SC5000 High End Roll-off

Yes noticed the same thing. Maybe its really a engine software thing.

but if we take a usb key without going through engine ? it can be interesting to do a test @Reticuli

Does Engine Prime have Elastique 3 and pitch alteration possible? If not, then the most likely culpret if indeed there’s weird sound stuff happening in Engine Prime would be an intentional degradation of the sound in it so that the players don’t seem so bad when juxtaposed to the computer software… similar to on the players when you have keylock off and you go “hey, the keylock on sounds pretty good compared to this”, when in reality you’re hearing substantial degredation and frequency response limitation all the time on them currently, even at zero or with keylock off. Yeah, I can test it.

In Engine Prime 1.2.1 you can change the speed and choose the ranges. It doesn’t seem to support ASIO, which would have allowed the use of JACK to do in situ routing pretty easily and with low worries of digital audio issues, so I had to use VoiceMeeter that I don’t necessarily get consistent results with. On the graphs you can see the original, Pioneer’s decoding, and Foobar sent through VoiceMeeter (for verification of the latter) all overlapped on the blue line, then the pink is Engine Prime.

It appears that Elastique is within Engine Prime and possibly also with the FS divider set to 3. I do not see any evidence of broadband compression going on, outside the possibility that the low pass filtering is amplitude-specific, which would make it a band-centric compressor/limiter if it was. The overall RMS of the outputed audio was pretty close to the original, accounting for a slight change in maximum peak.

If they did impliment Elastique in Engine Prime this way, I don’t see why they can’t just add a Sampling Frequency Divider setting under Performance so you can tailor it to your computer. A slider would work with 1 for fast computers, 3 or 4 at the slowest computers end of the scale.

It does certainly present a more consistent impression of sound quality with the players, though :slight_smile: If this is all the case, then perhaps for consistency-sake they’ll just switch Engine Prime to FS/2 when they improve the players’ firmware.

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The problem with all this is, that the music simply sounds worse. And not just a bit, but so much that I noticed it over the laptop speakers. Most importantly, the music also feels different. And that should not be. Denon really needs to make some ground on that problem.

But it doesn’t - and this all far less of a problem than some people are making out.

The 5000 was out for pretty much a year before anyone even hinted at high end roll off. Since then it’s only been guesses about hunches about wild maybes about what might be behind it.

None of its stopped laidback Luke, Oliver heldens, paul oakenfold and thousands of others from using their 5000s week after week

It most certainly does - a simple direct A-B comparison leaves no doubt about that. I wouldn’t mind a slight coloration too much, but the music I’m playing really changes character.

I’m also using my SC5000s every week. But there is a real loss in musical experience and that’s very frustrating.

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Has anyone stopped Dancing because of it?

What point are you trying to make? Where would you put the threshold for the issue being a problem, 20kHz, 18kHz, 16kHz, 14kHz, 12kHz, 10kHz? Do you understand what these numbers mean?

And yes, the sound has a big impact on the dance floor - not consciously for most people - but then it’s all about feeling, or isn’t it?

If you still think this is all of no importance, then why do you think Denon specified the SC5000 to have a flat frequency response from 22Hz to 22kHz (which it doesn’t)? Clearly they had given that some thought.

I would never ever have bought the SC5000s knowing about that issue in advance. Keeping them is a compromise, as they do have great features and I’m still hoping for improvements.

I’m tired of people telling us this is no issue with pointless arguments. If you don’t care, then why do you take part in the discussion in the first place?

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Nice of you to pop out to the dancefloor with a clipboard and questionnaire to gather responses from 100% of those attending.

I would like to see Denon adjust (and no, I’m not using the word FIX, as it’s not broken as is) this high end filter or roll off, but I’d see almostball and any of the other suggestions as more useful, rather than undue effort or programming or testing time being spent on just this

Indeed I do go onto the dance floor to party there and talk to people. I’m also my best customer standing FOH.

Now look, the technical specification of the SC5000 says it has a frequency response from 22Hz up to 22.000Hz. In reality that frequency response is more like 30Hz to 14.000Hz/16.000Hz/18.000Hz, depending on what you consider ‘flat’. Assuming that is +1/-1dB we miss something like a whopping 8.000Hz of flat frequency response. Also there is the issue of phase shift messing up transients and harmonics. To me that amounts to a clear defect that needs to be fixed.

