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higher sound quality is a good thing
Authored by: pcook on Feb 20, '03 12:44:14PM

It's not surprising that 'Sound Enhancer' or 'Volume Adjuster' make your low data rate MP3s sound worse. MP3 files throw away a lot of data. When you equalize or change the sound in some way you are performing DSP on the audio. But with an MP3 there isn't much to work with in the first place so you end up with nasty sounding artifacts.

The analogy to images which bbum used is a good one. Here's another example. Take your original hi res image and squeeze it down into a small jpg. Now use an image manipulation tool to adjust the colours (in other words, to do DSP)on the jpg. Nasty, eh? The same thing happens with your sound.

I have iTunes set to import audio files as AIFF. Not only do I not use low data rate MP3s, I don't use MP3s at all. This way I get the full resolution of the CD. iTunes and the iPod are quite capable of playing these files.

I would encourage anyone who's interested to give this a try. Rip a favourite tune from a proper CD (not an MP3 CD) using the AIFF encoder. Then rip it using MP3 at a high rate, then again at a lower rate (you can get extreme using the 'Custom' settings). You've got three versions now. Listen to them and see if you hear a difference. I find that the music is just smoother at higher resolutions and I am less on edge, more relaxed as I listen.

The problem becomes more obvious when you start changing the sound using volume adjust or some equalization.

There are practical reasons for using MP3s but as bandwidth and storage costs go down I hope we move beyond these lossy compression schemes. Some of us feel that even CD doesn't offer sufficient sound quality!



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WAV better than AIFF
Authored by: pathfinder on Feb 20, '03 08:45:25PM

As far as I know, ripping CDs in AIFF includes encoding the files, but in non-lossy encription. But when ripping in WAV the files are copied directly of the CD.
I noticed this when ripping a cd in WAV at 23x. AIFF ripping on the same CD only gave me 6-7x which was the same speed I got when ripping in MP3.



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