Today I was playing Paula Cole's "This Fire." The first track on the disc reliably causes my 990+755 combination to produce extremely distorted output, even at very low levels. This track is extremely heavy with bass, but I have other CDs that are equially full of bass that don't exhibit this behaviour. I've tried it with 2 different copies of the disc so I think I can eliminate a bad disc. The problem disappears on other tracks on this disc.

I also noticed a similar problem with the new Maroon5 disc. Apparently it's using some nasty BMG "copy protection" scheme. It sounds absolutely horrid. I mean, it sounds like a $20 RadioShack amp trying to drive Apogees. If I feed the analog out from the transport rather than the digital toslink/coax, the problem vanishes so I'm assuming this is an issue with the D/A conversion process interacting with the idiotic copy protection. Just for fun, I ripped the CD into 160k mp3's and then converted those back to WAV files onto a CD. The ugliness survives the process intact.

Any suggestions with either problem would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,