Yef wrote:

I have an audio source of people speaking where, just as
a person begins speaking a word, there is a cluck or kuk
sound. The format is AC3 which is Dolby 5.1. However
I also get this problem with from Dolby stereo AC3.
The problem is greatly exacerbated by converting this
AC3 sound to MP3 format.

Can anyone tell me what causes this?
Is this some form of protection?

Probably bad dialogue gating and not related to the Dolby encoding.

And yes, lossy compression systems tend to deal with these kinds of
sounds poorly.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."