[rimisrandma]

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[adamlr]

there are many reasons for hearing noise, to name a few:
 
1) bad quality files. as youve mentioned yourself, low quality files may be noisy. download a high quality track and see if the hiss goes away?
2) poor dac. you didnt mention what youre playing the music from? it may have a noisy dac.
3) poor amp. same as the above, the amp may be noisy.
4) damaged headphones. though you say you tried many so i guess we can rule that out.
 
this isnt to say these are the only reasons, these are just the reasons which i could think of.
 
whats your setup? what files are you playing? if for arguments sake youre playing the files off your computer, and the dac/amp is noisey, connecting it to an external amp wont help, it will just amplify the noisy signal.
 
edit: thats incomplete. if the amp is noisy, then connecting it via line out to an external amp will help. if the dac is noisy though, i imagine youll have to get an external dac to take care of it... anyway, it may be the files aswell... 

 

[NecroNeo]

Sounds to me like you are hearing noise in your source or source components. You could have the volume up too loud, or have an amp which doesn't have a very low sound floor, or all your recordings could be poorly made, in decreasing order of likelihood. Just my guesses, anyway.

 

[adamlr]

Quote:

Sounds to me like you are hearing noise in your source or source components. You could have the volume up too loud, or have an amp which doesn't have a very low sound floor, or all your recordings could be poorly made, in decreasing order of likelihood. Just my guesses, anyway.

thats funny, i would rate poor files as the most likely, source/amp second, and high volume last... 

 

[Mooses9]

i would also say poor files. poor files can cause distortion, can make the highs destorted, the lows clip, a bunch of stuff

 

[NecroNeo]

Yeah, I didn't think about really bad source files. When I mentioned poorly made recordings, I was thinking about somebody doing it wrong in the studio, which is why I rated it unlikely. But poorly done lossy compression is rampant and probably the most likely culprit. I know there's plenty of cheap amps out there, but I would think most of them are giving you ~96 dB of headspace. So although they might fail in other ways, I think most amps are not producing a lot of audible hiss unless you are listening too loudly.

 

[jekostas]

Um... this sounds like tinnitus, actually.

 

[rimisrandma]

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[nihontoman]

Quote:

Um... this sounds like tinnitus, actually.

that may be the case, the OP said that it began after he started listening to iems. my guess is too much volume and death metal isn't that good for your hearing
 
 
but maybe the Op just learned to hear subtle nuances in the recording, which in this case is mostly noise... who knows...

 

[Mooses9]

how is your isolation? if your getting poor isolation this can also effect the sound quality.
 
what is the KBPS on your files? for instance my lossless files are at 1536kbps what are yours?
 
poor quality will be like 128kbps those can effect the sound..... 320kbps can effect the sound dedpending on the headphones,sources amps ect

 

[rimisrandma]

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[Mooses9]

Personally I take a mp3 file for instance. Say its 128kbps then I use a file converter and convert the mp3 at 128kbps to a wave file format at 1536kbps which turn it into a lossless audio file.

I tunes really only allows you to use apple lossless which I personally don't like.

However the problem is. The way I do it I have to manually load in the songs and edit the album and artist. Personally its not really hard and doesn't really take a lot of time. Its just annoying itunes doesn't locate and add the wave files for you.

You habe to also edit in prefrence where your wave files are so when you add in the files itunes recognizes where the files are at.

I rip all my songs to the highest quality windows media player lets me rip them at whixhis like 14xxkbps then I can take that file and farther convert it with software just from wave to wave but it seems to give me a slightly higher kbps rate about 100 more kbps.

Now I know this sounds extreme however if tou are using digital files and you have a superb audio setup your files become the weakest link so reguardless of how extreme it seems extracting every last little bit imo is important.


Also you can copy and paste a whole album in wave file format to itunes. Alls you have to do is going on right click edit info and add in the artist and title of the album. Make sure you go into the prefrences and change where the locate is that your itunes is searching for the wave file at if its on your desktop in a file folder make sure under prefrences itunes knows where to look for the file folder.

