Think MP3s suck? You may just be listening wrong!

I know you keep saying that and maybe you are right, but I keep reading claims of people that have owned tables similar to the few I owned AND lesser claiming some big change in sound from CD to vinyl and honestly I just never heard that.

I realize FULLY what you are saying about a top notch table (( which I have yet to hear )) being better etc, but even within the realm of run of the mill mid priced or okay stuff, I see many talking about some big advantage in sound quality, and frankly I just do not get that.

Forget for a minute the higher end stuff, and tell me why many that had, even stuff similar to my last few tables find some big change?

I had an OM-30 on my last table I sold off, the Pioneer PL-500.

 

CD's are still sampled audio. Ultra high resolution digital files come close to vinyl.
I have both a Lexus ES and a Camry XLE V-6. Though built on the same basic platform, they are nothing alike when you drive them.
I have never once heard any cd player at any price sound better than vinyl. Trust me your giving up a LOT listening to MP-3's. Highest bit rate MP-3's are what, 320? Cd's (redbook) have a 1400 range bit rate. 1411 to 320 is a huge amount of compression. Vinyl is constant waveform. No samples. Sorry if your ears aren't trained enough to hear that. Mine hear it quite easily. I have tons of CD's. Many (most?) are heavily compressed to make them as loud as they can possibly be (probably to compensate for the **** stereo's they get played on). Some could argue that most CD's suck (and be correct). Suck the life right out of the music. I have a unique perspective as I can hear my own recordings off the multi-track source played through a world class system. These are 24/96 digital files. I can hear what digital recording does to the sound of my Martin guitar. I've owned it for 25 years, play it almost every day and am intimately familiar with it's sound. As much as I love the ease of editing with digital recording, I much prefer the sound of old analog multi-track units. I see generation after generation water down everything musical. We used to have great songs. Then it became great guitar licks. Then disco. Then hip hop. Now, "artists" rarely even write their own music (they sample others stuff and talk over the top). We used to have high end vinyl playback (Goldman, Micro Seiki, Linn, etc. Now we have USB things they call turntables. USB was never designed for audio. We used to have low negative feedback, high current amplifiers with dual power supplies, massive filter caps and great sound. Now we have "home theater in a box brought to you by Best Buy or WalMart". We used to listen to well recorded, well engineered, well mastered musical art. Now we have MP-3's played via phones by engineers with the mind set of "We can fix that in the mix". And the thing that always busts my gut is the younger generation says, almost without fail, "Ours is better". Not even close. I wish you could hear MFSL vinyl on my stereo. I just had dinner with a friend last week who does pro sound for Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris and many others. He was blown away by the sound he heard in my living room. Go ahead and like MP-3's. Love em even. Just don't expect me to. Won't ever happen.

 

OM-30 was likely a bad choice for that tone arm. Ortofons are high dynamic compliance carts. That arm needs a Shure or similar.

 

I also had a V-15 ( from the 1990's) on it, and yes the ortofon was not a perfect match, it did have some issues with very low frequencies, on warps etc. The ortofon to me sounded "better"or more listenable than the shure. I know the shure was more neutral and balanced though.

 

I see the level of quality of gear in the profiles tends to be of higher quality than what you regard as run of the mill. More to the point, many on this forum have turntable gear that I know is better than what I have heard so far. Trust me, I'd like to hear it. But and still, what you say here for the most part doesn't apply to the group on this forum. There's more than enough regular posters at this forum who have really good turntable set-ups.

In any case, in my experience the distance in quality between good LP reproduction and Good CD reproduction is greater than the distance between CD and good MP3.

 

Your talking about the good old days like there weren't any bad systems or bad recordings. Lets take the points one at a time.

"Highest bit rate MP-3's are what, 320? Cd's (redbook) have a 1400 range bit rate. 1411 to 320 is a huge amount of compression" FLAC and ALAC (Apple Lossless) are lossless file types that have a considerably smaller bitrate in comparison to a WAV file. Are you telling me you can hear a difference between those and a CD even though FLAC and ALAC are lossless? Also, there is a lot of compression on every picture you look at whether on TV or a digital still picture from a camera or a scanned old photo. You can scan an old 35mm photo and save it uncompressed. Can you tell me you can see a difference between an uncompressed image (bitmap or raw) and a jpeg? The jpeg is very compressed but yet I have almost perfect vision and I can't tell a difference. My point, just because something is compressed doesn't mean it isn't as good or that it sucks.

