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mastering for cheap cd players

Subject: mastering for cheap cd players
From: Rob Danielson <>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 12:52:02 -0600
Thanks for the plausible explanation! You're right, my waveform app 
shows a clip at two magnification scales but it measures a peak of 
94%.  I'm hearing three, pronounced, moments of distortion that sound 
like chain shaking in the louder, CD player call and two of these, 
but softer in the original. As the 2nd half of the file was produced 
from the CD player's analog amp/output passing through another A-D, I 
guess its hard to tell where the exaggeration is coming from exactly. 
The distortion is too wide to address with EQ. Surgical gain 
reductions were not very successful either. The harshness of the 
undistorted portions are responsive to EQ (e.g. mastering).

The softer call seems great so Rich has a simple work-around. I guess 
there could be several reasons the softer call escaped distortion. 
Dan, do you think that a lower record gain would have eliminated this 
type of distortion or is it likely to be more complicated? Rob D.

= = =

At 6:22 AM -0800 1/10/06, Dan Dugan wrote:
>  >  > http://home.comcast.net/~richpeet/0659.wav
>
>It may be a type of analog audio distortion called slew rate
>distortion. It affects high-frequency, high-level material, adding a
>lower-frequency rasp to it. The peaks aren't clipped, but the slopes
>are flattened out at an angle, i.e. a sine wave is changed into a
>triangle wave. Easy to hear, hard to see on a complex waveform.
>
>-Dan Dugan
>

-- 
Rob Danielson
Film Department
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee


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