Roxio CD Creator & Fidelity

Factual Questions
1

When burning copes of my medieval choir’s demo CD with Roxio Easy CD creator 5 platinum, the resultant CD seems to have a lot more “sibilance” and general treble-ness than the original. At first I thought that this might have something to do with the sampling rate, but the software does not seem to give you control over SR (or I’m just not seeing it). Does anyone have any ideas why this loss of fidelity occurs and what I might do to fix it? (Other than playing with the EQ)

2

So how are you copying the original CD? Are you

  1. Using the CD copy feature
  2. You’ve saved an image of the original disk and are writing that
  3. You “ripped” the original CD and converted it to an MP3.

My guess given your problem description is #3. Converting to MP3, because it is not a lossless compression process, you will lose some of the original fidelity.

3

The CD is a compellation using three of our digitally recorded CD’s as source. I rip the tracks (using Roxio) to WAV, arrange the songs in the order I want, and then burn them to CD. So, it can’t be MP3 comp-loss because they’re never converted to anything other than WAV. (Unless I’m missing something)

4

WAV is not a one of a kind deal. On the CD, the sound is stored in two tracks, 16 bit, 44.1 kHz sample rate. If, you convert the CD to 16 bit, 22.05 kHz, WAV files, you are downsampling to 22.05kHz. If you then take the 22.05kHz WAV files and make a CD, the files are upsampled to 44.1kHz, so you are losing fidelity in the downsampling then upsampling.

Anyway, check your import .wav settings and make sure it is at 44.1 and not 22.05.

Good Luck,
-Sandwriter

p.s. where could I get taste of medieval choir music?

5

I don’t know the answer to your question, but I do have a suggestion. You say that you are ripping the tracks to WAV files, then burning them back to a CD-R. Are you using the Roxio supplied Sound Stream program to rip the tracks? If so, check to see that you haven’t got any equalization or sound effects turned on. They should default to off but if at some point you played around with the settings and forgot to switch them off, this might be the cause of your problem.