Tough question to answer without knowing a lot more about your
system and settings...

In general, when you play a CD in your CD drive, the sound "can"
be generated there, and just piped to your sound card as an
analog sound signal that needs only amplification, and no
processing of any real kind...
Some CD drives (with some of the newer Windows versions) "can"
be set to transfer the audio in a digital format though, so this is not
a hard and fast rule...

When you start playing around with audio files on your hard drive,
you are pretty much trapped in the digital format.  That can require
some serious CPU horse power, and a pretty clean system that is
not too busy doing a lot of other things at the same time...
If your computer is "resource challenged" in this area, or you have
some setting wrong, or the files are fragmented plenty, etc., you
start to have problems.
I think you are in some form of the latter "state"...

              Rick Glazier

----- Original Message -----
From: "L Stewart" <[log in to unmask]>
> The problem I'm experiencing may be either software or hardware. However,
> I'm leaning toward software but I'm just not sure.
>
> I have recorded CD music tracks using both Music Match and MS Media Player
> 7.10 but the voices particularly, on playback have the same low hissing edge
> on the voices no matter which software I use. I re-recorded an album of
> Linda Ronstadt's best using the highest quality that MS Media Player could
> muster and I still have the "burr" on the voices where every note seems to
> have "ssss-sss-ss" at the beginning of every word.
>
> When I play the same CD on the computer directly in MS/MP - not the recorded
> and stored version, the sound is great and the notes are clear and precise
> (well, as clear and precise as you can get from PC-based speakers anyway).
>
> I tried a brand new set of Harmon Karden speakers right out of the box but
> had the same results so I'm 99% sure it is not the speakers. Could it be my
> old SoundBlaster Pro that is the culprit here? Surely though, when you are
> playing a CD directly on the PC, it would be using the SB card wouldn't it
> and in that case, why would the sound be so clear?
>
> It would appear to me that the recording software is the most likely
> limiting factor here but why would two different recording applications be
> so bad? And why, using the same software, would the direct play be so good
> in comparison?
>
> Has anyone experienced this before - and most of all, resolved it somehow?

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