You'd think the conversion software at Amazon's mp3 sourcing company would have alerted on something like this (presuming the file didn't come directly from the studio).
Their MP3 feed comes right from the record label. They aren't stuffing CDs into a machine and ripping them. The label supplies them. Trust me, I did this for a living.
If your own CD rip and the Amazon MP3 show the same distortion I suspect you've found a bug in the psycho-acoustic algorithms used to turn sound into a compressed MP3. Although I'll admit that sounds pretty far-fetched.
What the psycho-acoustic algorithms do is compress the sound signal down to what our ears can actually hear. If you've got a -21db sound value at 11kHz and a -20db sound vlaue at 11.5kHz they just present the louder one in compressed music. It's a horrible example, but that's basically what happens. They only present what you're most likely to hear, or want to hear.
But, given that this is Nickleback, the "what you want to hear" probably bumped up pretty hard against the psycho-acoustic model because nobody in their right mind would want to hear that *expletive deleted*it.
