I had been thinking about something I’d heard about embedded data being a source of noise in digital audio files. The gist of it was that like very low level surface noise on a record, or tape hiss that though barely audible it was there in the background and must be having some effect on your system and what you finally hear. As far as analogue playback is concerned you are stuck with it to a greater or lesser extent but this is not the case in the digital domain whereby the removal of the embedded data would give a quieter signal. In my system noise isn’t an obvious issue but I thought I might investigate this in pursuit of better sound. First I started on an exercise to reduce the number of tags embedded in my files to a working minimum. Not too far into this exercise it occurred to me that as a Roon user I could conceivably remove all the tags from my files and let Roon analyse them and provide the metadata. After a bit of experimenting to verify this “concept” my exercise then became to clear all the metadata and embedded album art from my files. Before I started this clearance I reset the Roon “Metadata Preference” to its default so it would rescan my library. The happy end result is that my system sounds better than ever now that my files are no longer introducing any unwanted inaudible noise into my system.
