Sound quality of .wav vs .mp3?

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August-8th-2002 | 01:27 PM

#16

obender66

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Joined: Oct 2001

Posts: 401

From: Toronto

It sound "better" because bass and trebles are overloaded-at the expense of midrange.
I finally hooked up hitachi tape deck at home and played old tapes(from up to 10-12 years ago)-copied from LP's on good equipment.
They are not as "crispy" as CD's, but they more "musical" with amazing imaging and ambience.
Sound quality is not limited only by frequency response. Road noise can hide imperfections in music, but it will not hide lack of ambience, even if 20-20khz are reproduced.

Alex

August-8th-2002 | 02:17 PM

#17

douggie

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Joined: Oct 2001

Posts: 484

Quote:

Originally posted by JJB
as Charles pointed out... the MPEG compression used for .mp3 files is one that bases the compression on loss of information in the audio (all kinds of neat techniques that remove the sounds that your ear can not hear - based on as good a model of the human ear as they can come up with). Because the process is not perfect you will notice a degradation in the audio quality.

When you convert the MPEG compressed audio back to an uncompressed bit stream (.WAV) format there is no way to put the information back in. There might be something out there that might help interpolate some of the information, but I have never seen such a program.

Basically think of MP3 as reducing the color count in a picture where there are certain tones that your eye can not see. Once you remove that information, it is gone.

Don't forget that CDs are also recorded by sampling the original audio signal. This means that the original is also "encoded". Just that the sampling rate is higher and therefore is less lossy. If you really want the perfect signal, then u'll have to find a way to fit an anti-skip LP player into your P5 (not to mention a way to get LP versions of "in-sink")

And that's why there's still a bunch of people out there still swear by LPs.

Some people just have more sensitive ears and swear they can hear the difference. I think it's just a matter of taste, coz eventually you want to "feel" good by listening to music. And that's why when it comes to audio, there's many many different brands/models and these different brands/models vary greatly in prices.

I don't know if this has happened to you but whenever i've upgraded my audio stuff and I ask my gf if she hears any difference, she would say somthing like, "it's louder?"