MP3s are never CD quality. Just look at them in a spectrum analyser and you'll see.
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MP3s are never CD quality. Just look at them in a spectrum analyser and you'll see.
"Treefingers" is an ambient piece. "Kid A" (the song) sounds like crap on mp3.....and I don't have Motion Picture Soundtrack on mp3, but I imagine that a lot of them butcher the ending.Quote:
Originally posted by Waz@Nov 23 2003, 06:07 PM
I don't really know why everybody is using Kid A as a reference point. I remember most of the songs being quite lo-fi.
...what makes you think that ambient music automatically needs to be encoded at a high quality? Often that's not the case, as there are no sharp sounds.
Why does it need to have sharp sounds? I hate listening to ambient on mp3s. HATE IT. Thats why.
No, I'm just saying, there's no technical reason that Kid A should be a special case regarding MP3s. It's all mostly lo-fi stuff and will do just fine at a decent bitrate.
I guess it really depends what you are listening to your music from.
If you have a high end HiFi System, you will see a considerable difference between MP3's encoded at any bitrate and CD's.
Ironically the major quality difference will come from the actual circuitry of the MP3 playback device rather than the raw data stream itself. There is a clear audible difference between a high end CD player and one you can get for a few bucks, so there is a clear difference between MP3 playback devices (the actual hardware and filtering) and a High quality CD player. Unofrtunately, HiFi producers will not touch high quality MP3 players with a ten foot pole. They think that high quality MP3 is an oxymoron.
As far as encoding goes, you could spak up a HUGE discussion on what bitrate, ABR, VBR, CBR what command line switches for LAME, what encoder version, what encoder compile, etc etc etc. HA forums is a clear sign of how everyone has a different taste and belief when it comes to encoding their music.
For me VBR is a no-brainer. I can hear the difference on my external sound card's output and on my portable mp3 player. I can clearly see the differnece in filesize too. I would like to see the iPod use OGG... he'll I'll even settle for the iPod using mp3cue so I can stop having that second long gap between songs or split the continiously mixed cd's I rip into segmented tracks... but that's not going to happen for a while.
If you're truly a lossless enthusiast you can FLAC'it but I hope you are willing to spend some moolah on a RAID then (and cut down on your portable music library size in your pocket players).
Hardware is certainly important. But really, with a normal sound card, a fairly decent pair of headphones and a headphone amp, MP3s really bite the skank's kneepads.
Unfortunately even if I could afford CDs, I wouldn't be able to find half of the releases I wanted, and I'd never discover new artists and songs, so MP3s clearly have the advantage there - but that's not an explicit MP3 advantage, it's a file sharing advantage. If only more people would wise up to lossless formats. They're not THAT big...
I think my old Yamaha sound card gives me a fair advantage, with a pair of nice headphones and using DFX with Winamp.Quote:
Hardware is certainly important. But really, with a normal sound card, a fairly decent pair of headphones and a headphone amp, MP3s really bite the skank's kneepads.
Especially since broadband is becoming the norm nowadays.Quote:
Originally posted by Waz@Nov 24 2003, 04:20 PM
If only more people would wise up to lossless formats. They're not THAT big...
I would have to choose MP3"s for i get the song that i want without having to buy all the other songs that I didn't need.