So I’ll ask you again, how far does it have to be off the specification for you, to be considered a defect?

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I doubt that insulting me is unlikely to change any priority in having this high end roll off changed.

Also, it’s orobaly there for a reason and probably not just a firmware on/off switch

Less than perfect sound is something club goers have been used to since the 70s. Really! Think stylus’s. Every time a record is played, some of the groove wears away, as does some the the stylus, both resulting in degraded sound. The nearest it ever got to perfect sound would have been a new record, played via a new stylus on a new cartridge.

Sorry, I didn’t mean any insult. I was merely inquiring how severe that problem would have to be, to be considered a defect in your opinion.

One has to admire the tenacity of beatom and @Reticuli on this issue. They back up their findings (true positive or false positive) with technical details.

Hopefully the hypothesis is tested further by Denon and if Denons finding converges with yours they will make the adjustment needed.

Don’t mind me…Im just brushing up my critical appraisals skills. :wink:

Just curious as to what you tested with? Is it a gold standard ? What is the confidence interval or what is the accuracy of the test.

Testing you can do with a variety of audio analysis tools (most employing FFT). I prefer to use the flux analyzer. If you go through this thread top to bottom, you can find many different read outs from different tools - the results are all consistent. So yes, FFT is certainly a gold standard and Denon are using it as well for sure.

Accuracy is usually something like 10ths of a dB, but there are so many settings and assumptions going into the algorithm one shouldn’t give too much weight to that. The point is, it’s a standard method and results are consistent over different tools and settings.

Thank you for clearing that up.

On the bottom line, an audio output defect would have to be significant enough for an audience members complaint to be made for me to consider it a fault or be in need of a fix.

I utiiise one of several very good mobile sound systems, either based on powered speakers or the older traditional passive speakers, crossovers, and amps. A couple of plastic boxes on tripods might give my audiences and I cause for concern if a playout device lacked in a particular frequency niche, but I stopped using box on a stick packages over 2.5 decades ago.

Afore the tide of “oh but on a great/loud sound rig, a sound blip is going to be all the more noticeable” I’ll rebuke that by pointing out that while that might be how someone could expect it to be on paper, in reality, a good sound rig will be able to compensate for things drudged up elsewhere in the sounds gain chain. Sure, it can’t put in everything that wasn’t being put into it from playout, but it can often compensate in other ways.

As a bottom line (again), I’m not saying “keep the roll off” but I’d rather a few other things got attention from the firmware writers way before roll off. Without hijacking this topic, I’d say that I’d like to see more “on player imputing” being made available - like being able to name cue points and loops and re-type tags all on the player rather than just through Engine.

It’s really cool to restart the debate but I hope we will at least, have a response from denon :slight_smile: I’m confident about this! @Chloe_DENONDJ

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All the remarks that “an audience does not hear the difference” will be 90% true, but I am “my 10% audience” and I would really like to have this solved also. The top-end frequencies need to be crisp and detailed, even if it means that key lock will suffer from it.

But… maybe as a third request AFTER the higher pitch resolution at low pitch ranges AND the beat grid adjust on the players… amongst other things I guess. :sunglasses:

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I am soooo glad I’m not the only one who notices the higher frequency distortion. Iam always thinking I some how left an effect on, it drives me crazy. Originally I just figured it was due to a few badly encoded files. Its not often I hear the difference when playing Bar/Club genres, but Techno and Tech House seem to be most affected. My current work around is using Serato for those genres. I figured that out by playing Serato analyzed files and Engine Prime files on different channels of the x1800 and could clearly tell the difference. I would like to thank the persistent Prime users who have continued to discuss the issue. It gives me a warm and fuzzy that Denon will provide a solution sooner then later.

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Thank for contribute to this topic Kade it’s cool to se we are not some few Dj who have a problem with that ! 139 messages later and it’s still a big issues with my pair of Dynaudio BM12A Speaker… 2019 are coming and i’m certainly sure the remplacement of the Pioneer Nexus 2 Denon need to fix it’s bugs