I recently ripped this CD to WMA9 96kb/s VBR 2 pass through EAC.

I've ripped quite a few studio and live CDs this way already and am (personally) pleased with the quality...until a few days ago, I bought the above named CD by Metallica. Audiowise there is one studio track and 6 live tracks on it.

My point is; it seems Metallica (or more likely their technicians) recorded the audio live to a compressed format and decompressed to wav for CD Mastering purposes.

When these live tracks are (re-)compressed(?) they sound really bad. The high frequencies are REALLY tinny with artifacts.

Can anyone out there confirm my suspicion? Is there a way to check the quality of the original wave on the CD?

Am I paranoid ?

I've not yet tried a rip to a different quality setting in WMA or with LAME.

Your ripping a live CD, encoding with a low bitrate these combinations commonly cause artifacts & some CD's will compress better than others, try a lossless format or at least 192kbps or higher.

.....right..... higher bitrate.... have you heard WMA9 96VBR 2 pass?

There is nothing wrong with it!

I'm just trying to find out here if anyone thinks the same - that the original recording was compressed, then decompressed for mastering purposes.

If you've ever re-ripped a CD made from MP3s (128-160kb/s CBR) you'll know what I mean.

You'll want to rip to plain ol' .wav first and listen to that before you can be sure it's not WMA causing the issues.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with it most of the time, but maybe you've just found the kind of sounds where it creates artifacts.


However - you can usually see if the original CD track is from a lossy source by ripping it to .wav and looking at a spectral analysis. There was a thread about this recently - gaps or whole blank areas in the spectrum above a certain frequency are a good sign that a psychoacoustic codec has been used. Though some codecs avoid this.

hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.

P.S. download applaud.wav from http://lame.sourceforge.net/gpsycho/quality.html and encode this using the same settings - does it sound OK? It's not transcoded or taken from a lossy source.

you can also see if a CD is tanscoded with e.g. Monkeys Audio.
The compression is always(I tested it many times with different bitrates (80-aps))
at arrond 45% and i never got 45% with any not transcoded music.

Thank you all,

I can't access http://lame.sourceforge.net/gpsycho/quality.html due to our stupid "websense" software at work so I'll try those suggestions over the weekend and come back to you with my findings!