"Vinyl is constant waveform. No samples. Sorry if your ears aren't trained enough to hear that. Mine hear it quite easily" This point really has nothing to do with the discussion we are having here but your statement is somewhat flawed since by the time your ears hear what is on a CD it is a constant waveform and as long as you have a good quality DAC it has the possibility to sound great. The argument you can make however is that there is more information on a record than on a CD. But IMHO once you start getting to a high quality 24/96 or 24/192 digital file it is very hard to distinguish between the original record and a digital recording of the same record.

"We used to have great songs. Then it became great guitar licks. Then disco. Then hip hop. Now, "artists" rarely even write their own music (they sample others stuff and talk over the top)" The is a large percentage of popular acts of the 50s and 60s that either didn't write their own music or had people help right the music that they released. Some examples are Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Patsy Cline etc. Things really haven't changed that much on this front only the style of the music and the way its recorded and produced. There are still great songs written by great artists. I would argue that the percentage of artists that write their own music is very similar today as it was back then.

"We used to have high end vinyl playback (Goldman, Micro Seiki, Linn, etc. Now we have USB things they call turntables. USB was never designed for audio. We used to have low negative feedback, high current amplifiers with dual power supplies, massive filter caps and great sound. Now we have "home theater in a box brought to you by Best Buy or WalMart" Are you forgetting the console style stereo systems that used to exist or more importantly those little all in one record players that you could stack several records on to have a couple of hours of continuos music or 8-track and cassette players? We still have great manufacturers of high quality sound equipment. Linn is still in business and making great stuff, you have McIntosh, Wilson Audio, ClearAudio, VPI, Krell, Martin Logan etc.

"We used to listen to well recorded, well engineered, well mastered musical art. Now we have MP-3's played via phones by engineers with the mind set of "We can fix that in the mix". And the thing that always busts my gut is the younger generation says, almost without fail, "Ours is better". Not even close. I wish you could hear MFSL vinyl on my stereo" There are plenty of great engineers and audiophile record labels out there that are still making well recorded, well engineered, well mastered musical art. One example is Chesky records but there are many others out there. There was plenty of poorly recorded, poorly engineered and poorly mastered music back then also.

"Go ahead and like MP-3's. Love em even. Just don't expect me to. Won't ever happen" I am not asking you to love them. I am asking you to try them again with a newer DAC ripped with the latest encoders and then tell me they aren't incredibly close to the CD they were ripped from or even sound the same. Of course they aren't going to sound like vinyl, but they sound a whole lot better than what we had in the old days for portable music (AM/FM radio, cassettes and 8-Tracks).

In other words they don't suck!!! Which is the whole point of this post I started.

 

MP-3 does not suck. The best sounds quite good.

Really in comparison to what we listened to in the 60's 70' and 80's even, cassette, 8 track, cheapo record players etc, honestly a decent MP-3 sounds better in all regards.

If you are comparing to the absolute best sound carriers, sure it is not as good, but it was not designed to BE as good.

 

The other day I unwittingly conducted a blind experiment with mp3 vs lossless. Usually I have itunes set to rip in lossless, but a couple of weeks before I had ripped some files for my wife in mp3 format and had not changed the setting back. Upon re-ripping a CD I was already familiar with I sat back and marveled at how clear and detailed it sounded only to be shocked a couple of days later when I noticed it had been ripped in 256 VBR and not lossless. It proved to be a turning point for me and I am now converting my whole collection to mp3 so I can have it all on one ipod (hopefully). There is just not enough of a difference to get your knickers in a twist about! I still found myself enjoying the music to the same degree as when I was listening to CDs or LPs before that. And at the end of the day that is all that counts.
Actually, I would say enjoying music has become easier since I switched to digital because clicks and pops, cleaning records, upgrading stylises etc ... always seems to interfere with the enjoyment of the music.

 

320 is OK...I usually go FLAC when I can.

 

MP3s don't suck.

Argument won!

Your ears must not be trained that well at all, otherwise they would be able to tell that we don't listen to samples, we listen to the output of a DAC, which is a constant waveform. Not only is the output a constant waveform, but digital sampling can perfectly reconstruct a waveform (not just a sine wave) given the constraints of noise floor (bit depth) and bandwidth (sampling rate).

