Hi Steve
John is mostly tuning using measurements, and he is a very highly qualified E.E. with Industry connections . In fact his S/W Dolby-A decoder DHNRDS is now a commercial product that has even been of interest to the USA Library of Congress and is being used as a tool
to preserve many earlier recordings for future generations .
It is also being used to recover many of the Masters that were destroyed in that major storage fire, where only some Dolby-A versions remain. His DHNRDS is much more accurate than the Dolby=A hardware decoders.
Yes, quite a few comparisons have been made with the Vinyl and other versions, but the problem is that MANY earlier recordings did not have correctly decoded Dolby-A, or it was used by some Mastering Engineers to make many recordings more suitable for AM radio play.
Another problem is that most of us have become used to the sound of this inappropriate use of Dolby-A to liven up or EQ many recordings.
The present problem, is that John is now attempting to reverse engineer many of these poorly mastered versions, not simply use his S/W as a purely Dolby-A decoder, but in recent months his hearing has become highly variable
due to a medical condition, and for a while he went backwards with his corrections due to this.
Have a listen to things like the YouTube music Video of Norah Jones-Come Away with Me, which hasn't been painted with the Dolby-A brush, and note the difference even in her voice.
You will see that I passed your feedback on to John in the quote below, which I am sure John will not mind me posting here.
Kind Regards
Alex
Quote: John Dyson
Replied: 17 minutes ago
1 hour ago, sandyk said:
John
Feedback that I have received is that versions 4 and 5 of Bloody Well Right are too bright sounding and lack low end warmth, which is what I have been saying about many recordings for some time
Alex
The comments agree with the revelation that I just made.
There will NEVER be the FA 'warmth' and distortion, however I did find a way of taming the sound. It does appear that there is some missing lower middle frequencies, but it will never sound like FA (just reminding -- however there is some missing.) I just realized that the problem with harshness was NOT too much HF, but instead about 2dB or so missing 500Hz to 1kHz.
I kept trying to tame the HF -- but that wasn't the problem.
The new versions really have a 'flat' sound -- with the addition of about 2.0dB at the frequencies that I mentioned above. Harshess is now under control -- coming in a few hours.
The tamed versions will be uploaded within a few hours.
John
There is also a discussion thread here,https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/58668-ferala-decoder-free-to-use/#comments
but the main effort is in a PM group of about 10 members including a few E.E.s and S/W people