I love digital clicking

Patrick M · Postby **Patrick M** » Mon May 17, 2004 10:15 pm

I just bought the Megadeth - Killing is my business remix/remaster the other day. The first 40 seconds or so look like this:

Here's the big gnarly waveform:

My question...what *causes* this to happen? I've never seen a good answer for that, but it seems to be a big problem on new CDs and remasters.

Xenu · Postby **Xenu** » Mon May 17, 2004 10:25 pm

The clicking? Carelessness. It's caused by a variety of things, and can be introduced at any stage, really. In particular, a malfunctioning sampling step is a likely culprit.

Patrick M · Postby **Patrick M** » Mon May 17, 2004 11:12 pm

A malfunctioning sampling step?

Since no one cares about Megadeth, here's a nice click from She's a Rainbow:

Rspaight · Postby **Rspaight** » Tue May 18, 2004 8:15 am

Is that Marino again?

Ryan

Patrick M · Postby **Patrick M** » Tue May 18, 2004 3:43 pm

Mixed by Bill Kennedy at Enterprise Studios
Pro-Tools by Chris Vrenna
Remastered by Tom Baker at Precision Mastering

Xenu · Postby **Xenu** » Tue May 18, 2004 5:31 pm

Patrick M wrote:A malfunctioning sampling step?

Since no one cares about Megadeth, here's a nice click from She's a Rainbow:

Is that from the section of the song near the end where the sound effects keep switching back and forth? There're a lot of bias pops in that section.

Patrick M · Postby **Patrick M** » Tue May 18, 2004 8:15 pm

Xenu wrote:Is that from the section of the song near the end where the sound effects keep switching back and forth? There're a lot of bias pops in that section.

I'm guessing it's between 0:11:13 and 0:11:14 on the ABKCO remaster.

That said, it would appear this particular pop is on every copy I've heard.

Patrick M · Postby **Patrick M** » Wed May 19, 2004 7:49 pm

So, McGoodwin, when I download these things from STG that are riddled with clicking (and I seem to be the only one who notices/cares), should I assume:

1) it's a bad rip
2) it happened in the original A/D conversion
3) other

Xenu · Postby **Xenu** » Wed May 19, 2004 8:30 pm

When it's people who're transferring stuff to their computeres--i.e. tapes, etc.--it's frequently the original sampling step. Sudden load, et cetera, can cause that. My old computer used to have intermittent digital clicking issues in record-in (which meant I had to do multiple "passes" of everything to edit together) in CEP, for example.

It can *also* be bad DAE, but as sectors tend to be bad in groups, you generally get a few "skips" in a row...that thwip thwip thwip noise. Single clicks aren't generally bad DAE.