And simply spitting out numbers is irrelevant, because they don't explain how the audio is encoded. Lossless formats like FLAC reduce file size (generally) around 50%, but that doesn't mean that 50% of the data is gone. *None* of the data is gone, it's just stored in a compressed form.

By the same token, try comparing a 320kbps MP3 to an 8-bit, 22.05kHz WAV. The WAV will actually have a slightly higher bitrate, but I think you'd be very hard pressed to find somebody that felt the WAV sounded better.

Simply comparing numbers and saying "huge amount of compression" is meaningless.

 

So you use MP3s on your phone but you have no idea why anyone would want a bunch of them on a phone for listening?

 

I know you're right, but I think that sucks. It's one thing to have preferences, which we all have, but it's another thing to lazily insult another person's preference just to boost one's own preference.

But, in the imaginary land where surface noise, pops and crackles, inner groove distortion, and rolled off high frequencies aren't issues, but digital artifacts "suck the life out of music," I shouldn't be surprised.

I'm certainly never surprised when it turns into an attack on the other person's gear. That's pretty much the standard playbook for these conversations.

 

Personally I believe the interpretation, of what´s engraved on the record, with TT/arm/ pickup differs much, much more than the difference between this interpretation and an mp3 file of the same. To distinguish an mp3 file from the original file is rather difficult, while distinguishing the differences in sound played on different TTs with different arms and pickups is very easy, using the same record. The thoughts that we normally can come close to the recording with LP playback don´t hold so much water IME, there is a lot of sounds that are not on the recording that we will hear, and also the opposite, a lot that we don´t hear.

 

I understand the utility of MP3s, but that doesn't mean they don't suck. I have no illusions about the sound quality.

 

Wouldn´t it be much better to explain or show the differences, just a thought. Suck is something else, I think.

 

By way of example, even low-data rate MP3 is better than the bulk of commercial cassette issues. As a portable sound medium, MP3 is a triumph.

 

I have a brother who jumped onto the MP3 craze very early on. Around 2002 or so he had already ripped his massive cd library (600+ titles as a rough guess) onto cdr in whatever was the common bit rate back then (128?). He was really pleased when he showed me his collection of cdr on a tiny shelf, and he had traded in all of his originals! I asked him recently if he wished he had hung onto the originals so that he could upgrade the bit rate or even go to lossless and he just sort of shrugged his shoulders and said the files were good enough for his listening. For kicks I gave a listen to a couple of his tracks and they were horrible sounding and reminded me of why I was so "anti-ipod" for most of decade.

There is a much larger delta to my ears between 320kbps AAC and 128kbps MP3 than there is between 320kbps and a cd - I guess what I'm trying to say is that 320 AAC is more like a Honda Civic to me!

 

The item described in the article is not for portable use. I don't dispute the utility of MP3 for portable use, just don't try to tell me they don't suck. It's a compromise. I am also amused by those who spend 300-400 bucks on a pair of headphones for portable use, to listen to MP3s.

 

You can repeat "they suck" ad infinitum, but simply saying that over and over won't magically make it so.

They don't suck.

 

What about AAC's, or is that on your "amused" list, too? Because I own a pair of HD-600's and I use my Cowon D3 + headphone amp + those to listen to...yes you guessed it, 320kps 48khz AAC's.

And the reason why I do that is because I've done internal tests where I've listening to lossless and to WAV and to these, and I cannot hear a difference. So on a fairly small flash-based device, I use high-bitrate lossy. I even use an intermediate 32-floating CAF file to transcode to AAC for my needledrops.

Someone else wrote earlier, on the flip side, "don't tell me what I'm hearing". I'd ask the same thing here. Trust that at least a few of us actually have done ABX tests before we decided to use lossy with our equipment. We're using our ears to guide us.

 

I think FLAC is more the triumph. MP3 was a necessary compromise while we waited for drive sizes to increase.

But really we agree, because certainly you are right - I would have LOVED an ipod with MP3s on it when I had my Sony cassette walkman in high school.

