MP3 sound quality: Good enough
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.)
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.
> It's a little like arguing that gold doesn't fall faster than lead, even though gold is heavier.
is a bad example, because heavier items do fall faster. If the difference in masses between them is very large (like a box vs the earth), the difference is not measurable, but it's there. It's off topic, but if you want me to show you the math I can.
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_!
Those who care about audio quality won't abandon their hardware playback platform for exactly this reason. Even those who don't understand the technicalities are vaguely aware of the problem.
The solution is FLAC, but since it's free, lossless, and (typically) 2-3x larger, it has had fairly slow growth. Still: http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html
But hey, Jonny is still one of my heroes. :)
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).
[1] Yes, I do know Ogg Vorbis. It is even my lossy format of choice. But it's never been a threat to MP3.
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).
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.
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.)
At what bitrate? I don't think I can tell the difference by 256...
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.
"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
My MP3 player sounds a hell of a lot better than the cheap ghetto blaster on which I played cassettes (often filled with songs recorded off the radio) as a child in the early 1980s.
I think music is, speaking generally, a product of its time. Most remaining music from past centuries is the small portion that was timeless. That doesn't mean that the majority of music through history was timeless.
Edited - no need to be rude
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.