Right click the file them go to details and the kbps will be there. Be it 128 or 1536kbps your file will have a bit rate.

 

[higbvuyb]

After using iems, I can hear some sort of distortion on almost any music.  Is it always there, but don't notice it and then once you learn how to detect it, it is hard to miss?
 
The sound I can hear is in both ears, with multiple iems, and with regular size headphones.  Sounds like tearing paper slowly, thin tissue paper rustling, like squishing that green foam block florists poke fake flowers into for an arrangement, crinkling up newspaper, the extra noise you hear when a record is playing nothing (no music, just dry record track sound)..etc  These are all examples of the sound in one way or another that are mixed real low into the music sound. I listen to a lot of death metal and I am guessing the quality may have always been crapty, I just never noticed it.
 
I ordered a personal battery operated micro cmoy amp in case the signal needs more power, and of course the headphone volume will be dropped.

Something is introducing noise. if it's audible while music is playing, something along your chain is faulty, probably your source. If it's only audible during very quiet or blank sections, that's normal. No recording can be made without noise.
 

Quote:

Personally I take a mp3 file for instance. Say its 128kbps then I use a file converter and convert the mp3 at 128kbps to a wave file format at 1536kbps which turn it into a lossless audio file.

This is pointless. Converting high-bitrate (e.g. CD audio) information to a lower bitrate means you lose the extra information that the higher rate gives you. Converting a low bitrate file to a higher rate will not bring back that lost information; it will have the same quality as the 128kbps file.

 

[nihontoman]

Quote:

Personally I take a mp3 file for instance. Say its 128kbps then I use a file converter and convert the mp3 at 128kbps to a wave file format at 1536kbps which turn it into a lossless audio file.

I tunes really only allows you to use apple lossless which I personally don't like.

However the problem is. The way I do it I have to manually load in the songs and edit the album and artist. Personally its not really hard and doesn't really take a lot of time. Its just annoying itunes doesn't locate and add the wave files for you.

You habe to also edit in prefrence where your wave files are so when you add in the files itunes recognizes where the files are at.

I rip all my songs to the highest quality windows media player lets me rip them at whixhis like 14xxkbps then I can take that file and farther convert it with software just from wave to wave but it seems to give me a slightly higher kbps rate about 100 more kbps.

Now I know this sounds extreme however if tou are using digital files and you have a superb audio setup your files become the weakest link so reguardless of how extreme it seems extracting every last little bit imo is important.


Also you can copy and paste a whole album in wave file format to itunes. Alls you have to do is going on right click edit info and add in the artist and title of the album. Make sure you go into the prefrences and change where the locate is that your itunes is searching for the wave file at if its on your desktop in a file folder make sure under prefrences itunes knows where to look for the file folder.

Right click the file them go to details and the kbps will be there. Be it 128 or 1536kbps your file will have a bit rate.

once something has been converted to lossy format, the information will be lost forever. you need it to be lossless from the start, that is the only way to benefit from having lossless files...

 

[kova4a]

Quote:

Personally I take a mp3 file for instance. Say its 128kbps then I use a file converter and convert the mp3 at 128kbps to a wave file format at 1536kbps which turn it into a lossless audio file.
 

Seriously? And you really believe that? You're just wasting the space on your device. 128 kbps will alway have that bad quality even if you make it into a file with 5000 kbps bit rate. This is like having a bad low-res video and upscaling it to HD resolution - it will still be very pixelated and blurry.
 
As far as the OP I already said in his other thread that's mainly because of the music he's listening to. It has nothing to do with the quality of the file - it's the quality of the recording. I have a lot of vinyl rips and remasters of metal albums in very high quality but with the Loudness wars and the low production value of this recordings it's very common to have butchered dynamic range, compression and added noise and artifacts to the sound. He probably noticed it once he got iems that were more revealing but once you've heard that it doesn't go away and you start noticing it even with less revealing headphones and iems.