Dear Richard,

...
>some distortion. Its not the first time I've had Csound generate
>"background noise" etc.
>
>I'm using WinSound from the Bath site on an MMX 166
o.k.

> with a crappy soundblaster card.
noisy anyway, so sometimes it's difficult to tell where that noise comes from

> Would anybody be kind enough to compile the following on
>their setup & tell me if its OK.
did it and all I could find was that your orchestra settings are quite unusal
to me.
sr=44000
kr=200
ksmps=220
nchnls=2

>
>Listen out for the slight distortion at the beginning of each "bell" impact
>(no clipping shows up on the waveform, and no samples are out of range). 
Yes you are right. There is a digital distortion at the beginning of each bell
with your settings.

I changed it to 
sr=44100
kr=44100
ksmps=1
nchnls=2

This takes a whole lot more of calculation time, but the result is
highhighhigh-fi without distortion, because there's no room for
approximation ...

Best regards
Ruediger Borrmann

rubo@berlin.snafu.de
http://www.snafu.de/~rubo/songlab/midi2cs