Gabriel Bouvigne wrote:
The pre-releases just keep getting cooler, thanks Rob! The auto attenuation is fantastic. On one track I have, ZZ Top's 'La Grange', taken from the Armageddon soundtrack (which has incredible amounts of clipping on the CD itself),
There is something I don't understand. Clipping is sound above the maximum allowed sound. As the sound of a CD is stored on a CD, and the maximum amplitude sound that can be stored on a CD is obviously the maximum allowed intensity on a CD, how can there be clipping on a CD, ie the sound of the CD exceding the sound that can be stored on this CD. That seems strange to me.
Strange but true. Modern CD's are mastered to sound very loud and sometimes sound engineers go overboard with it. A lot of pop CD's are compressed as well, to magnify their sound even more. So on a prudently engineered CD track, you have a wave form with peaks and lows, how it should be; however on one of these compressed and amplified CD tracks, you see virtually no peaks and lows, but a wave form that is pretty much solid throughout the entire dynamic range, and a lot of times goes beyond the dynamic range (clips). Actually making an audio CD clip is fairly easy. All that's stored on a CD is 16-bit wave files. You can open up a 16-bit wave file in any sound editing program and amplify it to induce clipping. Nothing too hard about it. However, I can compress and amplify a 16-bit wave file without inducing clipping, so why there are CD's out there with this problem is indeed strange. I think it's more often than not CD's being mixed for low-end audio equipment, which don't necessarily reveal these deficiencies. Or even just deaf audio engineers. It's pretty well known that many 'experienced' audio engineers have very bad hearing, after years of loud music all day long, so they use a lot of equalization and special equipment to help them hear the music. It's a wierd reality, but true as well. Maybe it's a combination of both of these factors which account for the current sad state of digital recordings.