ety. + rio 800 + 160kbps mp3 lame = excellent!
Feb 5, 2002 at 5:15 AM Post #16 of 22
Before really experimenting with the MP3 format, I had serious doubts about its sound quality. The only ones I had heard at that point were off the internet and I wasn't terribly impressed. Then a Nomad Jukebox found its way into my hands which prompted me to dig a lot deeper into the technology.

Now I have several hundred songs ripped and encoded from my CD collection using lame with the "--alt-preset extreme" setting which is pretty much the highest quality VBR you can get. I listen to my NJB with a Porta Corda and ER4Ps + the 120 ohm adapter included with the PC. I think the sound quality is just as enjoyable (if not more) as my fairly expensive full-size home system playing CDs. This continually amazes me, because I never expected the sound coming out of this portable setup to rival a system costing 8x more!

I've never spent a great deal of time switching back and forth between a CD and its MP3 counterpart to determine if I can actually hear a difference, because that's not very important to me. What IS important is that I find the MP3s I've encoded to be extremely clean, detailed and completely enjoyable to listen to. Every so often I'll hear something that I'll think might be a compression artifact, but then I'll go back and listen to the CD and find that the "artifact" is actually present in the original recording.
 
Feb 5, 2002 at 5:47 AM Post #17 of 22
Quote:

Originally posted by jcorkery
What IS important is that I find the MP3s I've encoded to be extremely clean, detailed and completely enjoyable to listen to.


What kind of music are you listening to? I've found that with classical music there's is a noticable difference.
 
Feb 5, 2002 at 6:50 AM Post #18 of 22
I don't listen to a lot of traditional classical music, but I do listen to quite a bit of music that contains orchestral arrangements. In fact, I prefer a spacious, open, airy sound. Granted, my ER4s don't quite create the same sense of "space" that my loudspeakers do, but I don't consider that to be the fault of the MP3 format.

I assume the differences you've noticed are glaring enough to be objectionable? What type of encoding do you use?

I'm not claiming that there's no discernible difference between a well-encoded MP3 and a CD; I haven't done any extensive testing to that end, nor do I desire to. I'm just extremely pleased at how good an MP3 can sound--especially after seeing how many audiophiles condemn the format. As I mentioned before, I find my portable setup to be at least as enjoyable as my full-size system, which I spent about 8x more money on. Maybe I'm not listening to the exact type of music that's most revealing of the format's limitations, but my taste in music is extremely varied. Anyway, I'm very happy with my Nomad Jukebox+Porta Corda+ER4 combination.
 
Feb 5, 2002 at 7:18 AM Post #19 of 22
160k mp3s sound quite bad compared to the original CD to me. 192k mp3s are usually "meh", 256k is not always discernable, and neither is 320k, compared to a .mac off my computer. I would say most of the time I find 192k adequate for something more then background music but less then critical listening, but I won't do critical listening because I have been able to hear some slight differences from CD and 320k mp3.

I also have a 256k LAME rip of Ode to Joy which sounds quite bad during some parts. Going to 320 would have improved it, but not solved it.

If I had a portable mp3 player that played non 44Khz audio, I would encode at 160k stereo, 32Khz. 128k stereo mp3 at 32Khz isn't nearly as fautiging to hear, although the high end takes another major hit, more bandwidth is spend on more important parts of the sound so you get less quantization noises.

If I were ripping something for active use, I would be using 96kbit 32Khz mono.
 
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