Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
Odd... I don't have to close my mouth to make or sustain the sound I'm talking about, and the closest it comes to "two sounds" is a minuscule pop of breath if I don't lead into it from another letter... if I say "sigh" and just kinda hold the sound there's no starting /a/ and no need to close the mouth... or I could stretch the middle of "fright" out for however long doing the same thing.

I went through this last fall when trying to work on a conlang (with help from someone who was offering as a way to practice for their linguistics degree)... spent three days trying to find the symbols for "long I", etc, before we figured out I meant sounds that don't have single symbols enough though I don't hear any hint of "two sounds".

And like I said, all the IPA vowel charts sound like 75% variations on the same sort of grunting pained sound.
Any chance you can record your self saying:

I ride bikes on the side lines?

Then someone with some audio editing software could compare the initial start of the sound to the end of the sound, to see if eliminating the bit in the middle helps clarify the difference between where it starts and where it ends.

And IPA sound banks are meant to produce a single vowel sound, so I'm not sure what you're expecting them to sound like. Some have the speaker lead into it with a consonant (so less "ah" and more "bah") but that can be confusing if you just want to know what sound is represented by each symbol.