CD Waveforms Illustrated

[mtrycrafts]

lol .
I'll bet you'r right though.

Unfortunately. Where else could they go to? A +.5dB or more?

 

[no. 5]

Where else could they go to? A +.5dB or more?

I would not doubt that.
I can just hear the excuse; "to save you - the consumer - the truble, we have relesed all of our CD's pre-clipped"

 

[jcPanny]

New CD compression

I wonder if the excessive compression on new CDs is intended to make it sound "better" on your iPod in low resolution MP3 format. Or maybe they want you to play twice as much for the SACD version for a decent quality recording.

 

[MDS]

I wonder if the excessive compression on new CDs is intended to make it sound "better" on your iPod in low resolution MP3 format.

That is an oft-cited reason for compressing the crap out of the music. Because it now has a much higher average level, you don't have to turn up the volume as much.

Due to the nature of MP3 encoding, a WAV file that has lots of peaks near 0 dB will clip with near 100% certainty when you decode the MP3 back to PCM even if the original WAV never did.