[chadbang]

I'm guilty (yes, I admit it) of downloading a lot of mp3s from the web. Some sound like they were converted from someone's warbly eight-track tape and other sound pretty darn good (at 192 kbs and upwards). There have been times when I've experimented burning a cd of mp3s I've downloaded (high quality ones), which were consequently coverted back into aiff files (I'm on a Macintosh). Has anyone noticed that there seems to be no going back from the mp3 format? The burned cds seem to sound a lot worse than the original mp3s. As The Who would say, "Is it in my head?", or have others noticed the same?

 

[ff123]

Quote:

Has anyone noticed that there seems to be no going back from the mp3 format? The burned cds seem to sound a lot worse than the original mp3s.

This could be just the difference between audio coming from your soundcard vs. audio coming from your CD player.

If you have a decent mp3 to WAV decoder, the WAV (and by implication, the WAV burned to CD) should sound just like the mp3.

ff123

 

[MacDEF]

Quote:

Has anyone noticed that there seems to be no going back from the mp3 format? The burned cds seem to sound a lot worse than the original mp3s.

MP3 encoders are "lossy" -- they actually throw out part of the music to get smaller files sizes. When you covert them to AIFF you still have the same amount of post-loss data. There's no way to recover it.

 

[thomas]

First of all, i don't know anything about AIFF files- is it uncompressed, and what your computer uses for normal audio playback?


If AIFF is the equivalent of .WAV for PCs, then there definately shouldn't be any quality loss. All the quality loss is done in the encoding stage, the decoding should not add any additional errors. And even if it did, the burned versions still shouldn't sound WORSE than your MP3s... When you play back an MP3, it still has to be decoded back to its native format (.wav in PCs, aiff in macs?) before being sent to the soundcard. So when you burn the CD's, the MP3 should be going through the same decoder, and sound IDENTICAL to what you hear when you play it back..

And in my experience, burned or even MD recorded MP3's ALWAYS sound BETTER than playing back an MP3 on your computer, simply because a cdp or md will have much better audio componants in the signal path...

So you should definately check which decoder you use to convert MP3--> aiff... that is what's destroying your sound

 

[Tim D]

Another possible explanation is that when you burn it on CD, and assuming you use the computer CD-rom to play it back, you might be utilizing the DAC within the CD-rom which is than passed to the sound card...which in essence is a double no no.

Analog output from cheap CD-drives passed to a soundcard within PC's are clearly inferior to just starting with digital playback sent to the soundcard directly.

 

[coolvij]

Tim D has a good point. What software are you using to playback the CDs? On Windows, WMA 7 (8?) playback CDs as WAV files, bypassing a drive's cheap DAC.....

 

[chadbang]

Sorry Guys, after MacDef's reply, I thought that was the end of the thread. I'm on a mac and using iTunes to convert the mp3s into aiff files (aiff is the mac equivalent of wav. on a pc). I think iTunes has a pretty good mp3 encoder/decoder. It was the same software that was once sold as Soundjam (Apple bought it out). To avoid going through many DAC stages, I download an mp3, convert it in iTunes and then burn it to an external Yamaha cd writer. I'm playing back the cd in my home system, not my computer. I'd like to think my CD player (Sony ES) sounds better than my mac soundcard, but I still swear the original mp3 sounds better than the final product. I don't know. Baffled. Thanks for everyone's thoughts.

 

[MacDEF]

>Sorry Guys, after MacDef's reply, I thought that was the end of the
>thread. I'm on a mac and using iTunes to convert the mp3s into aiff
>files (aiff is the mac equivalent of wav. on a pc). I think iTunes
>has a pretty good mp3 encoder/decoder. It was the same software that
>was once sold as Soundjam (Apple bought it out).

Yes, iTunes is a GREAT decoder; one of the best on any platform.

>To avoid going through many DAC stages, I download an mp3, convert it
>in iTunes and then burn it to an external Yamaha cd writer. I'm
>playing back the cd in my home system, not my computer. I'd like to
>think my CD player (Sony ES) sounds better than my mac soundcard, but
>I still swear the original mp3 sounds better than the final product.
>I don't know. Baffled. Thanks for everyone's thoughts.

My theory -- your CD isn't being burned well. Is the Yamaha CD-R drive a USB burner? If so, you may want to try burning at a slower speed to get fewer errors.

Also, when you play it back through your Mac, depending on which model you have, you might be hearing it through SRS processing, which might make you think it sounds "better" than the CD.