Just looked at it, took a close look at the waveform and found two anomalies (at roughly 17.640 and 17.967 s) between the words "old" and "world" in "...where the old world shadows hang..."

They sound and look just like jitter errors. Since they happen on all the players you tried - congratulations - with your Axiom speakers, you can now hear CD scratches.

I've got a few similar sounds on my oldest CDs (most specifically from the Pogues CD (IISFFGWG) I bought in 1987)... I'm anal about their care, but occasionally you smear or scratch one.

If this is a brand new CD, chances are there was a very small flaw in the original master (if it appears on all CDs of the same run) or just in the pressing of YOUR disc (if it only appears on yours). Large runs are done with metal masters (think Madonna) while small runs are done with glass masters usually (think that band selling them out of the back of their Pinto) so problems do occur.

It may be annoying to you, but let's face it... that's a lot less annoying than the pop and clicks of damaged vinyl, the slow loss of signal to noise ratio of cassettes and even data held on hard drives can eventually develop occasional errors.

Bren R.

p.s. I'm going to go against Alan's advice on polishing CDs unless it's a one time thing to just get a single copy of an irreplaceable master. Most of the polishing compounds will either fill scratches or cut and polish them out for short periods of time. Almost all of these are similar to automotive paint compounds and are made up of waxes and solvents mixed with diatomaceous (sp!?!) earth or a crystalline substance like tripoli. What do these do long term to CDs? Probably the same thing as they do to motorcycle visors - they fog and make the plastic gooey or brittle. Two of my buddies used to work for PPG, does it show?