Greg wrote: >Mr.- I have the craptastic logitech "X5bla" system on my desktop and >I can't even listen to MP3 files on them unless I have the volume >turned down slightly and causes the amp to distort. So your softsynth >is probably too loud. But anyhow, all distortions have their own >characters. What you're hearing is a harsh and defined digital >clipping sound of information being out of range, since CDs play ok >your amp is probably fine. When an amp distorts it will usually sound >smoother, less clicky than digital clipping. When your speaker is >cooked it will usually sound bad around specific energies of sound(?) >like, bass will sound terrible and mids sound slightly airy / fuzzy at >low volume and then as it gets lowder it all starts to sound like a >flag in the wind. > > > Some sound cards (noteably Soundblaster) introduce a whole new type of distortion sound. They don't sound like digital clipping, because they are clipping at 44100hz, then resampling to 48khz before converting to analog (or visa-versa). I notice this particularly when recording - no matter how hot the input signal, sample values rarely get outside the +/- 30000 range and never outside +/- 31000, even though the native 48k samples are clipping at ~32k. I really wish sound card manufacturers would tell us what sample rates they really support, and which ones they fake with up/down sampling. -- e. j. branagan the MUSE ? Nashville, TN
