Re: Risc PC Sound quality

In message <468d6ab7$0$17173$db0fefd9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Rob Kendrick <nntp@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jess wrote:
Rob Kendrick wrote:

All things being equal a CD will sound better, but the inequalities of
production standards can be more significant. MP3s can sound good.

But not through a Quad Hi Fi, and certainly not compared to a Quad CD
player, and easily identifiable as lossly compressed, even compared to a
badly mastered CD.

That wouldn't surprise me. In order to compare I once tried ripping a track
from a CD and converting to WAV, and comparing that against the
highest-quality MP3 I could make of the same track. The most noticeable
difference was in the song balance, actually. The WAV had a guitar twanging
away quietly in the background, but you could hear it if you listened for
it. On the MP3, it came right into the foreground. Quite intrusive. Really
noticeably changed the balance of the track. Not having much in the way of
finely-tuned musical senses, I couldn't really say it sounded /worse/, but
it was certainly different from the reasonably faithful WAV version.


To push the thread onto a different area, I have some good quality speakers
lurking about gathering dust somewhere. About a couple of hundred pounds
worth. Or to hedge my bets, let's say they /cost/ about 200 quid, but are
/worth/ 60 or so. Obviously there's no point putting superb speakers on a
naff sound source, any more than there is using poor speakers with a decent
sound source. To try to get a decent balance between the two, would anyone
care to suggest roughly how much is it worth spending? Assume Acorn machines
here - Iyonix, RPCs with 8 or 16 bit sound, etc. In each case, what's the
best speakers it's worth plugging them in to, pricewise? If you put a
better-quality sound card in, how does that change the equation?


--
Simon Smith

When emailing me, please use my preferred email address, which is on my web
site at http://www.simon-smith.org
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