Songs sound "muddy" in iTunes 8 after upgrade

Some users have noticed that the audio in iTunes can sound distorted or "muddy" at times, where a fair amount of garbled static or other distortion makes songs sound rather unpleasant.

User The3rdMan writs:

"[Upon installing iTunes 8] all my songs sound like they are underwater and have no way to adjust them."

This issue is not related to the "Sound Enhancer" feature in iTunes, as affected users have toggled this on and off with no effect on the sound quality. While some also suspected the "Sound Check" audio normalization feature (which sets the volume of songs to be the same) might contribute to the problem, this feature has also been disabled for affected users.

This problem occurs in Windows versions of iTunes as well as in OS X, which indicates the problem is either with the coding or some settings in the application as opposed to something with the system software or hardware. Other audio applications and even quicktime (which some may suspect since iTunes uses it for media playback) play the same audio files fine with no distortion whatsoever.

It seems the problem lies in the equalizer in iTunes 8 being more sensitive or having different gain settings than that of previous versions. Perhaps this is a bug, or perhaps it's an "enhancement", but in iTunes 8 the equalizer is turned on by default. If anyone had previously changed their gain settings in the equalizer and left it off, the update to iTunes 8 would have turned the equalizer back on, causing these problems.

Fixes

Turn off the equalizer Go to the "Window" menu in iTunes and select the equalizer. Then click the checkbox to turn it off and close the equalizer window. This should run the audio straight through to the output without modifying the gain in any way.

Reduce the equalizer preamp gain If users are still experiencing gain distortion, open the equalizer again and turn it on. Then ensure all sliders are set to 0 (for starters) and lower the gain of the "Preamp" slider. It helps to have a problematic audio file playing, so users can tell when the distortion disappears. This will lower the volume, but will hopefully remove the distortion. If it does not, then the problem is not with the equalizer settings (though it has been the root of the issue for most affected users).

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