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On Jun 22, 6:18 pm, Dave wrote:
I have been disappointed with the audio quality of some CDs I have
bought recently. Is there a free program I can use to get an accepted
measurement of fidelity? (like a signal to noise ratio)

I have my suspicious that some may have been stored an MP3s and then
"unripped" in the factory. So how can I tell for certain if my CD has
been an MP3, or other lossy format? I'd hope mp3 storage would leave
different markers than the original tape, for example.

There's no particularly good reason why the "factory"
would want to do such a things.

There's a far more mundane explanation. Recent
music distribution, including CDs, have suffered
from an industry-wide of sever over compression,
limiting and clipping, as an endemic result of the
mastering process. There's been this headlong
to produce "louder and louder" CDs. Many producers
have decided, quite incorrectly, to equate louder
with better.

The result is a dramatic deterioration of available
music,especially in the pop music genres. It
has nothing to do with MP3, it has everything to
do with overall incompetence and disregard of high
production standards.

To get a good measure I'd expect some Fourier transforms and signal
analysis to be done, so this should be relevant to sci.physics.

Nope, simply any peak-to-average measurement
should reveal an overl trend in this direction over the
last decade or so.