digby

hmm... that makes it sound like it's distorting during winamp's dsp. I don't suppose you know what square-wave distortion sounds like, do you? Without going into too much digital audio theory, what might be happening is that when winamp is set at unity gain (0 dB) it is actually still amplifying the signal. If you are listening to something that is recorded at a consistently high level (anything rock, pop, etc. ever recorded by anyone who knew what they were doing) then you could be filling up the buffer where the math is being done. When this happens it sounds like distortion because it is basically producing a square wave for the output.

But that still doesn't explain iTunes...

Some things to check... find some quite jazz or classical music and see if they distort as much with identical internal settings. (You should probably set winamp's volume to ~50% and the gain at the eq to unity (0 dB again). Also set the windows volume output to a lower level.) I suggest these genres because they don't have as much compression on the recordings (note - amplitude compression and data compression are completely unrelated, so mp3s of the same music should work fine). I have seen internal distortion caused from what I have described, so I hope this helps you.

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