Weird skipping-like sounds

[b0ng0]

I was listening to my NW-A3000 at work today and a few songs started to make a weird skipping effect, much like a scratched CD would. Now the player is well charged, and it only does this on a few tunes which play fine on my PC. Is this likely to be a bad transfer to the player or a hardware problem?

Also, I noticed on some songs that sounds in the mid-range not trebly or bassy, sometimes sound a bit distorted. Again is this a trait of the player or is it to do with encoding?

I have used SS4CP and transferred the files as they are (all MP3 minimum bitrate is 128Kbps but mostly 192 upwards).

Oh yeh, almost forgot - i know that they make a hissing when the volume is low, but I can also hear a weird "brrr" noise as well which changes frequency rapidly (this is just as quiet as the hissing though).

Thanks for any help

Edited July 28, 2006 by b0ng0

[grenert]

I've had skipping sounds with bad rips from CD. I'm not sure how good Sonic Stage is at ripping CDs. When I rip to MP3, I use Easy CD-DA (shareware) or Exact Audio Copy (freeware, but a little harder to use). These two programs have very robust handling of read errors on the CD.

You could confirm it is a problem with the MP3 by playing the file on your computer to see if the skip is reproducible.

Cheers.

-J. P.

[chriswyatt]

My player once started skipping once, just randomly, I don't think it was a bad rip or anything. I couldn't turn off the player or navigate tracks so I had to reset it in the end. I remember my minidisc player randomly started skipping once, then I think there was no sound for about 10-15 seconds and it started working again, probably something to do with skip-protection.