[Veydar]

Pretty much all my music comes from either itunes or amazon music. I've always had the feeling that certain songs have a few crackling noises here and there but because my hardware setup wasn't anywhere near hifi I always blamed it on that. A few weeks ago I bought an ASUS Xonar Essence STX and a pair of Sennheiser HD 600s. Listen to my music (through Foobar 2000, Hifi Mode in the Xonar control panel activated) with this hardware has made me notice some of these noises a lot more. 
At first I was a little shocked and thought the headphones were to blame but switching the cables from left to right would always switch the noise as well (from left to right). Listening to Diana Krall or Randy Napoleon for example is just overwhelmingly beautiful, whereas other albums are close to causing me physical pain. These albums/songs come from a variety of genres and include The Sounds - No one sleeps while I'm awake or the entire In Flames - Come Clarity album bought from amazon mp3 - just to give you at least two examples. Sometimes it's a few but annoying crackles, or a hiss during quieter parts that just seems to be a little bit too loud to simply ignore it. In other cases the album seems terribly flat or the instruments all sound, for a lack of a better word, too harsh. 
On top of that some songs appear to have been "produced" by throwing all instruments into a giant blender whereas others seem to reproduce every single note with astonishing clarity.
My question now being: Should I buy CD's and rip them using FLAC (or some other lossless codec); Is it simply the producer or the guy doing the mastering who's to blame; Or is a certain noise completely normal and I should just get used to the new listening experience? 
 
PS: This is my first post and I wasn't sure where to put it. In case this is the wrong forum for such a thread please accept my apologies. 

 

[sonci]

NONE is normal of course, but I think it depends on the records you are listening
overcompressed albums can click badly, and most of modern albums are mastered too loud, you cant do nothing about it, 
another reason if you are usin ASIO with bitmatched playback, it can be the low latency time, configurable in the asio control pannel, just set it to 50ms, and check the buffer length of the audio player you`re using, set it to recommended,
 
There can be also a million other reasons, or you just should let the card burn in for some time, anyway the guy at the mastering studio should have had a lot better gear than your pc soundcard

 

[GrindingThud]

"Your bedtime story is scaring everyone" is exceptionally poorly mastered IMHO. I dig the tunes and the emotion behind the music, but it's really noisy. Crossing the Rubicon sounds way over processed to me and full of artifacts. Neither actually 'clicked' on me though. Sonci may be onto something with the timing problem. Try Depeche Mode delta machine....that album is pretty 'clean'.

 

[Veydar]

Thank you for the information guys. @GrindingThud It's not so much a clicking but rather the artefacts you mentioned. I researched overcompression, since both of you mentioned it, and this seems to be one of my complaints with many of these songs. And the artefacts I seem to make out. 

 

[GrindingThud]

Metalfi has a pretty good description of their rating system: http://www.metal-fi.com/about-page/dynamic-range/

Thank you for the information guys. @GrindingThud It's not so much a clicking but rather the artefacts you mentioned. I researched overcompression, since both of you mentioned it, and this seems to be one of my complaints with many of these songs. And the artefacts I seem to make out.