Today I was playing Paula Cole's "This Fire." The first track on the disc reliably causes my 990+755 combination to produce extremely distorted output, even at very low levels. This track is extremely heavy with bass, but I have other CDs that are equially full of bass that don't exhibit this behaviour. I've tried it with 2 different copies of the disc so I think I can eliminate a bad disc. The problem disappears on other tracks on this disc.

I also noticed a similar problem with the new Maroon5 disc. Apparently it's using some nasty BMG "copy protection" scheme. It sounds absolutely horrid. I mean, it sounds like a $20 RadioShack amp trying to drive Apogees. If I feed the analog out from the transport rather than the digital toslink/coax, the problem vanishes so I'm assuming this is an issue with the D/A conversion process interacting with the idiotic copy protection. Just for fun, I ripped the CD into 160k mp3's and then converted those back to WAV files onto a CD. The ugliness survives the process intact.

Any suggestions with either problem would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Unfortunately I don't have an answer for you, but I felt the need to publically fume about futile copy protection schemes that interfere with obviously legal usage.

When will they learn?

Yeah, the tube heads and the record companies have one thing in common....they'd like us all to go back to 1950's technology. 8-(

Fortunately, I found my receipt so I'm going to try to return the Maroon5 disc.

By the way, the song on the Paula Cole disc that confuses the 990/755 combo is called "Tiger".

Cheers,

Does this distortion occur in both standard stereo and upsample?

It occurs with stereo and upsample. It also occurs on digital coax, TOSlink, and analog connections from that source. So I'm wondering if it might be a transport issue? Also, I note that this is an HDCD disc. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Problem solved. It seems to be a transport issue. I tried another DVD player and the problems disappeared.

However, I do notice a distinct difference in sound quality between digital coax and TOSlink. TOSlink signals are quieter (I need to raise the volume 6-8db to get equivalent sound pressure). I also feel like the quality of the signal is better with coax rather than TOSlink (TOSlink signal seems quite "shrill" or "bright"). I'm using a custom coax cable (canare cable with canare connectors crimped on with Canare crimper). The TOSlink cable is from Outlaw.

Cheers,