Here at Shockwave-Sound.Com, we deliver music loops in 44.1 khz uncompressed
WAV files, and full-length tracks in 192-kbps mp3 files.
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 mp3 files, it should sound as
good as if it were made from our 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, and sometimes it cannot. Regardless, the process of correcting
errors itself, may 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.
