Sounds good on my DAW, terrible after burning to CD

bluedaffy

bluedaffy

New member
I've been having this issue and it's really got me scratching my head. When I listen to the master on my DAW (studio one pro) the audio sounds good, when I burn it to a CD and play it on other systems and speakers it sounds noticeably worse. The sound isn't like a mix that translates badly to other speakers, it's like a harsh sound. It's all over the spectrum but most noticeable in the mids and highs. Studio One claims that it automatically dithers when burning to a CD from the master project, so I don't think that is it. The only other things I can think of is

A) I am using old blank CDs to burn my mixes and masters just because I do it often to take to different speakers to hear how it sounds. Can audio burned on old CDs actually affect how the audio itself sounds? I was under the impression that old CDs just made it more likely to cause errors when writing, like glitches and whatnot.

or

B) Because I recorded some tracks at 44.1 and some at 88.2, I created my master project at 88.2, it made the most sense to me to create it this way due to it being the highest common denominator or of the recorded material. If 44.1 is not converted correctly to 88.2 could this cause the audio to sound trashy.

Trashy is a good word for the sound I'm hearing after burning to a CD, only on my monitors playing through my DAW is when it sounds smooth.
 
Before going looking at dither and CD brands and all that.....consider that it's your monitors and your room not letting you hear what you should/could.

If it sounds equally bad on a few other systems....then it's not that you system is the better/best system, it's just that your monitors/room are lying to you.
 
Good point, I will do that now. I will try everything because the answer is probably something very simple. Having said that, I have heard on many occasions what it sounds like to have an imbalanced mix, and I don't think that is what I'm dealing with here because the sound quality itself is bad. For example if there is a break in a song where it's just a guitar playing alone, it sounds bad, and it can't be a bad eq setting because I very rarely eq my guitar tracks (other than a HP @ 80hz or so) because I get what I want at the recording stage and it sounds good through my monitors and phones.

Thank you though, I will run around right now and check on a few pairs of speakers and report back to try and narrow it down.
 
And to add if you haven't gone through this yet-- Do comparisons with relevant commercial mixes between your studio environment (play back chain) and these other places, and then the same with your mixes. This is a pretty standard thing to have to work out (‘know and learn) so you can sort out what’s why.
 
What is the format of the source material and how are you burning? CD audio is 16-bit 44.1 KHz. If your source material is something else, the DAW has to transcode from whatever you're working in, e.g. 24-bit 48 KHz down to the CD standard. Different software does that with different levels of competence.

I tend to work in 32-bit 96 KHz. I've Audition 3.0 does a very good job translating that into the CD standard. Audition CS6, not quite as well. Nero does it abysmally. The difference in audio quality is not merely noticeable, but dramatic. The Nero-transcoded CDs sound as you've described -- harsh and "trashy."

Whatever the problem, it is definitely NOT the CD itself. CDs are digital storage media, i.e. they're just a bunch of machine-readable 0s and 1s -- either they can be read or not. There's nothing about a CD that will affect the sound quality and a very expensive CDR will not sound any better than a cheap one. You might get more drop-out on the cheaper one, or it might not last as long, but as long as the data is there, they will both sound exactly the same.
 
PTravel said:
.. I tend to work in 32-bit 96 KHz. I've Audition 3.0 does a very good job translating that into the CD standard. Audition CS6, not quite as well. Nero does it abysmally. The difference in audio quality is not merely noticeable, but dramatic. The Nero-transcoded CDs sound as you've described -- harsh and "trashy."
Click to expand...
Interesting turn there. I use Nero (typically) to burn, but it's never occured to me to do the reduction to 16/44 there. Always that ver gets done and exported directly out of the master prog (Sonar in this case
 
Massive Master- Good suggestion, but yes it does sound trashy through the same system.

PTravel- Thanks for the clarification on the workings of a CD. That's kind of how I assumed they worked.

Update- I burned the master again without changing any of the project settings since the last time but this time decreased the burn speed. Before I had burned as fast as possible because after all, they were just throw away CDs to be used as a medium to listen to the rough draft of the master on different systems. This time I set it to burn at 8x, which I know is fast and still not ideal for an official master or whatnot. After burning the CD at 8x I gave it a listen on a long drive yesterday in the car. I'm pretty convinced that the burn speed had something to do with it because everything sounded smoother unlike the time before when I listened to it in the car. I am in the middle of moving right now so I haven't had any time to listen on other speakers but I am excited to do so because I think that was part, if not all of the problem.

When Studio One burns to disc there are 2 progress bars, one is write (burn) speed, the other is mixdown speed. When burning @ max speed I noticed that the write speed never got to top speed (24x) it would get up to 10x or so and then be throttled back to 4x and then return to 10x and so on. I speculate that it was because the mixdown speed couldn't keep up with the write speed so that is why it burned in waves of fast and slow, in doing so maybe the integrity of the master was compromised?

I will post an update after I listen to the new master on other speakers. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this before?
 
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