Originally Posted by showtaper

Here's a quick one to show what a cheap soundcard looks like with no input.

To enhance the stripes a bit, I normalized the file by 10% and boosed the high end by 10db. These settings could be used by someone to boost the volume and compensate for missing highs on an old cassette recording.

The moral: not every artifact is from lossy compression. With a little work, I can probably duplicate most waveform distortions.....