"Sonic performance"

[Honus]

Hello all! I'm new to the forum. My inquiry is regarding a comparison of portable CD and MP3 sonic performance. Most everyone here is using MP3 as apposed to a CD player. As MP3 is a compressed format, I would think CD players would provide better sound. However, I am reminded that CD players have cheesy dacs and also compress if the "anti-skip" feature is employed.

What do you all think? Which is a better performer - MP3 or CD?

I am presently listening to an iriver Slimx.

Thanks!

 

[crazychimp132]

I think that technically, MP3 can never be as good as lossless cd quality. But I think MP3 is much more useful because of the smaller file size, obviously. Also, I can't actually percieve a difference between MP3 and lossless if it's encoded right, so I lose nothing by using MP3.

 

[blessingx]

Welcome to Head-Fi.

Although convience, storage space, P2P sharing and rising prices of classic PCDPs have probably pushed many to the DAP relm, remember 'MP3' players often play other formats including newer lossly codecs like Vorbis and AAC, but also support uncompressed and sometimes lossless files. So the format isn't always the issue. A FLAC on a Karma, a ALAC on an iPod or a WAV/AIFF on many others should at least start out on par with a CD.

There are a least a few here which were at least initially surprised at how well the iPod stood up against classic PCDPs. You may be do a search. And with the Karmas superior EQ and iRivers, Creative, etc. different signitures they have their fans.

 

[Honus]

Thank you all for your responce. blessingx, Do the other formats you mention, "lossly codecs like Vorbis and AAC", take up considerably more space on hard drive players, thus reducing disk space?

Thanks

 

[blessingx]

Well the argument generally goes that AAC and Ogg Vorbis sound the same as MP3 but at ~30% reduction in bitrates/size. This is if all things are equal. They're not. The L.A.M.E. MP3 encoder handles itself quite well (especially with presets) so MP3 still is in the picture (at least with that encoder and at least in the bitrate range you're likely to use for music). There's a few file size comparisons around. You can see an old one I did here. The newer formats have disadvantages (AAC is pretty much just on the iPod, Vorbis usually requires a battery hit) over MP3, but are really worth a try. 256 AAC is my default now and very difficult in most situations/equipment for me to tell from uncompressed). Arguably if you're archiving lossy (always best to be uncompressed or lossless) MP3 is still the way to go (you never know what your future player is going to support), but there are different characteristics of the modeling so people have their favorites (when sacrificing info crisp versus warm for instance, let alone related issues like QT/iTunes AAC encoding speed and Vorbis being open source, etc.).

It's best to run around the HydrogenAudio forums a bit. Very very good information there (including recommended LAME settings).

P.S. And in case you haven't seen before, the lossless support of ALAC (sometimes called AL or ALE) and FLAC generally compresses music ~40% (depends on complexity) with zero information loss. Think like .zip on your computer. There are other lossless formats, but nothing with portable support as far as I know.

 

[BigFil]

Your assumptions about more storage space used with lossless files is correct. Most lossless compression formats on average half the original uncompressed file size, but are still usually 3-5 times the size of lossy compression techniques like MP3 depending on the bit rate of the encode. That being said with 20, 40, 60, and soon to be 80 gig portables you could still tote around quite a collection of alblums even if they were all lossless. The other downside of lossless compression is the hit on battery life.

 

[Shosta]

I know that Mp3 is compressed but from my experience, my philips HDD120 (LAME 320Kbps cbr) has better sound quality (subjetive) than my last Discman (Sony).
It's totally subjetive point of view. (Classical music sound more natural to me).