I was doing some headphone listening last night on my Windows PC/Media Player and on a couple of CDs with very dynamic bass, I noticed severe compression that made the CDs very difficult to listen to. Whenever the bass was hit, all the air went out of the rest of the band. I got to experimenting and the sound quality on my Macintosh was much better (no breathy compression). When I went back to the PC, I noticed that the same CD played through iTunes didn't have the compression. So...the question is, why does Media Player introduce compression? Is there a setting to turn it off I(I don't see one)? Why would they do that? It doesn't appear to be a Mac/PC thing because iTunes works fine on both and the PC sounds fine when I'm NOT using Media Player.
