FLAC files

D

dinlee23

Gawd
Joined
Aug 28, 2008
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so i just bought a pair of M audio AV40's and limme tell you they are well worth the money.
so then i realized that the majority of the files i have are MP3's then i decided to play some FLAC files to my amazement some of the songs are actually worse than the MP3's i can hear every snap crack and pop that happens i dont know but its definetly not my speakers since it only happens to a few songs i just want to know if this happens to some people too or is it just me thats experiencing this
 
idk but it only happens particularly on my linkin park albums specially the Reanimation album to be specific
 
Potentially the decoder you're using has some issues. What media player?
 
The decoder is used to, as you might guess, decode the files for playback. If you're using foobar, then it's unlikely the decoder is to blame.

Do the snaps and pops occur consistently when tracks are played back?
 
But where did these FLAC files come from? They were ripped directly from the CD, yes?
 
no piracy talk allowed around here. ---- magnetik

but I'm going to leave this thread open.
 
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yeah im ripping 3doorsdown right now, its not consistent at all there were probably 3 songs that SCP'd but i was just curious if FLAC's tend to do this or not
 
ok so i searched the same song on you tube its called linkin park reanimation - cure for the itch and it still SCP'd so i guess linkin parks recording on this song was crap at best lol
 
Not necessarily. As someone already mentioned, intentional crackling is not uncommon. It can give a tack a vinyl or old fashioned sound, such as in Incubus' Summer Romance (Anti-Gravity Love Song). Believe me, Linkin Park's albums were high-budget productions.
 
oh ok lol thats the first time i heard of that mhmm interesting lol didnt know artsits do this i thought that the file got corrupted or something
 
yea thats happened to me. With old recordings sometimes the stuff u lose through mp3 compression is actually worth losing. For example, an old pekka pohjola recording i contains the sound of the snares buzzing on hard piano chord hits, which is pretty irritating, when it synced to my ipod nano, itunes converts it from alac to 128 aac, and i noticed that the 128 aac file almost completely eliminated the buzzing.

I might upload the tracks later for comparison, it's really interesting and you can notice it on any pair of speakers.
 
GJSNeptune said:
. FLAC is airtight. Huge community of support.
Click to expand...

FLAC is far better than mp3 especially on good high resolution audio systems (gratz on your 40's). My guess is it's either a bad rip (cough* you get what you pay for *cough) or else it's meant to be there and you just didn't pick it up before. Eric Clapton also has a track "One Chance" off his Pilgrim album (1998) which starts with the sound of a needle dropping along with some simulated vinyl noise before the bass kicks in and the song blasts off. Very good track and one of my faves. Check it out
 
Many years ago a friend of mine called me to complain about some audio equipment he'd bought and was disappointed in the quality, complaining that he was hearing this crackling static in a song he enjoyed. I never once - at the beginning - thought much of the song itself which I'll tell you the artist/song in a moment but sure enough that's what turned out to be the issue in the long run.

Because this friend had been buying absolute shit for audio hardware for so many years, crappy low end headphones, used tape decks (this whole thing happened in the early-to-mid 1980s, a long time ago), etc, he'd never owned anything truly "hi fidelity" in all his life, and this was just about the time when CDs first appeared. Naturally because of my recommendations he finally did go out and purchase a Sony CD player, one of the very first ones, paid a princely sum for it, and the first CD he got was one that I myself and many others treasure to this day: Rush - Grace Under Pressure.

Now, if you're a Rush fan at all, to any appreciable degree, you already know where this post is going:

The first track on that album is "Distant Early Warning" and at about the 14 second mark into the song there's this crackling static that happens towards the middle-right channel (not quite center, not quite full right in the stereo field, but around the middle-right) and this friend of mine had simply never ever even noticed it in all the prior recordings that he'd listened to because they didn't have the capacity to reproduce the full range of audio frequencies like CDs can and do: the analog cassettes on crappy tape decks, in crappy car stereos, nor on the "audiophile" LP players some of his friends owned at that time, etc, all the stuff that couldn't "do" the music accurately.

So he contacted me complaining about that crackling static and saying his brand new CD player was borked, and I was almost ready to believe him until he mentioned that his first CD was Grace Under Pressure and he was hearing that crackling static almost when he pushed Play.

I almost dropped the phone because I was laughing so hard but, eventually I did get him to come to understand that the crackling static was part of the song itself and no his brand new CD player wasn't borked or defective, it was working exactly as it should. :)

Was fun times in those days, with people that had never really heard good quality sound and seeing their reactions when they began to hear things they'd never realized were part of the original songs they'd been listening to for years, sometimes decades...

Didn't mean to hijack the thread but, as soon as I read some of the posts this little story came to mind so... :p

</off_topic>
 
haha thats funny, yeah i notice some songs have a lil static or pop here and there but later on the song they disappear so im guessing that theyr part of the song, its just that i havent heard them before so i was just a lil concerned
 
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