On 6/7/03 1:20 AM, Clyde Kahrl posted: > I find it interesting that there are complaints about MP3 >Quality. I remember when CDs first came out. They were really >really awful. Portions of some recordings sounded like fingernails >on chalkboards to me. > This is because taking good music and converting it to digital >seriously degrades the recording--particularly when you only sample >at 44khz.
Nonsense. It's because digital recording, mastering, and playback were in their infancy. The engineers were learning as they went along. Just as some of the early half-speed mastered LPs were horrid, once the engineers learned how the process differed from what they had done before, things got a whole lot better. Oversampling can produce a superior product, but you have to remember that the playback system only handles 14 bits per channel at 44 KHz, most audio hardware is only designed for the 20 Hz to 20 KHz range, and few speakers have decent response beyond about 12-15 KHz -- the upper limit of hearing for most of us and one-third the sampling rate of CDs. There's nothing inherent in the process of digitizing sound that degrades things. Just pop a CD of the Beatles or old analog material from Elvis, the Beach Boys, Sinatra, or the Stones to hear how much better old music can sound when it's been properly remastered for digital media. >Over time, these have improved but modern CDs are still >not comparable to the output of modest hi-fi equipment from the late >70s. Yes, the days of Shure cartridges, Dolby B noise reduction, paper cone drivers, and 18 gauge speaker wire. I sold high end audio on the early 1980s, and I can tell you that Bose makes a desktop radio today that sounds better than some of the $5,000-plus audio systems I sold -- and you don't need to be sitting in the right spot in an optimized room to benefit from the sound. > Some MP3s really stink because of the really awful encoding >out there. I have never encoded using iTunes, so I don't know if it >is reasonably good or not at encoding. I would think you would want >variable bit rate and so forth--and I'm not sure it has that. And I >don't know how to control the dynamic range. First, there's no reason to control the dynamic range, since that's already established by the CD you're acquiring the sound from. Second, you can select one of three default encoding rates (128, 160, or 192 Kbps) or choose a custom setting that lets you specify the bit rate between 16 and 320 Kbps, enable variable bit rate, choose from 7 quality settings, pick a sampling rate between 8 and 48 KHz, and filter subsonics (10 Hz and lower). Some MP3s stink because people don't understand the process. Sure, a 64 Kbps file will be small and load quickly, but it's not going to sound very good. And some types of music are more demanding of even higher quality than others. > I suspect it's a lot like digital photography. Every time >you go through some digital conversion process you lose a whole bunch >of information/data/whatever. Maybe if you went direct from mike to >MP3 you would have less of a problem than going from CD to MP3. Digital photography suffers primarily from its reliance on JPEGs, which are not only lossy, but only support 8 bits per color channel. 24-bit color is fine for output on your computer screen, but you tend to lose detail in bright areas and shadows. However, most digicams let you decide whether to record in JPEG format or something better, such as RAW or TIFF. The amount of information lost depends on your settings, as is true of digital recording and MP3 compression. Recording directly to MP3 doesn't strike me as a particularly smart thing if you want quality. Just as taking a digital picture with high JPEG compression creates a noisy photo, MP3 is also a lossy compression scheme. It's the nature of lossy compression schemes to create an inferior product, but there's nothing inherent in the digitization process itself that necessarily creates an inferior image or sound file. > But when you say that MP3s are bad, I can't help but suggest >that CDs are bad, so what do you want? I'd like a reality check. Stop listening like an engineer. Listen like a fan or a musician. It may break you of the endless upgrade cycle of the audiophile snob -- the kind of people I used to make good money from. The first rule of audiophile sales is that every improvement leads to another, because each "better" component magnifies the minuscule flaws in other components in the system. In reality, few audiophiles are ever completely satisfied -- yet most average consumers are. There is such a thing as being too picky for your own good. Dan the listmom, retired audiophile -- Dan Knight, president, Cobweb Publishing, Inc. <http://cobwebpublishing.com> <http://lowendmac.com> <http://digital-views.com> <http://digigraphica.com> <http://lowendpc.com> <http://reformed.net> Microsoft is to software as McDonald's is to beef. -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 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