smokestak

thanks for the welcome invite cask.

as far as the mp3 vs cd debate goes i've heard some prefer the energy of the spin of a cd. some say a mp3 will gain energy as you feel energy listening to each mp3 each time. some think all of the sound quality is from the encoder that a system that's on. i'd say getting a quality copy can be important in 2 ways apart from the encoder quality, both bitrate and overall the compressing algorithm.. first the og might be better than the re-release sound quality mastering wise. 2nd being each og might have many different sounds respectively up to 20 variants so far. some guys claim they hear different things with a new system from a track they have heard a thousand times. i've heard way different cds from the same og cd ripped the same way. i first experienced this back in '97 when my friend with the same cd wanted me to rip mine and upload the files to his server. he didn't always want to me to listen first and put my spin on that rap cd. i'm sure he wanted to hear differences, granted any on my copy in line with his. also, a cd plus the covers and case should have a sitting energy that you can tap in as needed or feel the whole time possibly without noticing until now. on another level i've heard that the spinning of the cd remembers the thoughts you have during each track. so don't go giving away all those cds. some old cd players also don't play a cd-r. a lot of for sure don't play a cd-rw. plus owning a tight cd collection rules. as far as an audiophile goes i wonder what they hear sometimes. i think some of them can find a unique angle to listen to the music and can hear nuances. some might have a sensitive system or a not very in-tune one to all sounds. some i think have heard so many systmes they start to get smart about what music to put in there and how the track should sound.

320 kps mp3 is exact cd quality to most ears in my estimation. 256 sounds great to most. a lot of the time a 256 will not have a sound loss due to whatever small amount of compression between the 320 and 256 not being recognizable to most. 192, not as good some of the time. the old school when hd space was real important was 128. basically i think that breaks down to the amount of energy one gets from a certain track. the higher quality mp3 should have more. i've tested the difference between a 192 and 256 and the 256 sounded noticeably brighter, some tracks arent that complicated so the 192 is enough. when the track is not complicated the compression algorithm can make looping compressions more abundantly resulting in smaller files with the same quality. re-encode the mp3 to 256 or 320. realistically what happens is all the information whether one encoded the mp3 as low as 54 or up to 320 will still be present when you decode the thing back to a wav. so re-encoding to a higher kps should result in higher sound quality granted the track is complicated. mp3 is easier for things like ipods and phones to recognize. i have a lot of tracks that are wma and i can't tell the difference between that and the mp3s i have. when i add a wma to my ipod the track has to be converted by itunes to a mp3; the reconverting takes aboout 8 secs each file.