[Budley007]

Well, I bit the bullet about 3 weeks ago and picked up an Echo Indigo and some Grado SR225s for my laptop. The combo works really great, but now I'm wondering if it's working a little "too" great. I've found on several recordings some annoying "hiss". When I discover a particularly bad passage of a song, I'll try it out with some cheap Pioneer cans on my older home system. It's still there. (now that my attention has been brought to it)

I don't know why I didn't notice this before, but it's bugging the crap outta me. So far, about a tenth of my CD library has this problem on several tracks if not all of them. Is this something common to bad recording? mastering? or just me? -Thanks.

 

[Garbz]

hiss i've never noticed. However the detail in my setup has made listening to rap music an anoyance. Most of the songs have slight distortion in the bass lines which aren't audible when there's a 4000watt pa blasting away, or a 500watt subwoofer in a freidns car butchering the sound.

Lots of cds are incompitently mastered.

 

[plainsong]

I have some bad recordings that..surprise!.. sound bad on all my gear, although by varying degrees. Some of my stuff does have hiss in it. The worse example that comes to mind is the best soundtrack ever written for a film: The Black Stallion. Excellent music, horrible recording.

 

[Budley007]

Yea, when I first heard it, I sorta panicked about having defective gear. After auditioning several other CDs, I've determined that it is simply some kind of bad CD production. I can actually hear it get louder and softer during several passages. Other CDs, zip...nada...no hiss at all.