Maybe someone here can help me. I am extremely picky about the audio quality of my music. I'm running into the problem lately that when downloading music some of it comes out sounding distorted - very faint popping, crackling noises similar to static. This stays true on every audio device I play these tracks on. Is this simply a bitrate issue or might there be something else involved? So far I have tried to compare bitrates of the songs that sound distorted to the songs that do not, but I have soooo much music I'd rather not go through all of it! My findings have been that 320kpbs tends to sound fine and the distorted songs range from anywhere below that. My boyfriend doesn't seem to be able to hear these crackles and pops that drive me crazy and we actually end up having fights about it when trying to listen to music and I finally snap and can't take it anymore and have to stop listening to that album altogether - since it tends to be an entire album with a few exceptions. I know I'm not imagining these distortions, they are not on every track I own and like I said it carries over to sound distorted on every device I play them on.