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Distortion on some Hi-MD recording/transfers.

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Sony_Fan

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I just noticed that on some music transfers from CD to my RH10, there is distortion in some of the music. I only record from pre-recorded CDs, no CD-R. Is the distortion caused by:

- The CD

- SonicStage

- Bitrate (Hi-SP)

- RH10

???

Is it present when playing back through sonicstage?

I take it you are ripping and not recording real time?

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Is it present when playing back through sonicstage?

I take it you are ripping and not recording real time?

Yeah, I'm ripping using SonicStage 4.0 The distortion is more present during the louder parts of a track. Some of the softer CDs from the 80's seem to have no distortion. I'm starting to think the distortion is being caused by a CD with high volume. I was ripping "One Heart" by Celine Dion.

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Lossy codecs can cause sometimes clipping on loud peaks that are close to 0dB - even if the actual peak on the CD is less than 0dB. IIRC, it has to do with how scalefactors are calculated. That's why when using MP3, for example, I always send my files through Replay Gain and set the peaks to 89dB - you might be able to do the same with Wav Gain and import the wav files into SS for encoding to ATRAC.

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Lossy codecs can cause sometimes clipping on loud peaks that are close to 0dB - even if the actual peak on the CD is less than 0dB. IIRC, it has to do with how scalefactors are calculated. That's why when using MP3, for example, I always send my files through Replay Gain and set the peaks to 89dB - you might be able to do the same with Wav Gain and import the wav files into SS for encoding to ATRAC.

I don't like WavGain because it doesn't work like MP3Gain. I would transfer MP3 to my Rh10, but they sound horrible.

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Blame the record companies and their "Louder is best" compression techniques.

Almost all the CD's released now have the dynamic range of a sponge pudding and are constantly pushing the upper limit on CD's, this causes them to sometimes clip (the crackle you hear) but because someone decided that the louder a song sounds the more sales they get from radio play thats what we have to put up with.

When CD's were originally released they had a dB range set out to go from infinited upto +6dB to allow for peaks, music was supposed to sit around 0dB and only peak once or twice into a soft limit at +3dB and never the hard limit at +6dB. Now we have them constantly banging into the hard limit at +6dB and anything less than +5dB is counted as wasted volume.

Edited by Qwakrz
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Blame the record companies and their "Louder is best" compression techniques.

Almost all the CD's released now have the dynamic range of a sponge pudding and are constantly pushing the upper limit on CD's, this causes them to sometimes clip (the crackle you hear) but because someone decided that the louder a song sounds the more sales they get from radio play thats what we have to put up with.

When CD's were originally released they had a dB range set out to go from infinited upto +6dB to allow for peaks, music was supposed to sit around 0dB and only peak once or twice into a soft limit at +3dB and never the hard limit at +6dB. Now we have them constantly banging into the hard limit at +6dB and anything less than +5dB is counted as wasted volume.

I think you hit the nail on the head. This explains why CDs from the 80's and early 90's do sound better after being transferred to Hi-MD. Most of the CDs of the late 90's thru today are very loud and not very compression friendly.

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Hyper-compressed music is mainly "optimized" for the casual radio station listener, listening in the car and other noisy environments and for lo-fi systems, in other words, the average consumer. On higher end gear in quiet environments, it will sound mostly awful, particularly when listening for longer periods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

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Well, i think i found a way to reduce distortion from louder CDs. BEfore, I was just importing a CD with ATRAC3+ 256 at "normal" setting. Now, I import the CD as WAV files and then convert to Hi-SP and transfer to Hi-MD. It may be my imagination, but there seems to be less distortion.

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