Post by boomzilla on Jun 3, 2020 13:12:02 GMT -5
For quite a while, some of my audio files have sounded as if their upper midrange was clipped. Particularly with female vocals recorded at high levels, the voice will sound distorted when the singer's volume swells to a crescendo.
Initially, I thought one of my components was clipping, but through substitution over time, ALL of the system components have been changed multiple times without altering the effect.
garbulky has posited that the "lack of room treatment" is the cause, but since some tracks sound pristine even at high levels and even when the recording volume is high, I've persistently rejected that explanation as well.
What I believe is happening is that some tracks have been damaged over time and the distortion has crept in. Before you poo-pooh the idea ("digital copies are BIT-PERFECT!"), allow me to explain... Some of my library is relatively new, other albums and tracks date back to the 1980s. When I began ripping, I initially ripped to .ALE format (Apple Losless Encoding) using iTunes. Somewhere along the line, I chose to begin ripping in .WAV format instead and using a different player (J-River). After I determined that I wasn't going back to iTunes, I used some software (name and version forgotten) to do a mass conversion of all the .ALE files to .WAV format.
In theory, this should have been a completely lossless conversion since .ALE is not a lossy format. However, I did notice after the conversion that some files sounded better in their .WAV versions than they had in .ALE, other files exhibited the opposite effect. I'm suspecting that I have a number of poor-sounding files in my library that were damaged during that .ALE to .WAV conversion. Since there's no way to definitively determine which files are "bad," I think that I'll need to just keep a list of funky-sounding files as I encounter them and then re-rip those files and discs using current technology (and directly to .WAV this time).
I've also noted that some players are more revealing of the bad tracks than others. The same file, played through Roon and J-River, sounds different. I'm not terribly surprised at this, since I've caught J-River before automatically down-rezzing my 44/16 files to MP3 format. No warning; just does it. Roon has never done that yet. And before you tell me to switch to your fave player, I'll tell you up front that I'm NOT interested. Having paid for Roon, and having been satisfied with its performance (other than with damaged files), I plan on sticking with Roon.
So now comes the "needle in a haystack" search for the CDs that I need to re-rip. Sigh...
Boomzilla
Initially, I thought one of my components was clipping, but through substitution over time, ALL of the system components have been changed multiple times without altering the effect.
garbulky has posited that the "lack of room treatment" is the cause, but since some tracks sound pristine even at high levels and even when the recording volume is high, I've persistently rejected that explanation as well.
What I believe is happening is that some tracks have been damaged over time and the distortion has crept in. Before you poo-pooh the idea ("digital copies are BIT-PERFECT!"), allow me to explain... Some of my library is relatively new, other albums and tracks date back to the 1980s. When I began ripping, I initially ripped to .ALE format (Apple Losless Encoding) using iTunes. Somewhere along the line, I chose to begin ripping in .WAV format instead and using a different player (J-River). After I determined that I wasn't going back to iTunes, I used some software (name and version forgotten) to do a mass conversion of all the .ALE files to .WAV format.
In theory, this should have been a completely lossless conversion since .ALE is not a lossy format. However, I did notice after the conversion that some files sounded better in their .WAV versions than they had in .ALE, other files exhibited the opposite effect. I'm suspecting that I have a number of poor-sounding files in my library that were damaged during that .ALE to .WAV conversion. Since there's no way to definitively determine which files are "bad," I think that I'll need to just keep a list of funky-sounding files as I encounter them and then re-rip those files and discs using current technology (and directly to .WAV this time).
I've also noted that some players are more revealing of the bad tracks than others. The same file, played through Roon and J-River, sounds different. I'm not terribly surprised at this, since I've caught J-River before automatically down-rezzing my 44/16 files to MP3 format. No warning; just does it. Roon has never done that yet. And before you tell me to switch to your fave player, I'll tell you up front that I'm NOT interested. Having paid for Roon, and having been satisfied with its performance (other than with damaged files), I plan on sticking with Roon.
So now comes the "needle in a haystack" search for the CDs that I need to re-rip. Sigh...
Boomzilla