Clicks on CD

[Perfect Record]

I have a Denon DVD/SACD/DVD-A player that actually has very good sounding D/A converters. But it has one quirk (other than a klunky DVD style transport) that I wonder about.

I sometimes hear a tick at the start or end of a track. When I check the masters, there's no DC offset, and the fades in and out are clean.

This may well be a quirk of this particular player, but I wonder if others observe this kind of anomaly in other players. Most of my masters have digital black between tracks, so the tick seems to happen at the first non zero sample on the track.

If this is a known problem on more players than this particular model, I could keep dither alive between tracks. But this is the only player where I've heard this problem.

P

[allemano bernard@neuf.fr]

Hi, Perfect,

Not sure at all, but, I was having problems like this with, very, very little portions of clips (after cuting or trimming, etc... during edition operations). But in this case, generally, you cannot edit your CD. So, If it's not the case, forget this post

Best regards,

Bernard

[Graemme]

Preston,

Try making a CD with several tracks but with the programme being all digital black on a few tracks and then just dither noise on some others. The reason I mention that is because it might be the muting circuitry in the player, which *may* be easy to fix, depending on the implementation.

If you hear ticks on all tracks, with this test disc, it's likely the muting circuitry. If it only occurs on the dither noise tracks then it may be a D/A issue.

Graemme

[Perfect Record]

Graemme,

I can, and might make just such a test. My real reason for asking this question is to see if others have seen similar problems on other players, or if this is just an anomaly on this model. If there's a whole generation of players with that click problem, then we might want to re-think digital black on masters.

It's actually a great sounding player and I've been listening to a lot of music on it. It's about 50/50- discs that have the clicks and those that don't. Older titles copied from analog tapes never seem to have the clicks, but I'm guessing those titles don't have digital black between tracks.

But using this player, I'm reminded of yet another reason DVD-Audio died. Each track is a separate file on the disc. You can't do a real segue between tracks. Concert CD's are doomed. But some DVD-A's had amazing audio quality. I should go back and see if it's only CD's that have the click problem. I don't remember it on DVD-A's.

[Thomas Grubb]

Hi Preston,

I went through a similar thing with a Cambridge Audio DVD/SACD (and Bluray) player and a Sony Bluray/SACD player, though it was only SACD playback I was testing (I didn't keep the players long enough to play CDs!), and some SACDs were fine, others clicked...the Sony was much worse though. Apparently there is a generic chip used in many players that has a bug that introduces clicks at the start of tracks. The Oppo player was also affected, but apparently a patch was offered to fix the problem. The Cambridge Audio player sounded great, but the clicks made it impossible to listen to anything.

Come to think of it, I have a Panasonic DVD player that also puts clicks at the start of CD tracks - I retired that for listening to CD masters pretty quickly! I've never had any issues with my Pioneer SACD player playing either SACDs or CDs though.

I would have expected better from Denon!

Cheers,
Tom

[Thomas Grubb]

Just saw that apparently it's a problem with Mediatek based players, but there should be a fix available.

T.

[Perfect Record]

Hi Preston,


...Come to think of it, I have a Panasonic DVD player that also puts clicks at the start of CD tracks - I retired that for listening to CD masters pretty quickly! I've never had any issues with my Pioneer SACD player playing either SACDs or CDs though.

I would have expected better from Denon!

Cheers,
Tom

There are so many CD's that never go to digital black between tracks that if I was going to be very kind, I might think that possibly the designers of this player never heard the problem on the prototype. On the other hand, I also can't imagine approving a prototype without having played many CD's DVD's SACD's.....

[Perfect Record]

Just saw that apparently it's a problem with Mediatek based players, but there should be a fix available.

T.

A friend who recently designed a very high end CD player, which was designed around a DVD transport and controller but with greatly improved converters, tells me that many current generation D-A chips default to mute when they encounter digital black. He implied that designers could defeat this function.