Here at Shockwave-Sound.Com, we deliver music files either in 44.1 khz uncompressed
WAV files, or in 192-kbps mp3 files.
The WAV files represent the original CD master recordings, untouched and
uncompromised. They are, byte-for-byte, the same as what is put onto a commercial
music-CD.
The mp3 files are encoded in 192 kbps format, and this is of sufficiently
high quality to be nearly indistinguishable from the original recording, for
all but the most exacting listeners. Not only are our files encoded to this
high bit-rate, but they have also been encoded by the encoding-engine in Sonic
Foundry (now Sony) SoundForge, which is widely known to be the best sounding
mp3 encoding engine in existence today. The bottom line is that, when you
create an Audio-CD from our WAV or MP3 files, it should sound every bit as
good as the original master recordings.
In the event that the Audio-CD you produce does not have a high enough sound
quality, this is most likely caused by too high burning-speed when you burned
the CD. Most CD-burners in computers today are capable of burning CDs at extremely
high speeds, like 40x or even 52x speed. This is good for data storage, but
for audio-CD format, it is not recommended, because the Audio-CD format has
less advanced error correction than the data storage format. At high burn
speeds for audio, errors (called jitter and C1 and C2 errors) may be introduced
during recording. Such errors can usually be corrected, but sometimes they
cannot. Regardless, the process of correcting errors may in itself cause audible
sonic degradation. Try re-burning the same files into an Audio-CD at 4x or
8x burning speed, and see if this helps. Here at Shockwave-Sound we always
burn audio-discs at low speeds; certainly never any higher than 8x, usually
slower.
Other factors that may also affect the sound quality of an Audio-CD are:
Media quality, Playback equipment, and any CD-authoring software settings
such as "filtering", "volume normalizer", "noise
removal", "eq", "hiss removal" etc. We recommend
switching OFF all such features when you burn an Audio-CD.
