I’m finally convinced that MPC at standard quality is god enough for my archiving needs. However I have one remaining concern. In the future (when I have enough money for a CD/MP3 player), I plan to convert my MPCs to WAV then re-encode with lame to 128 kbps MP3s.
How would these MP3s sound compared to MP3s encoded straight from the CD?
Obviously they won't be quite as good. However, since 128kbps MP3 isn't exactly a high quality format the degradation won't be very apparent. For instance, if a WAV is 100% quality and a WAV --> MP3 is 90% quality, then a MPC --> WAV --> MP3 is 87% quality (hypothetically).
Think sum of squares. When you transcode, you are introducing quantization noise twice. But since MPC standard is such high quality, its standard error is pretty small compared to a 128kbps MP3.
If you are wondering whether you should encode with MPC xtreme, I don't think that's necessary. If your 128kbps MP3s will be played on a portable player in environments less than conducive to high quality listening, then just the background noise will degrade the sound more than transcoding from MPC I think.
I thought so. Just wanted to make sure. Thanks.