"Magic" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >This is the case with ATRAC, but not with MP3. The power of the system you >are using to play back the MP3 can come into consideration, as can hardware >interpolation on sound cards or in software. If you take an MP3 and play it >back via a system that has a hardware MPEG decoder card in it (assuming you >have it set to handle MP3 decoding) it will sound far better - the card has >dedicated hardware that handles smoothing and frequency boost/cut which will >automatically come into play to compensate for what may have been lost in >MP3 encoding. I don't disagree completely, but I do disagree somewhat with this. A hardware decoder is not *necessarily* better than a software decoder. If a software player and an MPEG card use the same decoding/processing algorithms, they will sound exactly the same given a fast enough processor for the software decoder. I think it's safe to say that given a good enough computer/software combo, the key to a good sounding MP3 file is in the encoding used. That said, as someone pointed out, there is something wrong when various MP3 players sound different using *no* EQ/processing. Since the MP3 format is a standard, they *should* all play back the same until you kick in the processing. But they don't. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
