SiriuslyCold Posted March 12, 2008 Posted March 12, 2008 MP3 vs AAC vs FLAC vs CD By John Atkinson @ Stereophile Stereophile has been criticized more than once for not paying enough attention to the subjects of MP3 and other compressed file formats, such as AAC, and for offering no guidance at all to readers about how to get the best sound quality from compressed downloads. These criticisms are correct. We don't. (more)
oneneo Posted March 12, 2008 Posted March 12, 2008 So conclusion for me is I have to re-rip all my music with AAC at 320kbps or perhaps lossless ALC ? ???
SiriuslyCold Posted March 12, 2008 Author Posted March 12, 2008 you don't have to... but if you bought a good system, why feed it with junk?
karlie Posted March 13, 2008 Posted March 13, 2008 Gosh, although I agree that mp3 (especially at 128kbps) is not so great, the Stereophile article is completely crap. The interpretation of of the curves is completely subjective and wrong. The most important principle to remember is this: if you can't hear it, don't care about it. So the encoder doesn't care about the noise floor if it is going to be covered by something else. And a pure sinewave covers extermely well the noise around. When is the last time anyone in this forum tried to hear something at -80dB? (or even -60dB if one were to consider an CD mastered with an average level at -20d, already very low)? If the CD had been invented with a sampling frequency of 1GHz and 128bit depth Stereophile would tell us that 44kHz at 16bit depth is crap? Yes mp3 is not great, but babbling on frequency response is useless. Only double blind tests are relevant. Testing analog equipment is still relevant for Stereophile, though as each equipment has a subjective sound quality that can be discussed in a magazine.
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