The only time I use MP3 now is when I want to email my girlfriend a track and the FLAC is over the 25MB attachment limit. Yes, I know I could use dropbox or whatever, but I can't be bothered and it becomes a bandwidth issue anyway because I'm frequently on satellite networks with very restricted bandwidth.

I've got an old rockboxed ipod with the Red Wine Audio imod, and it has an 80GB drive in it. I mostly use it on planes, where I am using the noise-cancellation of my headphones, anyway.

I guess it's a trade-off only being able to fit 180 full resolution FLAC albums on it. But to me, that's a lot of albums for the odd plane trip, etc.

It's just my opinion, but I think too much portability can also be a misstep for us as music lovers. I don't think music should be played all the time. I think it helps my music appreciation to involve myself in the sounds of my non-musical environment when I'm away from the stereo. When I take a walk, I listen to nature or street sounds, and am available to the people around me. It's a good priority. And it cleanses the musical palette.

I think a big part of the reason that music has become such a background event is that it is now being played for so many more hours of the day that it has become less special when it is heard. Chocolate ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner sort of stuff. Too much of a good thing. It's desensitizing.

The main argument for MP3s seems to be to have as much music available as possible with you in places where you used to not be able to have it. But is listening in those environments really serving your music appreciation as much as waiting until you got to a nice quiet space with a good system would? It's debatable, I think, but a point worth considering.

For sure, a listening quality comparison between an MP3 played at home on a big system (which I would never do, but for purposes of illustration) and a FLAC played on a noisy subway or even competing against the movement of your own body while you are walking, would be clear. These environments are certainly more deleterious to the experience than the loss from FLAC to MP3.

But I would say that for me FLAC makes sense for portability anyway, because storage space is ever-expanding, and the size of full quality CD resolution FLACs is constant. I'll have my whole collection in the palm of my hand someday. Until then the only compromise is I can only carry 180 albums at a time (what could we carry before, 10 cassettes in a backpack case?), once in a while, when I'm going to be away from music for longer than a few days or something.

In the end, if the only consequence of using full-resolution FLAC files is that I can't have everything, all the time, then I think that actually jives with what I think is the ideal level and place of music consumption/appreciation in my life anyway.

Everyone is different, so MP3s are certainly right for many of you.

ccm

 

This statement:

"I don't think music should be played all the time".

I couldn't disagree with you more. To use your ice cream analogy...yes, it's like food for me. But it's not ice cream all day long, it's oatmeal then some pancakes then a sandwich then steak then fish then...you get the idea. I'm not playing the same album over and over again.

I play music while working, while reading this forum, basically whenever I can squeeze it in. Occasionally I'll take a day off if I need it but essentially I just go with the flow and I need my music. It's food for my soul.

 

It's all about how MP3s are encoded, what you listen to them on, and your ears.

If you have a 128kps MP3, and listen to it on a high end (hell, any) system, you will think MP3s suck.
If you listen to a 320kps on that same high end system, it will sound much better than the 128k version, but you will still hear differences from the vinyl or cd. Take that 320kps file and listen to it on an average system, and you probably wont hear the difference between it and the CD, unless your ears are trained to know what to listen for.

I am an average joe schmoe, with average to crappy equipment. MP3s need to be 160kps at the very least for me. I can sometimes hear the difference between MP3s ripped on iTunes at 160k and ones ripped with LAME at the same rate. The cymbals start sounding jingly and ringing (for lack of a better description) on low bit rate MP3s. Anything ripped at 192 and above, I usually cannot tell the difference between rates, and they sound good to me. I don't have the best equipment, though.

Personally, I don't use MP3 anymore, unless I'm ripping something for my daughter. I have an old Sansa Fuze that's Rockboxed, and an Android phone. My wife has an Android phone too. So I can rip everything to ogg-vorbis. I can hear a difference between ogg and MP3 at about the same bit-rate, when I play them back to back. I think the oggs sound fuller. I can only tell when listening to the same thing back to back though. If a random file is playing, I can't tell you what format or bit rate it's in. Unless it's a jangly, low bit-rate MP3.

With my ears and equipment, I cannot really hear much of a difference between MP3s and lossless. Yes, the lossless sounds a little better through my computer speakers, but not enough to make a big difference to me in the environments I listen to my portable player in. I want the space savings.

 

Sure, not all music is ice cream, but I don't eat all day long either, even if it's healthy food.