HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)
Reply #82 – 2002-12-04 23:34:58
One question of budgie that has not been answered yet was questioning the point in having MP3 in the first place, where he under-emphasized the format as only being useful for low bit-rate portability. There is a HUGE range of possibilites in mp3, and EACH has its own possible application, even archiving, because each person has their own perception of what makes something useful for them. Regardless of whether one agrees with them or not because of one's higher standards, some people just don't care, and are happy with what they have; not to downgrade the quality of mp3. File sharing is one major reason that mp3's compression is so useful. Even if one does not feel the encoding is adequate for archiving, it is still often listenable and he or she can then go buy the cd or download a higher quality encoding. Bands are discovered by listeners everyday on their computer, and it is mainly because of mp3. I eventually buy anything that I find that I like, so there is nothing lost by it. Bandwidth and storage ties right in to Filesharing. ANY gain of filesize can be significant to SOMEONE. Even at --alt-preset standard, I can fit many albums on one cd and listen to it on my mp3-cd player and the quality is great. Albums that I have stored on my computer may not be perfect copies persay, but they are much more easily searched and played in this format compared to the physical cd format with the normal person only having one to two cd compatible drives on his or her computer. This makes my normal use of my cds far less (until my mp3cd player broke the other day) and makes them last longer. You might say that my CDs are still my music "archived" and my mp3s are my most used music. The 2nd definition in computer science of the noun "archive" on dictionary.com may not be known by some, and it is: A file containing one or more files in compressed format for more efficient storage and transfer. While this usually pertains to zip files or other file compression formats, Mp3 does that very well as well, and since it is "not the best", there are other formats to choose from. Isn't there a thing called preference? Also, A question for mithrandir: What is usually lost by cutting the signal off at 20Hz-22KHz? What I mean by "lost" is, what natural instrumentation or sound requires that high of frequency to be perceived as it was meant to be heard? As you said, not many things are recorded 20KHz or higher purposely, because most of the music that is meant to be heard falls in the middle ranges. When a musician is recorded with the proper equipment, I assume that more sound range information is recorded than what is required for his particular music or instrumentation, and even some of that unneeded information is then downsampled onto his CD when it is finished (this is overly simplified simply because I do not intend to get into the inner workings of studio sound recording at the moment, that is not my concern.) Because of this, I want to know what types of music and instrumentation recorded out there makes use of or contains significant sound information in these higher frequencies. People talk about how they can hear in those ranges or not, but if you can't, what are you missing, and is it significant? I know that significance is always opinionated, and I'd like to hear opinions as well on this.