christopherpostill said:
We have an entire CD collection, 9 straight days of music, ripped to our 200Gb media centre in 320k MP3
I believed this to be CD quality... am i wrong?
Is there a quality BETTER than 320k MP3 without exceeding 13mb per track?
IMVHO MP3 is a lossy compression and by nature cannot be identical to the original. If the originality is to be retained or faithful reproduction demanded Lossless compression software is to be used. Having said that, there are many misleading websites and folks who seem to consider themselves as authority and write things about MP3 which are generally not accurate. There are a few sites, however, which give facts about MP3 and do a good job of explaining things.
I am a frequent visitor to many audiophile forums, besides, being on many groups of individuals involved in particular aspects of Hifi and Audio. The general consensus on those forums where people from the industry interact with each other is that MP3 is not equal to CD, I repeat “not equal to CD quality”. Many who use this format think otherwise. There is no way we can blame them, especially if it gives them as much pleasure as the original medium.
MP3 and other lossy formats (e.g. AAC, M4A, Ogg, WMA, etc) will certainly sound different from the Redbook CD source even at high bitrates (320 kbps). While the MP3 encoding won't necessarily sound bad, but it isn't the same as source and anyone should be able to hear the difference. Encoders of the highest quality still suffer from pre-echo and other artifacts in some cases and will fail on extremely difficult samples already using a very high bitrate. Mainly the difference is noticed in mids and high frequencies which somehow sound a bit pronounced or in other words slightly up front. This attribute of the MP3 can in long run sound a bit fatiguing to say the least. As you know even the CD has been blamed for sounding a bit harsh in comparison to the vinyl. The benefit of these types of encoding is a significant savings in file size (3-4x) while still retaining a reasonable image of the music. You'll need to decide for yourself whether or not the fidelity provided is acceptable.
FLAC and other lossless formats (e.g. ALAC, WMA Lossless, APE, etc) will encode/decode the material from/to the original WAV source precisely. No change in the sound should be heard using these formats. These formats will typically provide between 1.5x and 2x savings in file size, and as such are less space efficient than MP3, but will provide near perfect fidelity.
If you think CDs are perfect sound forever you will love mp3. Both formats are flawed from design to execution.
We humans hear from 20Hz-20,000Hz through our ears, when the hearing gradually fails and depending on the degree of the individuals heightened sense of awareness we tend to switch to listening through our skin, some hear better some don’t.
I have a test disc with various tones and frequencies and based on that my hearing is good upto 16,000Hz though my ears (I am 47), according to a report I had read some time ago, average hearing for a 40 year old is good upto 17,000Hz on the average.
I can go on and on but am afraid that someone may object to our ramblings and say that this is not the right place to discuss audiophilia, LOL
