roadwarrior said:
I've recently began a site located on the
www.purevolume.com site. I've listened to tons of others stuff there and they all sound superb sonically. Mine on the other hand have excessive wow and flutter sounding more like a bad tape recorder of the days gone by. I tried uploading the originals and converting to various different Mp3 rates all the way up to 192bps and to no avail. Anyone have experience with how to resolve such an issue? As I said it seems that I'm about the only one with sucky audio quality. The original Mp3 files always sound great...just not after uploading and listening to them however. My particular site is at
http://www.purevolume.com/hisway HELLLLLLLPPPPPPP
Ah...the reality of digital music.
You are already aware that analog is infinite (tho limited by the human ear at ~18Hz to 20kHz, the human ear can still detect sounds that the best microphones still can't capture). Digital is finite (limited by bits).
16 & 24 bit CDs cannot capture the infinitessmal hearing range between >18Hz to 20kHz, so digital has to do 2 things:
1. due to bit limitations, Digital clips phase angle relationships (meaning you can hear left and right but the phase angles of 3D depth perception - or a sound mixed in to appear 10 feet away is gone), so nearly all of the 3D depth perception is eliminated and what remains is a flat, 1D sound like a drawing on a piece of paper. (listen to Dark Side of the Moon on CD and a 1st class album stamping on Phono with headphones to see what I mean).
2. due to bit limitations, Digital also clips the bass and the highs. Bass has to be clipped because its soundwaves are very large and is a huge bit-hog (thus the need for subwoofers to exagerate the existing bass frequency that remains). Highs need to be clipped to save bits for the middle range - which is why cymbals sound cold and brassy compared to Analog. So right off the bat, you now understand the digital CD has inferior sound quality when compared to an album or reel-to-reel tape.
Now, each time a copy is made, further degradation occurs exponentially. The 2nd generation copy is inferior to its mother copy - even when using identically set parameters of the mother copy. With analog, there is more tape hiss and with digital, there is further clipping of lows & highs and there's more "mud" (for a lack of a better term).
Now to save server space, many of these sites use inferior settings from its mother copies which further degrades the quality.
Digital (odd order distortion) will mathematically never be able approximate Analog (even order distortion) to the human ear and the human ear will always be able to tell the difference between the two. The trade off of Digital to Analog is: musical purity is lost for the convenience of affordibility and features.
I remember back when I was a kid in the 60s & 70s that we used to get kits to make our own tube amps and our own parametric EQs to get the best possible sound from our records and reel-to-reels. Kids today could care less about how music sounds - they want portability.
Why one would want to listen to crappy sounding mp3s which promote hearing fatigue is beyond me...but then again, we carried those little crappy portable transister radios around in the 60s & 70s because crappy sound was better than no sound...
DY
(and not that new HD radio either)
