*BUMP*

Okay, I'm listening to the beginning of the song "Virtuality" from the Rush album "Test for Echo". Anyone have this one?

The ride cymbals at the beginning sound like crap to me. Crackly and scrunchy instead of smooth and splashy. It sounds like encoder artifacts, except that I'm listening straight from the CD.

When this same track is gets encoded into an MP3, it seems to me to accentuate this problem and bring it to the forefront. The MP3 (even at 256kCBR) makes it sound worse.

Can anyone confirm this? Remember: I'm talking CD-audio-straight-from-CD here. Anyone have this album, and a good system to listen to the high frequencies? Do you hear what I hear?

___________
Tony Fabris