Clipping... my gosh... I thought it was blown over proportion...

Just for the fun of it, yesterday I downloaded the DSP Spectrum Tool for Winamp (I don't work for them). The spectrum analyzer tells you when the music is clipping. I couldn't believe how much some of the music I have clips! :-(

For example, the "Almost Famous" soundtrack is clipping like crazy. I passed the whole CD into Cool Edit 2000 and asked CE2k to give some stats about the wave file... it detected hundreds of possible clipping spots. I zoomed-in and most were obviously stuck to the floor or ceiling for some time.

I though that was only true for pop music, but then I looked at my Miles Davis - Essentials 2CD's and analyzed the song "New Rhumba". I could hear lots of clipping without analysis. I thought it probably was the original tape that was saturated. Well... it is clipping at around 9 places. I can't tell if the clipping on the wave form are the clipping I hear, but.....

This is disgusting......

what will be the exaplanation? The redbook standard has too poor of a dynamic range? That's one more reason to move to the "new and improved" formats?

grrrrrrrrrrr......

 

Welcome to the state of the music world that's been around since the early to mid 90's.

You won't find many arguments to your statement around here.

Except the the CD format actually has pretty good dynamic range as it is. Some of us around here still enjoy our LP's which have a dynamic range of about 40 db - compared to the CD's 90-100 db. It's just that most CD's are pushed to the top 10db of the range (ok, a little exaggeration, but not by far).

Joel