only tell the decoder to turn absolute silence even further down.

4) The typical mode of the HDCD.exe application (used by the HDCD DSP) would be to convert to a 24 bit file (even if the decoded signal is indeed only 16 bits!) and applying a volume adjustment.
While this could be worthwhile for tracks where the HDCD features are indeed enablet, it is messy when only parts of a CD is HDCD, and unneccessarily so if these parts do not apply any features. (Only the 'Peak Extension' feature would require volume adjustment.)

5) Even if you want to apply HDCD decoding, you may want to scan the entire CD for HDCD features. The HDCD DSP only scans the track in question.

6) This point is probably not much of an issue, given the scarcity of the 'Transient Filter' feature, but HDCD.exe does not process properly this HDCD feature, and to the best of my knowledge, there is no available software implementation of this. If you have a DAC which supports this feature -- I don't know how many such do exist! -- then on the few CDs in question, you will get full-featured HDCD only by feeding the signal unprocessed to the DAC, but not if you decode by the HDCD DSP or through playback.


(I still think this forum needs a FAQ ...)

[mville]

Re: Questions about DSP's

1) It is not needed if you rip to lossless ...

OK, thanks for the detailed reply.

So, to confirm, any non HDCDs ripped to flac, with the HDCD dsp, are not affected?

I think I'll re-rip my 84 HDCDs :cry:

[Porcus]

Re: Questions about DSP's

any non HDCDs ripped to flac, with the HDCD dsp, are not affected?

Correct.

[Hitarth]

Re: Questions about DSP's



OK, thanks for the detailed reply.

So, to confirm, any non HDCDs ripped to flac, with the HDCD dsp, are not affected?

I think I'll re-rip my 84 HDCDs :cry:

hi,
did you rip, selecting the +6 ??