OK, here's what I've got:
- Effect is still present when rendering through speakers and my usual listening headphones
- Nicer speakers/headphones definitely bring up the visibility of the glitches
- Running the audio through my preamp/decoder masks the noise slightly; in this case the noise is only audible when levels are fairly low overall
- Activating 5.1 upmixing on the decoder almost totally obliterates the noise unless levels are near silent (e.g. between tracks)
- By far the most troubled setup is running direct from my PC's line out to my noise reducing headphones, with noise reduction turned on (which, unfortunately, happens to be how I work, which covers about 90% of my listening time)
- The noise seems to be around 75-80% of the peak level of the stream; i.e. not as loud as if a cable were getting tweaked on my physical end, but a very, very similar sound.
Just to be extra sure, I've played back local MP3s, CDs, and several other audio formats, as well as the Ambient channel which seems to have comparable volume levels overall - the problem remains constrained to the Chillout channel.
To recap: I've now tested 4 different final presentation methods (nice speakers, crap speakers, nice headphones, crap headphones) and the noise is audible to some extent in each. This is also consistent across 3 different machines so I doubt it's a sound hardware problem.
I'll work on setting up a capture for your tech guys. To be safe I'd like to do a packet capture as well just on the off-chance Winamp itself is handling the stream communication differently than wget would - is Ethereal's dump format okay with your engineer?
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