Manics on Twitter - Page 48 - Forever Delayed

Porco · #**706** 18-07-2010, 23:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by //Kelly

I can't speak for all songs on all online stores but I just checked play.com's top 5 tracks and all of them were above 200kbps, 4 were 320kbps which is well over the bitrate quality of a CD track.

No it isn't, sorry, you're wrong. 320kbps MP3 files are arguably fine for most people's everyday listening, but they are inferior to CD audio - that is just fact (perhaps you are confusing bit-rates with sample rates?).

Mr Richey · #**707** 18-07-2010, 23:37

Wrong thread! Sorry

Ken Korda · #**708** 19-07-2010, 09:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Porco

No it isn't, sorry, you're wrong. 320kbps MP3 files are arguably fine for most people's everyday listening, but they are inferior to CD audio - that is just fact (perhaps you are confusing bit-rates with sample rates?).

Hmm perhaps. I'm no master on bitrate, just echoing what people have told me in the past.

Porco · #**709** 19-07-2010, 10:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by //Kelly

Hmm perhaps. I'm no master on bitrate, just echoing what people have told me in the past.

Well, it's a little misleading to compare the bit-rates of CD audio (which is fairly constant, it being uncompressed) and MP3 (whose main purpose is to use compression to sound as similar as uncompressed audio whilst taking up less data, i.e. less kilobits per second).

But having said all that, in data terms, an CD audio is basically 1411.2kbps. That's why a single album on CD needs to hold hundreds of megabytes, whereas you could fit several albums in MP3 format on one CD. A lossy compressed audio format like MP3 is literally throwing away information about the audio that you might not notice. The more it throws away, the smaller the file can be, but the more you will notice.

So at 320kbps, you won't notice much, if anything, but it has thrown information away.

So I would always rather have the quality of CD audio available (or better!) for my favourite music, though of course I recognise the advantages that downloads have in terms of convenience, and that vinyl (which is a whole other tangent!) has in terms of artwork and the whole 'warmth' thing. But if I was picking one format of the three, I'd plump for CD every time.