Hi all

Bear with me. This is a long post...

I had something very interesting happen today. I had a last minute call from
a new client needing help with a compilation product for release.

This person gets permission from old bands from the 60's and re-releases
them in short replicated runs for collectors.

He gets the songs from many different sources: people and formats. As he
says he doen't get the original masters, but audio CD's. Most of the time
they are ready for release. Sometimes he has to add a few bonus tracks to
the product so a new CD master has to be created.

Anyway, accordinng to him, any copy of the CD's that are made from his
masters don't sound the same to him as his main discs that the songs were
taken from. He says he hears a loss of detail and air around the recording
in the copies.

The master he was sent is what he wants and sounds good to him but,
according to him, any copies made of this disc sound wrong. He says both
the direct copy as well as an audio extraction sound different to him and
can pick out the different versions.

So, I had him bring over the discs that he had. He had the original audio
CD-R master, extracted AIFF files saved on a CD-ROM, as well as the bonus
tracks that need to be added the the final product in AIFF format.

I proceeded to extract the audio using Samplitude Pro 8.2 CD extractor. I
made him a CD and he sat there with headphones and switched CD's back &
forth in the player & said the copy doesn't sound the same.

Then I imported the AIFF files into the timeline and lined them up with the
extraction files to A/B them. There was a SLIGHT difference - yes, the AIFF
sounded "better" than the extraction - but my GOD he was being picky! My
monitoring and room are good so I know what I can trust hearing here.

Anyway, I made him an audio CD of the AIFF files and he compared all 3 disks
- the original, the extracted copy, and the AIFF disc. He compared again and
said all 3 sounded different!!

What he is trying to do is eliminate the change he is getting while trying
to copy the disc so it sounds like the master.

I am suspect of the original files as he didn't do the transfer, and doesn't
know what was used to do the transfer, and how the files were treated before
he got them. He did say someone had done some noise reduction especially on
the vinyl transfers.

I did see that the waveform of all of the files was VERY flat, giving me the
impression that the files were heavily compressed or normalized. Started
life as an mp3 maybe?

The actual audio level was quite low though - strange.

Anyway, anybody have any ideas on what might be going on?

Thanks!
--
Tom Jancauskas
Imedia