[MacDEF]

I'm not bashing MP3 here at all -- just clearing up some misconceptions...

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It's my guess that someone with a stance against MP3 might not keep up with the latest improvements in encoding.

That would be a bad guess

There are some of us who check out the "latest improvements" to see if there is something better out there. LOL, on this board, I think such an approach to audio is a common sickness

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If I'm using MP3 compressed audio, I can fit four more times the amount of audio onto a single CD for a slight quality hit. Plus, for me, it's well worth it to pack a ton of music onto a few CDs than to carry a foot high stack of MDs. Saves space and money and having to swap discs. For this convenience, the change in sound quality is a non-issue.

I think "4x more for a slight quality hit" is a bit off -- it's a very big quality hit

But on that note, do you realize that you can also do this with MD? 160 minutes on a single MD for sound comparable to good 256k MP3? Or 320 minutes on a single MD for sound comparable to 96k or 128k MP3? Plus MDs are smaller than CDs, just a bit thicker. The comparisons here aren't perfectly compatible; I'm just pointing out that you can also compress more music onto MD and it's just as easy to be "portable." For example, I have a case that measures .75" x 2.75 x 2.75. That MD case holds 10 MDs. It can hold 800 minutes of audio with better quality than any MP3, 1600 minutes of audio comparable to 256k MP3, or 3200 minutes of audio comparable to 128 or 96k MP3. That's 13, 27, or 38 hours of music in 5.7 cu. in. A "wetsuit" case of 10 CDs (the smallest 10 CD case you can get) measures 5.75" in diameter and is 1" thick = approximately 18 cu. in. So 10CDs worth of MP3s are 3 times the size of 10MDs worth of music. The whole "stack of MDs" thing that people throw around is a bit off, I think

I've said many times that the big advantages MP3 has over MD is transfer speed. It's not really *as* big of a difference as people say, since they never factor in *all* the time factors (the time it takes to download MP3s or rip new MP3s off of CDs, the the time it takes to transfer them to the player or to burn them to a CD, etc., which you usually do quite often, vs. MD where you basically copy once and leave it), but it's still a big advantage. I also think MP3 has the debatable advantage of being able to store compressed music on a hard drive. (I call this a "debatable" argument because some people argue that this isn't really an advantage but rather a requirement because except for CD-based MP3, storage is so expensive.) But those are, IMO, the biggest advantages of MP3 over MD. As several people have said, different strokes for different folks. I just don't like to see unfair, or incorrect, comparisons being made.

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MP3 CD players aren't advertised for sound

They aren't? If I hear one more person call MP3 "CD-quality sound"...

 

[Neruda]

I wonder if the average portable MD actually has the electronics that make the better sound quality noticable at all...