Hi FirebirdTN,

SirQuack's question is pertinent. Speaking generally, it's rare to find a pressing defect in a commercial CD, but it does happen. Over 25 years of buying CDs and getting review copies that number in the thousands, I've encountered three or four. The defects do not cause "popping" sounds. The disc either skips, refuses to advance to any other track, or issues occasional "clicks" which are drop-outs that the CD player's redundancy or data correction cannot cover up.

Some very early CD players had very poor error correction for tracking damaged or scratched CDs and it did not correlate with CD player price. But if you are hearing these "pops" in all your players from the same disc, I suspect it may be a defect or damage. The upper label area is much more sensitive to any scratch than the actual playing (underside) surface of a CD.

Tape hiss from early analog recordings may vary in audibility depending on the mastering process and whether or not various digital noise-reduction programs were invoked during the remastering. Some mastering engineers do not use these for fear of removing high-frequency nuances--the sustained ring of a brushed cymbal, for example.

It really varies with every recording. Axiom speakers are very linear through the midrange and treble, where our hearing is especially acute, so if there is analog tape hiss present from an old Ray Charles track (I cite this because I was just listening to some older stuff and noted the tape hiss) then you'll hear it.

On the other hand, some transfers to CD of old master tapes are done extremely well and are remarkably noise-free. But there are many kinds of analog distortion that are readily audible if you choose to focus on them rather than on the music. To cite two, I can easily hear flutter on early piano recordings that resulted from the analog tape machines of the era, and tape-modulation distortion during loud passages (it's a kind of background "fuzz" that rides up and down with transient musical peaks). And there is no digital way of removing these types of distortion in remastered CDs.

Regards,

Alan Lofft,
Axiom Resident Expert (Retired)