[lextek]

Any thoughts on using a MP3 player (HD) as a source for a headphone system? I would be using it with a Creek OBH-11 or maybe a MG Head in the near future with Sens HD600.
thanks,
Bob

 

[MacDEF]

lextek, I deleted your duplicate post in the Portable Audio forum.

 

[dngl]

Um, it'll work. Trust me, you'll be able to tell the difference between MP3 and CD easily and you won't like it

 

[Peddler]

I am certainly enjoying my music on MP3 format. I'm currently using the Iriver2 CD/MP3 combo. I have to say that I'm impressed. Apart from some low level noise from the electronics (which only really effects music when listened to at fairly low levels) and (of course) the supplied phones.

There's also a nice range of controls for ramping bass and treble - although the purist in me hates these things - let's face it, MP3 is compressed audio and has already been 'screwed' around with anyway.

On the HD based player I tried (the Archos Jukebox) I found that the headphone output was sadly lacking - it did sound excellent through line-level output fed to the Airhead and the Ety's though - but I would have expected more from a player that cost £250.

The Iriver2 has 12mw output - yippee!!! I'm currently using the unit with the Ety4P's and the Sony 888's - drives both easily to VERY loud levels. Typical rip sizes do vary depending on source but I usually find 192 acceptable.

I feel that there is a certain 'hardness' about MP3 sound generally. It's not that there's no detail - it's just fairly relentless sounding (almost as if there are many small gaps between the frequencies).

Still liking what I'm hearing so far generally though.

I hope this helps.

 

[dhwilkin]

As long as the mp3s are encoded at at least 192 kbps using a decent encoder, and the recordings weren't poor to begin w/, I see nothing wrong w/ using them as source material. Obviously, they won't sound quite as good as the real thing, but they can still be very enjoyable.

 

[tangent]

lextek, I do that very thing daily. My current setup at work is my PC running WinAMP, playing high-bitrate MP3s (175 Kbit/s VBR) through a stereo-link DAC to my Sennheiser HD-570 headphones. In the past, I used a Rio Volt connected to a Corda HA-1 headamp driving my Senn HD-580s. (I decided to downgrade my work system so I could use the better stuff at home.) This type of system is an incomparable improvement over listening to cheap headphones plugged into a typical sound card.

Rant: All this anti-MP3 sentiment confuses me. The crux of the matter is that it's completely subjective to say "I can easily tell when I'm listening to an MP3". Who am I to say what you're hearing?

Yet I can't help but return to the fact that I don't hear a difference when I test carefully with properly-encoded MP3s. I have to wonder how many people listen to a little portable MP3 player playing random MP3s they downloaded with Napster and say "yuck, this sounds nothing like my hi-fi system!"

I guess the main thing I'm unsure of is that people aren't changing only one variable at a time: the MP3 version vs. the uncompressed version of the same song. Everything else must remain the same: the player, the DAC, the cables, the amplifier, and the speakers. Otherwise, the test is bogus. If you test a portable MP3 player against your hi-fi system and find the MP3 player lacking, all you've proven is that no one has yet come up with a hi-fi MP3 player. It doesn't mean that MP3 is inherently flawed.
End of rant.

 

[MacDEF]

Quote:

All this anti-MP3 sentiment confuses me.

Why? This is a forum dedicated to getting the best possible sound. It follows that there will be criticism of compression/bitwise reduction based on the fact that such techniques affect the sound.

Quote:

I guess the main thing I'm unsure of is that people aren't changing only one variable at a time: the MP3 version vs. the uncompressed version of the same song. Everything else must remain the same: the player, the DAC, the cables, the amplifier, and the speakers. Otherwise, the test is bogus. If you test a portable MP3 player against your hi-fi system and find the MP3 player lacking, all you've proven is that no one has yet come up with a hi-fi MP3 player. It doesn't mean that MP3 is inherently flawed.

Some of us have done very thorough, scientifically valid testing

 

[Nikolai Dot Org]

Try this test:

Grab the latest version of CDex (v1.40 beta 9) at http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/download.html and encode using the LAME engine with these settings:

MPEG-1
256kbit/sec
STEREO
No VBR

Telling the encoded MP3 apart from the CD original will be very, very difficult without extensive A/B testing. Even if there is a difference, the better MP3 encoders add a degree of "organic-ness" that is hard to describe. Usually, this isn't a bad thing... it sounds *different*, but in a good way.

 

[Sirwar]

Well, using my computer, I can't tell much difference between 192 and playing the actual CD. But despite that I use 320 for everything I rip. I haven't noticed any difference, so I enjoy the mp3s just as much as the CD. Hell, even my 128 and 92 bit mp3s still sound nice, and musical. Even with the "lossy" compression, the biggest difference in quality is the recording itself.

