

MP3 sound quality: Good enough - yan
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2009/09/dithering-jonny-greenwood.html

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kwantam
This guy takes the "anti-audiophile" sentiment a bit too far. If you know what
a FLAC is, you must also have more money than sense and want oxygen-free
copper cables?

FLAC is a good means of conveying audio losslessly. Monster Cables are snake
oil. These things are not the same.

(And I'm on the older cusp of the "MP3 generation," so this isn't somehow an
age thing.)

~~~
headShrinker
Hmmm... Well I agree with you about him taking it to far. I know monster
cables are bull, but true audiophiles ($25000 and up per system) will use non-
monster oxygen-free cables, and they swear by them. I will give it to them,
some of those systems really sound great. I don't know if it's due to the lack
of oxygen in the lines though.

~~~
robotrout
I promise you, it's not. There's a lot of articles floating around recently
about the placebo effect in medicine. I'll be kind to these people, and let
them off with the excuse that placebo effect, which is still not understood,
is the reason their $500 cables make them think their audio sounds better.

Audio is something we understand pretty well. We can measure it's delay and
phase and amplitude and distortion. We can measure these things, and we can
see when they change, and we can see when they don't change. We can see these
changes to levels that the human ear can't detect, but even if you believe
that an audiophile can detect things that others can't, we can see these
changes on our instruments.

I'm not certain how far to beat this horse. It's a little like arguing that
gold doesn't fall faster than lead, even though gold is heavier. At the end of
the day, you either believe in measurable science, or you don't. As somebody
who has spent countless hours in front of an audio analyzer, tracking down
actual audio effects all the way down into the noise floor of the system, I am
confident on this issue.

Still, the guys selling those cables are richer than I am, so who's the idiot?
Certainly not the salesmen.

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kwantam
Further robotrout's point: a friend of mine did some research on actual sound
quality for generic versus high-price cables.

He measured the noise floor with Monster cables at about -160dB, whereas cheap
crappy cables were about -125dB. However, he also found that basically all of
the difference is explained by higher quality connectors on the Monster cables
compared to his ultra cheap bargain basement ones; when he replaced the cheap
connectors with some modestly priced RCA connectors that weren't utter shit
(but were not Monster cable made), the two cables were indistinguishable.

For the record, even -125dB is below the noise floor of arguably every person
on earth.

So really, the most important thing for cables is to always use good
connectors. You cannot hear the difference between "super duper copper" and
"layman's copper."

Another popular bit of audiophile snake oil is "ribbon cables." These use
wide, flat conductors instead of round ones because---they claim---the round
conductors have higher impedance because of the skin effect
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect> ). Of course, this is absolute
bullshit, because skin depth at audio frequencies is more than the diameter of
the round conductor. What's more, since ribbon cables aren't coaxial, they're
actually more susceptible to EMI.

...and people still spend hundreds or even thousands _on_the_cable_!

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DarkShikari
The problem isn't that $format doesn't sound good, the problem is that when
you convert $format to $otherformat for playback on $system, you lose far more
quality than if you converted from the original audio file.

~~~
jrschulz
ACK. Additionally, FLAC is perfect for future-proof archiving. MP3 is already
declining (thanks to Apple) and while you will probably still be able to play
MP3 files in twenty years, it will hopefully not be the format of choice.
Other formats are superior to MP3 even today -- not only in sound quality, but
in other areas like gapless playback and metadata capabilities as well.

But hey, Jonny is still one of my heroes. :)

~~~
jamesbritt
"MP3 is already declining (thanks to Apple) "

