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Amazon vs. Itunes Mp3, am i the only one who hears a huge difference?

post #1 of 33
4/27/11 at 8:23am
Thread Starter 

I wanted to see if anyone else has noticed the difference in sound quality between amazon's mp3, itunes aac files, and ALAC files. Whenever i pull up a song in amazon's mp3 thing, it sounds radically different than itunes, particularly "war is the answers" by five finger death punch, which seems to have very slightly more bass, and slightly more treble, so it sounds like the guitar has been colored about half a note upwards of the itunes file, and is generally a bit more "forwards" and textured than the itunes file, which sound "flat" and a bit "fizzy" in comparison. Then when i pull up a bass track from bass outlaws (i use their stuff to test the bass on a pair of headphones) it seems as if the extra effects have been slightly reduced, although they sound "deeper" and more realistic. Im not positive though because i dont have access to the itunes version of these songs anymore. At other times, i hear something i wasnt familiar with with the itunes version, which is a "rattling" noise from time to time, and typically more bloated bass. So has anyone else noticed a difference in sound between the two?

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post #2 of 33
4/27/11 at 8:28am

Your thread is confusing. Your title says iTunes mp3 (which is crap), yet you mention iTunes AAC. Are you talking about buying from the stores? There really shouldn't be much difference there, they are both ~256 kbps. 


Edited by Satellite_6 - 4/27/11 at 11:13am
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post #3 of 33
4/27/11 at 9:55am
Thread Starter 

ah, aac is what i mean, the difference sounds pretty substantial to me though, could anyone else check this out? 

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post #4 of 33
4/27/11 at 9:59am

Ahh... the walmart and target of online music. Great selections at okay prices with slave-labor quality. As I swore off Itunes when it was released years ago, I cannot test your hypothesis, but theoretically they should be the same.

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post #5 of 33
4/27/11 at 10:12am

Truth be told, i'm not that suprised.

 

acc and mp3 are 2 different formats, that means the sound priorities of  the two formats are different, going a little more in deapth: VS a FLAC which is around 600-700 kbps, both mp3 and acc have a choice of what 256kbps of information to take out of the audio file, this difference in the meathod of file/audio compression could in theory create what you hear

 

hope this helps :D

 

cheers

 

PS if u still don't understand or want me to elaborate send me a PM

 


Edited by jrkong - 4/27/11 at 10:13am
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post #6 of 33
4/27/11 at 11:45am

iTunes sucks a little more at playback lately.

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post #7 of 33
4/27/11 at 1:29pm
Thread Starter 

ive been using banshee to listen to either kind of file.

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post #8 of 33
4/27/11 at 4:01pm

I believe I read somewhere that occasionally (somewhat rarely I think) Amazons MP3s are mastered different than the standard CD. It could be the songs that you are comparing are two completely different masters of the same song. I don't think there would be much of a noticeable difference between amazons 256kbps mp3s encoded with LAME, and iTunes 256 kbps aac as far as sound quality goes.

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post #9 of 33
4/27/11 at 7:40pm

You're not crazy. I definitely prefer iTunes AAC to Amazon's MP3, which tend to sound very compressed. I find that AAC compares very favorably to HD Tracks' FLAC file.

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post #10 of 33
4/27/11 at 8:03pm

Back when the default bitrate on iTunes downloads was 128K, Apple made a big deal about their claim that this was the equivalent of a 256K MP3 download. Since they (finally) moved to 256K by default, I admit that I am hard pressed to tell the difference in quality between the resulting files and the ALAC versions of WAV files I have transferred into iTunes. Apple claim their implementation of AAC uses VBR, but the Wikipedia entry is less graceful about this claim:

 

iTunes supports a "Variable bit rate" (VBR) encoding option which encodes AAC tracks in an "Average bit rate" (ABR) scheme. As of September 2009, Apple has added support for HE-AAC (which is fully part of the MP4 standard) but iTunes still lacks support for true VBR encoding. The underlying QuickTime API does offer a true VBR encoding profile however.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

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post #11 of 33
4/27/11 at 8:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Snag1e View Post

I believe I read somewhere that occasionally (somewhat rarely I think) Amazons MP3s are mastered different than the standard CD. It could be the songs that you are comparing are two completely different masters of the same song. I don't think there would be much of a noticeable difference between amazons 256kbps mp3s encoded with LAME, and iTunes 256 kbps aac as far as sound quality goes.



This seems like the only viable reason, but still rather strange. If they are at the same rate, any significant difference you are hearing is likely your imagination. :-/

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post #12 of 33
4/27/11 at 8:56pm

Personally, the reason I don't buy from Amazon is because even though they say 320 kbps I've gotten tracks that were only 192 kbps. MP3 is an older format than M4A (AAC) so the quality does tend to be a bit less. Add to that a lower bitrate? Thanks but no thanks.

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post #13 of 33
4/27/11 at 9:02pm

buy the real cd if you are a fan

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post #14 of 33
4/27/11 at 9:30pm

1. Is it even the same mastering? If no, you are looking at the work of 2 differnet sound engineers and the difference are likely due to their preference and not the codec.

2. If yes, use Foobar, ABX comparison testing.

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post #15 of 33
4/28/11 at 12:45am


Quote:

Originally Posted by snbbqsb View Post

buy the real cd if you are a fan


Unless you have a small apartment and a love for loads of music thus leading to no room... Or if you'd rather buy digital where a higher percentage of the money goes to the band... Or because you like the lower carbon-footprint form going digital...

 

;)

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