 

[Vertigo-1]

Tonally, 320k MP3s are just about perfect compared to CDs. The difference is in the ambient soundstage, especially when using instrumentals. A halfway decent CDP will just give off a better "air" around instruments.

While I can't hear much of a difference between a Rega Jupiter and a Denon 370, or even a Denon from an MP3, I can certainly hear a difference between the Jupiter and a 320 MP3.

 

[tangent]

Quote:

I can certainly hear a difference between the Jupiter and a 320 MP3.

Was that using the same DAC with both, or did you use the Jupiter's internal DAC? See what I mean about not knowing whether someone changed only the one variable of CD vs. MP3? Even if you did the test properly, there are a dozen more who effectively tested their CDP's DAC against their sound card's DAC, thinking that they were testing CD against MP3.

This also gets to my point about no one having made a hi-fi MP3 player yet. People with high-end sources tend not to add outboard DACs, because the whole point of getting a high-end CD player is to get a good DAC matched precisely to the CD transport section. Yet when testing MP3s, some people will test against their computer's sound card, at best connected to an inexpensive DAC, or worse, against a portable player.

As I discovered in my recent DAC runoff, a decent $200-300 DAC will outperform even an "audiophile" sound card's DAC. And heaven knows most people don't even have a sound card equal to my Audiophile 2496.

It's time for me to shut up now -- I'm getting wound up again.

 

[lextek]

Thanks for all the advice. I tried two MP3 files last night one at 160 joint stereo and the other at 192 stereo. I'm using iTunes with a Mac. I played both on my Nomad MGII with Airhead and HD 600's. Both sounded very, good. I think for the portable I would use the 160. For the NJB(more room,less portable) I would use the 192 rate. Are there better rippers than iTunes for the Mac's. I see LAME mentioned alot here.

thanks

 

[gavinbirss]

I have been doing some quality test myself and to make a long story short MP3 at any bitrate, even at 320 K is not as good as the original.

How I tested ?

Take any digital audio track in pcm or wav format and compress it with the MP3 encoder of your choice.

Decompress the file back to WAV and open it with a program like Cool Edit Pro and do a frequency analysis of the file.
(150 db scope from 0.1 hz to 22050 hz)

Look at it while the file is playing and look closely at the nature of the response from 16 KHZ to 22 KHZ, it sucks. (Do the same with the original file)

Now take OGG VORBIS OGGENC V 0.4 (-m 6 : 350 K VBR) and do the same. The response from 16 to 22 KHZ is now almost perfect and this is what MP3 lacks at any bitrate.

Do yourself a favour and find OGGENC V 0.4 and a player like SONIQUE 1.90 or 1.95.

pros of OGG VORBIS : quality
cons : file size (-m 6 : setting : 1 to 4 compression)

OGG VORBIS is also free.

The later versions however do not sound and perform as good as V 0.4 with 350 K AVR.

 

[dhwilkin]

Quote:

tangent said... This also gets to my point about no one having made a hi-fi MP3 player yet.

That's because there is little demand for it. The whole point of mp3s is convenience, which means most of the "R&D" goes to increasing storage space. If sound quality happens to improve as well, great. Same principle there's no audiophile pcdp, at least not anymore.
Quote:

tangent said... As I discovered in my recent DAC runoff, a decent $200-300 DAC will outperform even an "audiophile" sound card's DAC. And heaven knows most people don't even have a sound card equal to my Audiophile 2496.

Keep in mind the Audiophile is a budget soundcard, as far as audiophile soundcards go. An interesting test would be to compare those DACs w/ something like the CardDeluxe.

 

[aeberbach]

gavinbirss, that's not a test of the MP3 encoding at all. That's a test of the mp3 encoding AND the decoding to .wav AND the frequency analysis of Cooledit. Too many variables to prove anything, even if you trust all the components. Have someone help you perform a double blind test, playing back both CDs and MP3s from the digital output of a sound card into an external DAC like the ART D/IO or the USB stereolink - but even then you haven't eliminated the variable of two different players being used.

Assuming Cooledit is showing you correct results, you will probably find if you read the documentation for your MP3 encoder that the rolloff above 16kHz is intentional. It is discarded by default because most people can't hear those frequencies at all. It can be turned off and you will then see much the same performance as Ogg, if not better - but will you hear the difference? Have you used a signal generator recently to see if you can still hear 16kHz?

LAME is also free, and can be played back with any number of portable and non-portable devices, which Ogg can not. There is no portable Ogg player that can hold the 3000 tracks I have loaded over the past two days onto my PJB, for example. Unless of course you mean free in a religious and ideological sense, in which case you will be perfectly willing to use any format as long as it is "free" and disregard the performance entirely - but please save the political advocacy for Slashdot.

I don't think that anyone disagrees that MP3 is not as good as the original - that's what "lossy compression" means. Ogg and wma and mp3 are alike in that regard.