Speakers breaking up on only one of my songs

[rbuist]

Hello all,
Just finished tracking a 4 song ep. Everything sounds good at high volumes except one song- the guy I mixed with and I first noticed it when we put the songs on my iphone and listened to it in my car. When everything kicked in, we noticed the car speakers to have a weird distortion. He EQed some bass out of the mix and turned the bass track down 1 dB; I didn't notice the distortion on my long drive through traffic and snow coming home from Philly.

Tonight, I was blasting the tracks through my head phones and, it's extremely slight, but I noticed a little bit of the headphone speakers farting out.

The only difference between this song and the other 3 are that I have a piano track on it. I'd like to think that the keys weren't clipping on the recording program or peaking the mic, but if they did, is it still possible for the distortion to still be present in the final mix? It'd be a pain in the ass to track keys again, but I'd do it if it meant a cleaner sound for the song overall.

And just so you know, the other 3 songs sound perfectly fine blasted through the headphones (cheap skull candy's); I even tried playing loud hardcore bands through the phones and wasn't able to hear the kind of distortion I hear on my song.

Also, the versions of the songs I am listening to are kind of 'fake masters'- with that, the guy who mixed them compressed the final mix down then increased the volume to a level similar to a professionally mastered track- no clipping or distortion at all when we listened to it in the program thru the recording monitors. At this point, I'm wondering if I should go back to Philly to get another mix, or go to my meeting on Wednesday with an engineer who is going to master it and see if he knows what's up.

I haven't been able to get into contact with the guy who mixed yet, but I had to ask someone tonight. Recording this record has been 2 steps forward and 4 steps back the entire time, but I am so close to being done that I'd do anything to finish it up right by now. Any help/advice you can give is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
-Ryan

[funnyfingers]

Since you said iphone, I am guessing you converted to mp3 or something similar. What is the bit rate? Try the highest possible constant bit rate and see if that helps.

[Chromer]

It's possible the process of converting from wav to compressed format has created some overs when decoding. Do you have the raw wave file? Does it crackle?

If the wave file is clean, ask if he can re-export it at a -0.3dB peak level.. If you still hear crackles, then it's possible that one of the tracks has some clipping, but it could be happening a lot of other places in the mix chain too...