How do you know that? And what format is supposed to be replacing mp3? It's
the only audio format I run into on the Web (but then I don't use Apple
products to play music).

~~~
jrschulz
I don't use Apple products either but I know that they sell tracks AAC
encoded. And that's exactly why I see MP3 declining: before iTunes, there was
no serious competitor for it.[1] But now the biggest online retailer of music
uses an alternative. MP3's "market share" may only have gone down by a few
percent. But thanks to iTunes, AAC songs can now be played almost anywhere.
Since most people couldn't care less about the format of theit digital music
collection, as long as they can play it, MP3 has lost a lot of its relevance.
It will probably survive as a household term for digital music, irrespective
of the actual encoder, though.

[1] Yes, I do know Ogg Vorbis. It is even my lossy format of choice. But it's
never been a threat to MP3.

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MikeCapone
"MP3" can mean a lot of things (to some people it just means "digital music").
Quality depends on the bitrate, on CBR vs VBR, on the encoder used, on the
playback device, etc.

Personally, I ripped most of my CDs in 256kbs VBR AAC (no DRM), and that's
fine for me. But I wouldn't go back to 128kbps MP3s (especially if encoded
with something else than LAME).

I'd love to use more OGG Vorbis, but iTunes just plays better with AAC (even
if you install the quicktime codec, you can't have the artwork inside the
files).

~~~
masklinn
> "MP3" can mean a lot of things (to some people it just means "digital
> music"). Quality depends on the bitrate, on CBR vs VBR, on the encoder used,
> on the playback device, etc.

Yeah but every time you need to transcode your music to the next format of the
day, you're going to lose a bit of quality. And the losses multiply too, they
don't just add from one lossy format to one another.

If you store your music in a lossless format, you just have to come back to
your lossless copy to create each lossily-generated copy, and you'll only ever
have the losses of this transcoding.

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davepeck
He started this series by saying that he thinks vinyl is "the best available
method for reproducing recorded music."

I believe that anyone who thinks this has never bothered to learn how audio
reproduction works in theory or in practice.

(I say this as someone who loves vinyl for many reasons... just not for its
reproduction.)

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puredemo
Well, if CD sound quality is good enough..

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rphillips
I was just talking to friends about this the other day. MP3s are convenient,
but the fidelity isn't the same as a CD (or the nuisances of a record). Are we
lowering our standards as a society, because we don't have time for Xbox, TV,
Music, and Family. For the most part music is timeless. Will we get to the
point where MP3s will be the only distribution medium and we lose the
timelessness of Music? Perhaps we already have.

~~~
gort
"the fidelity isn't the same as a CD"

At what bitrate? I don't think I can tell the difference by 256...

~~~
Edinburger
What are you listening on? I expect that most people could tell the difference
if they listened on a reasonable quality separate CD player, amp and speakers
and compared that with an MP3 player plugged into the same amp and speakers.
Unfortunately I don't have an experiment I can cite but having tried it
myself, I can say the difference is substantial.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
You're probably experiencing the placebo effect.

If you care there's software that will let you double-blind test yourself to
see what bitrate is transparent for you.

LAME above 165 should be transparent (i.e. sound the same as the source) for
most people even with good equipment.

~~~
zokier
notice what he said:

"quality separate CD player, amp and speakers and compared that with an MP3
player plugged into the same amp and speakers"

"MP3 player"

I'd assume that it means iPod-style device, which probably doesn't have as
high quality output as "quality separate CD player". Yes, its comparing apples
to oranges, but its different from placebo

~~~
Edinburger
Good point. I haven't listened to high bitrate MP3s through something like an
iPod but with a high-end outboard DAC. With a setup like that I believe it
could become hard/impossible to tell the difference.

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aurora72
MP3 causes a hearing disorder called Tinnitus. There's a research paper about
it here:
[http://weltenschule.de/Logologie/info/MP3-Gefahr/MP3-risk.ht...](http://weltenschule.de/Logologie/info/MP3-Gefahr/MP3-risk.html)

I don't mean MP3 is totally bad but, I believe it might affect a sensitive
person when the bitrate is below 160kbps and badly encoded.

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zokier
If only the problem would be in the transfer medium and not in the MAX GAIN
LOUDNESS IS HEAVEN -style mastering.

