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Unbelivable recording playing half-tone below concert pitch (440Hz).

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    Unbelivable recording playing half-tone below concert pitch (440Hz).

    Hi: can this be? The performance was done a semitone below 440Hz. This is, in the temperate scale, aprox 311Hz, much lower than any pitch which could have been used. Hence, I now see it myself, its not the perfomance but the recording. But that's equally unacceptable. By the ghods ... it could be my CD player! I leave this post as a curiosity but right now checking with another CD.

    #2
    Confirmed. Just the CD player. Sorry.

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      #3
      Originally posted by Enrique View Post
      Confirmed. Just the CD player. Sorry.
      How can your CD player do that? Does it have a pitch control? I can lower pitch on a minidisc player but I've never heard of it happening on a CD.

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        #4
        Well, not realy a stand-alone CD player but the CD/DVD unit in the machine I am writing in. I played another one and checked against the score with a fine tuning fork. It lags or the software is to blame, the latter being highly improbable. In a computer the disk can spin at any velocity alowed by the unit manufactured. Furthermore, when your CD player reproduces a disc, it is continuously varying its speed. I must either buy a new one or call a technician. Thanks for worying.

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          #5
          AMENDMENT: a CD player or a computer drive is controlled by a quartz crystal. And it is truly unbelievable it would lag or lead. It's more easy I was mistaken. And indeed I was. It wasn't an audio CD (CDDA). It was a FLAC file being played by a CD player. Sorry for a useless post!

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            #6
            Originally posted by Enrique View Post

            Sorry for a useless post!
            Not at all - it was interesting. In the old days it was easy to alter the speed on a turntable to change the pitch if you wanted to play an instrument along with the record. To the best of my knowledge, you can't do that with an ordinary CD player but computer files are a different thing.

            It would be an interesting exercise to check out CDs of old performances - say 1940 or before and see if they are playing at the right pitch. I have read of several classical recordings being a incorrect by as much as a semitone. (Don't ask me which ones - I can't remember.)

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              #7
              That's remarkable! I had detected small differences in vinyls, played on the same quality turntable, but I found it was due to pitch diferences among European and American orvchestras, now a thing of the past.

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                #8
                It's relatively easy to adjust the pitch on any analogue or digital recording when feeding it through a good Wave Editor (such as the latest Nero options). The resultant copied cd will play at the newly-adjusted speed on a cd player of course, although I've never heard of a standard cd player with a pitch adjustment feature.

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                  #9
                  I have sometime played with a wave editor. May be I'll give some good one a try, inasmuch as I manage to not alter other parameters. One of these is volume (sonority level) and I find that only a few good transcriptions (vinyl to CD) escape the rule of using maximum sensibility during the recording.

                  A cd player with pitch adjustment would be a useful thing, but it would have to be costume designed. I mean for a musician with a piano. Either the piano is out of tune or it is an old recording with A not = 440.

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