jess28 Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 hey guys,just wondering if anyone could help me mp3 listening. Basically i want to know the best format and if theres a way to get cd qualty or better from mp3 Having to sell my receiver and want to get some good listening in before it's gone Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jacksonbart Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 The best you will get with MP3, is riping CDs using 320kbps. That is short by a long shot of a CD, but sounds pretty good in the car. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jess28 Posted May 5, 2011 Author Share Posted May 5, 2011 basically the only way to get cd quality is from cds,am i right ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jacksonbart Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 You can rip CDs to WAV or FLAC file formats. WAV is the full size file and FLAC is a losses compression. If you are a MAC user there are losses apple formats as well. I guess it depends on what you are trying to do. I mean if you are looking to buy songs digitially on-line, Amazon for example sells MP3s are coded at 256kbps. Again if your a MAC user I believe I-tunes sells both lossy and lossless formats, but I am not a MAC expert. There are also some High Def music sites that sell music files in FLAC but I have found the selection to be limited. If your looking to burn your CDs, well then based on the software you have, you have choices on what quality to RIP the music to your harddrive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wuzzzer Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 No mp3 bitrate will ever be better than a CD, all will be compressed. Like JB said, 320 is a good bitrate and probably the highest you'll see any mp3 software encode them at. I just bought a car that has a USB port and I bought an 8 gigabyte thumb drive and copied all my favorite songs to it at 192 bitrate, the highest that my mp3 software will go. It sounds fine in the car. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quadklipsh Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 No mp3 bitrate will ever be better than a CD, all will be compressed wuzzzer is RIGHT !!! mp3s sound way too digital and mettallic and tinny. even at 320 kbps iv found that the air around instruments and spacing gets better than in 192kbps or 256kbps ones. but overall they dont hold a candle to good cds . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jacksonbart Posted May 5, 2011 Share Posted May 5, 2011 No mp3 bitrate will ever be better than a CD, all will be compressed wuzzzer is RIGHT !!! mp3s sound way too digital and mettallic and tinny. even at 320 kbps iv found that the air around instruments and spacing gets better than in 192kbps or 256kbps ones. but overall they dont hold a candle to good cds . Come on Quad, I am not right too? BTW sorry I never got back to you on the personal message, thanks for the nice comments regarding my room. You are top notch in regards to you love of music. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jess28 Posted May 5, 2011 Author Share Posted May 5, 2011 thanks guys ,thats what i thought . I lost most of my cds in a fire but have thousands of mp3s and they just not up to par like what was said before to digital and metallic and i just dont like it. I think im just going to save up for a good record player and start collecting albums . I prefer albums anyway Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mustang guy Posted May 10, 2011 Share Posted May 10, 2011 thanks guys ,thats what i thought . I lost most of my cds in a fire but have thousands of mp3s and they just not up to par like what was said before to digital and metallic and i just dont like it. I think im just going to save up for a good record player and start collecting albums . I prefer albums anyway Completely right about albums. I listen to them daily, and would be very upset if anybody took my turntable. Today I was listening to a 50+ year old Ray Charles that belongs to my dad. There is a sound exchange where I live, and I routinely buy records for 2-3 bucks. I like the static, and the realness of the sound. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
todzilla Posted May 12, 2011 Share Posted May 12, 2011 So with CD's themselves being a big winner over mp3's. How much difference does a good quality CD player make? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gnatnoop Posted May 12, 2011 Share Posted May 12, 2011 So with CD's themselves being a big winner over mp3's. How much difference does a good quality CD player make? a whole lot. it's the DAC in the player that counts, imo. i tried 4 different CDP's before finding one i liked. later ran the output from this player to an outboard DAC and improved the sound another order of magnitude. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wboffthelake Posted May 12, 2011 Share Posted May 12, 2011 Since I have a collection of over 30,000 music files, going back to 1998, of varying formats (mp3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, and probably some others), and varying bitrates, and since the 30,000 is only the number I still have now, as I have deleted many, many more due to poor quality, I think I qualify as an expert here. First, bitrate, in and of itself, means nothing. A poorly ripped 320K file can be outperformed by a well done 128K file. Believe me, I've heard it many times. The same is true for file format, garbage in, garbage out. Next, FLAC does give the best quality, but limiting my discussion to the mp3 and AAC (m4a) file formats, as they are the most prevalent, the minimum bit rate required for the highest quality you can get from either format is 256K, whether you are talking CBR or VBR (with VBR, 256K would be the average bit rate). Any less simply cannot and does not give you any of the musical subtleties that exist within music. The increased file compression simply glosses over those subtleties at lower bit rates, as there are not enough bits to encode them. My personal opinion is that, at any bit rate, AAC gives a better sounding representation than mp3, especially regarding the subtleties. Also, make sure you are using a line out jack on your music file player and not a headphone jack. The latter will not give you the best quality sound. Better yet is to plug a USB stick directly into your receiver if it will allow you to do so. Something to keep in mind is that, given that so much music now has a massively compressed dynamic range (understand that I am talking about two different types of compression, dynamic compression is different from file compression), when you encode music that has a high level of dynamic compression in a lossy format, you lose most if not all of any remaining subtleties that still existed in the music despite the dynamic compression. Essentially you are getting a double whammy. That is why CDs, especially non-remastered CDs released prior to around 1990, which is about the time newly recorded CDs began getting the dynamic compression treatment en masse, sound best with our Klipsch speakers. It has that hard punch that is not overwhelmed by the rest of the music. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gnatnoop Posted May 13, 2011 Share Posted May 13, 2011 Since I have a collection of over 30,000 music files, going back to 1998, of varying formats (mp3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, and probably some others), and varying bitrates, and since the 30,000 is only the number I still have now, as I have deleted many, many more due to poor quality, I think I qualify as an expert here. First, bitrate, in and of itself, means nothing. A poorly ripped 320K file can be outperformed by a well done 128K file. Believe me, I've heard it many times. The same is true for file format, garbage in, garbage out. Next, FLAC does give the best quality, but limiting my discussion to the mp3 and AAC (m4a) file formats, as they are the most prevalent, the minimum bit rate required for the highest quality you can get from either format is 256K, whether you are talking CBR or VBR (with VBR, 256K would be the average bit rate). Any less simply cannot and does not give you any of the musical subtleties that exist within music. The increased file compression simply glosses over those subtleties at lower bit rates, as there are not enough bits to encode them. My personal opinion is that, at any bit rate, AAC gives a better sounding representation than mp3, especially regarding the subtleties. Also, make sure you are using a line out jack on your music file player and not a headphone jack. The latter will not give you the best quality sound. Better yet is to plug a USB stick directly into your receiver if it will allow you to do so. Something to keep in mind is that, given that so much music now has a massively compressed dynamic range (understand that I am talking about two different types of compression, dynamic compression is different from file compression), when you encode music that has a high level of dynamic compression in a lossy format, you lose most if not all of any remaining subtleties that still existed in the music despite the dynamic compression. Essentially you are getting a double whammy. That is why CDs, especially non-remastered CDs released prior to around 1990, which is about the time newly recorded CDs began getting the dynamic compression treatment en masse, sound best with our Klipsch speakers. It has that hard punch that is not overwhelmed by the rest of the music. great info! i don't disagree but i've never been satisified with any lossy compression methodology. FLAC is lossless and deserves to be seperated from mp3 and the others. Of course, today, with HD's prices plummeting, you don't have to compress at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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