Using .ape's, playing in Foobar 2000. (RME Digi96/8 Pad, meta42, HD650's)

With classical mp3s, I notice alot of hiss/background white noise. Is there some way to remove tihs? is it perhaps a problem with my encoding? I'm just using cdex to encode with full paranoia.

The hiss shows up with APE's and with mp3s(alt preset extreme).

Is there a foobar 2000 plugin or some way of encoding better?

That's tough to deal with.

Assuming you've definitely pinned the noise to the source file/recording... there's basically no way of removing the hiss without sacraficing sound quality. The hiss is composed of a lot of high frequencies, and there is no way of sperating the high frequencies from the noise to those coming from the instruments.

Almost any way you remove the hiss will remove some of the quality and tone of the music because it's all mixed together with the sound of the instruments.

Cooledit has some filtering options to do it though. You'll see the 'air' and live sound of the recording is taken away the more the hiss gets filtered out.

My university has a music library with 1000's of cds, so I'm going to borrow cds from them and rip them.

Yeah yeah, I know this is stealing... mozart won't miss the money

Cd's marked "digital recording" generally have less hiss, though some don't.

Strangely enough, I've found that I actually enjoy the older analog recordings more than the newer digital ones, dispite the tape his.

I think it has more to do with the simpler more effective mic'ing techniques they used. Especially RCA/Living Stereo - check out those recordings for sure.