Re: The death of High Fidelity - SBC

On Thu, 8 May 2008 10:12:53 -0700 (PDT), the q is silent
<james.c.wagner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 8, 6:38 pm, ChowCham <tacoy...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is there a chance that the record industry is getting people
"addicted" to MP3's for the sake of convenience only to introduce a
return to high fidelity once the iPod market has been saturated?
That's one way to recoup lost profits and continue to sell and resell
the same product in different formats.

Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here. MP3s themselves
are not the problem. They're a perfectly good file type, and if
they're encoded at 192kbps or higher, their sound quality is almost
indistinguishable from a CD to most ears. I listen to all of my music
in the form of 192kbps MP3s from my iPod, with Shure earphones, and
the quality is nothing short of excellent (at least for music that
hasn't been recorded over the last few years in LOUD mode - Magic is
trying experience no matter format I dare to listen to it in).

The problem with iTunes is that 128kbps is its default setting if
you're ripping a CD, which most people will use simply because they
don't know any better. And worse, anything you buy from the iTunes
store is encoded at 128kbps. Perhaps that is part of the vast record-
wing conspiracy, and in a few years they'll be advertising 192kbps or
higher MP3s - better sound for the same price! Though most new music
will still sound like ***, if it's recorded according to the LOUD
philosophy.

But let's blame Apple and the record labels for these problems - not
the poor little MP3s themselves. They don't deserve the shitty
reputation they've got.

-Jyqm

iTunes uses AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), which is part of the MPEG-2
standard, not mp3 (mp3 is MPEG-1, layer 3). AAC represented
state-of-the-art audio compression when it was developed in the late
1990s, and it is superior to mp3.

The biggest problem with mp3 is/was that there was a lot of
variability between encoders. Commericial mp3 encoders made by
Fraunhofer were vastly superior to many of the freeware and other
encoders out there. A lot of mp3 encoders produced annoying ringing
artifact in stereo mode, and annoying cymbal swooshing artifact in
joint-stereo mode.

I don't hear those annoying artifacts, or any others, with iTunes'
AAC. I'd be hard pressed to distinguish between a 128kbps iTunes ACC
file and the wav file. But then, I'm not as critical as many others
when it comes to audio quality.

I would suggest that when using iTunes (or any other encoder), that
the variable bit rate (VBR) encoding option be used. VBR allocates
more bits when encoding passages of music that are more demanding, and
less to those that are not. VBR raises the bit rates when necessary,
and doesn't when it isn't, thereby achieving higher encoding quaity
with small file size. Using constant bit rate (CBR) is akin to driving
with your cruise control on when driving on a winding mountain road.

Jerry


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