[X] My Assistant

Yeah they were the 'high end' pressed fakes, with the perfect replica cases and jackets. Some of them the different catalogue number but others had the correct number.

Confusingly, I looked up and some of the Taiwanese manufacturers were legit, as in they paid royalties and had licenses? That could explain the seemingly high quality of the 'fakes'. It would make sense for my country as well as, as there used to be lots of grey market importers.
yeah the dac was okay but the output stage was trash lol. It was the same with the PSP and PSVITA. Psvita was worse as they arbitrarily removed the high quality video and audio outputs last minute but left the chipset.
Edit: I am a little surprised by how much enthusiasm people are putting into converting the PS1 for audio play back.

One technical review says it used some good parts, has terrible technical measurements but in the implementation Sony engineers tuned it to sound warm and gloss over the weaknesses of the design.

So its like they did a good implementation of a very cut down version of their high end hardware, engineered to cover up the large amount of the jitter and noise that would typically sound bad. Having expert engineers that helped develop the CD audio standard tune the sound output obviously pays off.

I don't believe it for a second because the quality of the actual CD pickup assembly is pure garbage. No matter how good your dac might be the drive mechanics aren't. They don't even use a brushless spindle motor. Trash goes in, trash comes out of the error correction (CDDA error correction isn't guaranteed to be a perfect reconstruction and it is not always mathematically possible to make a perfect reconstruction).

It's silly to concentrate so hard on the circuitry when the mechanics are so busted. Also the later models up through SCPH-55xx series had the same audio circuitry (DAC et al) sans the RCA jacks on the back. To me those people are the blind leading the blind.

This post has been edited by Moonlight Rambler: Jul 7 2025, 14:26

I don't believe it for a second because the quality of the actual CD pickup assembly is pure garbage. No matter how good your dac might be the drive mechanics aren't. They don't even use a brushless spindle motor. Trash goes in, trash comes out of the error correction (CDDA error correction isn't guaranteed to be a perfect reconstruction and it is not always mathematically possible to make a perfect reconstruction).

It's silly to concentrate so hard on the circuitry when the mechanics are so busted. Also the later models up through SCPH-55xx series had the same audio circuitry (DAC et al) sans the RCA jacks on the back. To me those people are the blind leading the blind.

Three quarters of the circuit is trash. A few components are top tier back then. To hide bad output quality they made it sound warm with even harmonic distortion and over smoothing.

So the PS1 is very inaccurate and bloomy but people like that 'analogue' sound. Its like the entertainment sound system sound of the 90s or the Beat by Dre approach.

Three quarters of the circuit is trash. A few components are top tier back then. To hide bad output quality they made it sound warm with even harmonic distortion and over smoothing.

So the PS1 is very inaccurate and bloomy but people like that 'analogue' sound. Its like the entertainment sound system sound of the 90s or the Beat by Dre approach.

not sure we're talking the same thing, i'm talking about the laser and seeking motor and supporting physical hardware, not the circuitry post-decoding. the error correction doesn't make the sound "analogue."
I do know what you're getting at otherwise, i just don't consider the non-DAC analogue circuitry to be the most fundamental problem with the playstation. It's their poor ability to actually read discs.

The AK4309 appears to be a pretty decent DAC but just changing the circuitry from the analogue outputs onward isn't really enough; the digital portion of CD reading also needs to be considered.

(this is of only academic interest to me, I find CD's to play fine on almost any player but I'm quite aware there's some hard-to-perceive loss going on from error correction in most of them, since CDDA was designed sacrificing the ability to perfectly recover the bits present on the master disc in order to increase total capacity. The way CD players are designed, it isn't even always possible to determine that an error has occurred because there are so many stages in demodulating the data from the RF signal of the laser sensor output, and some are abstracted away from the "computer" portions of a player or PC because the CPU time complexity of doing such decoding in software would be massive at the time.)

The "solution" to this, insofar as there is one, would involve a domesday duplicator style project for copying CD's from raw RF captures of the entire surface being read, which would in theory mean you're seeing everything that the player does and can take as long as you want to try to get a perfect decode.
MQA is technically another "solution" but it's a shitty one because it steals a bit from the output and is primarily snake oil, and involves all sorts of filters being applied to the output. if they simply stole one bit without trying to do things to post-process it back, that'd work.

