[Five]

I did download it and check it out. Looking more closely in b&w shows those strange stripes rhino mentioned faintly above the primary cutoff at around 5kHz. This noise goes up to about 16kHz and then ends very abruptly. Then there's an even fainter layer of noise above 16kHz that goes all the way up to 22050Hz (the limit of 16bit/44.1kHz WAV).

These factors combined are completely unprecedented, and I do take a look at the SA of every show I download and listen to. Never seen anything quite like this in my life (and I do check the SA of 90% of what I download as well as everything posted in this forum for a couple years now).

There's no direct evidence here that I can find which resembles any lossy encoding I know of... no blocks whatsoever. So while there is something wrong with it compared to status quo with that lineage I don't know what it is and afaik it is completely lossless. I've been thinking about it for a couple days, completely stumped. But there is no evidence of lossy encoding at all, just a fishy smell.

I've got it on my other comp and can post a pic of the b&w sa to illustrate what I'm talking about in the next couple days.