I am new to copying my own cd's, but have had them for some time. Why is it that the quality and the hight of sound is not as good as an original when played on a car stereo. Someone once told me that it is possible to change something when copying. I would appreciate ANY input. Thank you.
There are several areas where problems can creep in. Ripping:- A lot of current CD's are mastered far too "hot" - with samples actually going over 0dBFS when reconstructed. When you rip these, you will see a flat top to the wave files. There is no real way around this problem as yet. Ripping (again):- Perhaps you are ripping too fast? In WaveLab, for example, there is an option to use "ultra safe" method. It is a lot slower, but what it basically does is looks very slowly at the files, and reads them a pre set amount of times. If you have this set to 3, it will keep reading the audio until it gets 3 reads that are exactly the same. A lot of rippers are not that good, to be blunt, and introduce errors. DC Offset:- When you rip audio, it always introduces DC offset into the files. This is bad, and needs to be removed - especially if you are going to reprocess the files in any way. Normalizing:- don't do it. There is no good reason to ever normalize a file. All it does is raises the peak to a determined amount - most people use 0dB or 0.1 dB. This seems fine, but when the audio is decoded in a CD payer, the transients between samples - especially if you have 2 or more consecutive samples at or near 0 dB - wil often be OVER 0dB, and introduce distortion. Burn Speed:- generally, do not burn Audio CD's higher than 4x if quaity is important to you. You may have some, all or none of these issues, but you should be aware of them. Keeping Audio quaity high is not quite as easy as a couple of mouse cicks, despite what you read. Basically, don't believe everything you see or hear - after all, do you believe everything in the newspapers?? Digita Audio is the same. A lot of people have a lot of things to say, and most of it is at best inaccurate and at worst badly wrong.