This post has been edited by Moonlight Rambler: Jul 8 2025, 05:36

not sure we're talking the same thing, i'm talking about the laser and seeking motor and supporting physical hardware, not the circuitry post-decoding. the error correction doesn't make the sound "analogue."
I do know what you're getting at otherwise, i just don't consider the non-DAC analogue circuitry to be the most fundamental problem with the playstation. It's their poor ability to actually read discs.

Its not error correction, its an inaccurate output stage. So more error.

You are right, I am not sure why people think the PS1 CD drive itself is any good considering its one of the main failure points. I went through about three of them, due to drive failure.

One of the best ps1 improvements is getting rid of the CD drive.

(this is of only academic interest to me, I find CD's to play fine on almost any player but I'm quite aware there's some hard-to-perceive loss going on from error correction in most of them, since CDDA was designed sacrificing the ability to perfectly recover the bits present on the master disc in order to increase total capacity. The way CD players are designed, it isn't even always possible to determine that an error has occurred because there are so many stages in demodulating the data from the RF signal of the laser sensor output, and some are abstracted away from the "computer" portions of a player or PC because the CPU time complexity of doing such decoding in software would be massive at the time.)

I think the mastering process has a bigger impact. With better produced disks being less likely to have errors. I was once part of a preservation project collecting and gathering up all the old 1st and 2nd gen Sony music CDs and CDs produced at their fabs as they put a huge amount of effort into the quality of the original releases. Quality then dropped off as you mentioned due to improved error correction and filters and less need for the CDs themselves to be error free.

The "solution" to this, insofar as there is one, would involve a domesday duplicator style project for copying CD's from raw RF captures of the entire surface being read, which would in theory mean you're seeing everything that the player does and can take as long as you want to try to get a perfect decode.

Yeah back then we had a pro drive that could do the full output without error correction and do multipass. No clue on the exact technical specs.

Really should swap out this key board...

really need to change my phone, already cannot game more than 3 hours

You are right, I am not sure why people think the PS1 CD drive itself is any good considering its one of the main failure points. I went through about three of them, due to drive failure.

One of the best ps1 improvements is getting rid of the CD drive.

I've also got a graveyard. There's also a couple more that aren't in this stack because the shells snapped, so they're just loose motherboards in a box that I have. And a PSOne that I fried electrically.
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I think one of those might actually work but it's a Japanese unit with the extra lock-out in the BIOS rom, and while apparently PSNee has a workaround for that now I've not done it yet.
I bet that workaround existing has increased the cost of japanese units unfortunately

I think the mastering process has a bigger impact. With better produced disks being less likely to have errors.

Correct. By the way, "HQCD's" actually do seem to have a cleaner "RF eye" pattern on an oscilloscope than run-of-the-mill discs tend to, interestingly enough. So they are actually doing something different in the mastering or pressing process.

Bought 8 more HDDs and now my thighs are noticeably warmer than usual. Might need to reconsider how to set up my storage stack.

Removed watermarks from a few datasheets today in emacs after uncompressing them.
I love that it's actually possible to do that with PDF's, even if I wish it were simpler.

MQA is technically another "solution" but it's a shitty one because it steals a bit from the output and is primarily snake oil, and involves all sorts of filters being applied to the output. if they simply stole one bit without trying to do things to post-process it back, that'd work.

MQA is getting roasted ATM. Couldn't prove in court how they were in any way technically superior.

Then everyone started dropping them.

A lot of services and distributors switched to Dolby, but Dolby still has problems.

eg Dolby Atmos can be a superior format for some audio eg movies but it also functions like a container so can get Atmos certification with lossy audio and a more limited dolby format inside the container.

There are only like <20 4k UHD movies that max out the Dolby Atmos home standard... Many studios just say why spend extra as most streaming services compress the audio and remove features anyways.

yeah the only "useful" thing about MQA is that you can use it to verify if your CD rip is good using some software someone from VideoLAN made. It's a side effect of its actual intent, but whatever.
I don't think that's really worth losing bit depth over but subjectively it doesn't sound much worse if you just bitwise AND the samples with 0xFFFE to clear the lowest bit unconditionally (thus stripping MQA off of it).

bit depth is less important than sample rate, even though I'd prefer more of it rather than less. The natural response of a speaker and analogue electronics make it less meaningful.

Also: got a wii U from someone; HDMI outtput was borked but analogue component video works so meh, good enough.

This post has been edited by Moonlight Rambler: Jul 22 2025, 07:21

Forgot to turn off H@H before restarting my pc.
It's painfully slow to recover from that (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)