'FeralA' decoder -- free-to-use

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A great clip John, and yes, I”d love a copy!

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14 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Gang -- I need help.  A AS user/listener about the FeralA decoder has asked for Led Zepplin test deocdes.  I cannot remember who!!!   Whoever is interested in Led Zepplin -- let me know, please!!!   I searched my records, but I get so overwhelmed, I cannot remember who?   I have an example to see if it is close...

 

John

 

 

It was me!    (for the others reading this thread - John actually worked this one out, we have swapped a couple of PM's.  Oh, and the example mentioned sounds pretty decent....)

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On 9/24/2020 at 11:03 PM, jabbr said:

 

Don't give up yet.

 

Yes if you can tweak eq that might be an improvement. 

 

No question that this offers changes in SQ that vastly outweigh many tweaks.

 

C,mon folks who are testing power cables for DC supplies, capacitors, different disk drives, ummmm ... @John Dyson is providing this software for free! ... I mean if you really care about SQ, right?

 

I must admit it has surprised me also how little interest this thread has gained, considering some of the other crazy stuff being tried elsewhere.  (no offence to anyone, I like a bit of crazy stuff myself)   

 

Do you think it might help if someone could collate a few examples of successful decodes?  At the moments there are dozens of versions and examples of ABBA and Carpenters tracks, but not much else.  Personally I would be interested in a small selection of tracks or short samples covering other artists and genres.

 

OK - I could try it myself, but being perfectly honest I am as busy as hell at the moment, and I think it would take me too much time for me to try to get it running and usable, mindful that it has been about 30 years since I have needed to do much with a command line software or similar.  (maybe a simple starters guide "for dummies" might help too, just to get the software up and running?)

 

But if there were a few convincing samples to try, it might be enough to convince me and a few others to give it the time it maybe deserves.

 

Just a thought.

 

As it happens, I have just been listening to the Cure's "Staring at the Sea" compilation Album from a late 80's CD rip.  Sound quality seems pretty good to me, but there are few tracks with very noticeable tape hiss.  (In particular on the second track, 10:15 Saturday Night, much hiss at the end of A Forest too)  From what I have read here, audible tape hiss is one of the more obvious "FerralA" tells.  As I said, the overall sound quality of the album seems pretty good to me, certainly in comparison to similar recordings of the era, if this one could be improved it would certainly help to convince me.

 

 

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18 hours ago, John Dyson said:

I finally got a copy of a few selections from the Cure disk.   Did some reviews...

 

Thank you so much for finding something that I have not found in a few years of searching -- YOU WIN THE PRIZE.

The Cure disk is NOT FA.   The hiss on the disk is natural tape hiss, not enhanced hiss from the FA compression.

 

I tried decoding it, even though my prejudiced opinion would be that it would fail.   Indeed, all of the manifestations of expander

surging.   This is a good *commercial* example that I can use now -- I  only have 'master tape' type material to demo

non-FA that I can cannot publically release.

 

Here is a failed decode of the 2nd cut, Saturday Night.  (50 seconds of unlistenable recording.)

The only good news -- no hiss :-).

 

John

 

 

TheCure-SaturdayNight.mp3 1.15 MB · 12 downloads

So I win the prize for being useless at detecting FeralA.  The kudos is overwhelming!  I presume I win a FeralA decoder?🙂

 

Joking apart, I think there is an interesting observation here.  I had started out thinking that audible hiss is a FerralA "tell".  The Cure album has much hiss, but I also note that it has a very respectable DR score (DR 10 to 16, depending on track, 13 average, for the 80's CD)  So now I am thinking that a more accurate FeralA "tell" would be audible hiss, combined with a low DR?

 

Does this make sense?  I shall keep hunting!

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4 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Did you first make 100% sure that the album actually had Feral-A encoding, which is sometimes done to make the recording brighter sounding ? 

Is there a way to be 100% sure a recording has "Feral-A" encoding?  I have asked this before and the answer seems to be no.

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@Skip Pack - Would it be fair to say that you are using the decoder as more of a general tool for effectively "remastering" certain albums, or at least improving the mastering of certain albums, rather than strictly as a tool to correct for "FerralA"?  This is a genuine question by the way.  (mindful of some of the recent posts here!)  I am just trying to understand a little what you are doing, and where you find a benefit.

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3 hours ago, semente said:

John, what you are asking is even more difficult than giving directions to a blind man driving a car, over the phone. 😞

So many variables, which keep changing from version to version.

With a bit of effort and focus, it is surprising what can be achieved sometimes.

 

 

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11 hours ago, fas42 said:

Just to give some immediate feedback, John ... again, the Super Trouper snippet. The voices intro lacks sparkle and air; and the following instrumental run sounds, 'artificial' - the following seems OK ... this was comparing it to the RAW sample, which I downloaded some time ago.

 

If you want me to elaborate more, let me know ...

 

I presume you are still checking the snippets via your laptop speakers? Or have you found a way now to feed your PC sound to the Edifiers?