The MP3 is officially dead according to its creators.

mp3 was created at a time where broadband internet was rare, and almost exclusive to universities and the government. Now, the majority of the country has broadband.

 

[QUOTE="anorak2, post: 19078230, member: 73776"320 kBit is probably undetectable for almost everyone.[/QUOTE]
You can't speak "for everyone"... it's definetely detectable for me, and I don't have golden ears, and I'm sure for many people on this forum.

 

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Mp3s are dead. CDs are dead. Downloads are dead. Physical media is dead. Vinyl was dead. Anything that is proclaimed to be dead, seems to be very much alive.

 

If the technology continues to be used and modified to their own preferences by the public in general...does this mean, we can then declare the creators themselves, "officially dead"?

 

mp3<flac<wav

any questions?

 

mp3 < (flac == wav)

 

That's what I remember as well. MP3 took off first with the media players. I remember that the first time I heard about MP3 was when the Diamond RIO PMP300 was launched in 1998. Then came Napster but they started a year later. That was about 5-7 year after MP3 format was released IIRC.

Sometime it's hard to remember how history compressed itself during the last 20-30 years and how fast technology developed and became integrated into our day to day life.

 

Seriously.

If I can’t play FLAC w all the $ I’ve spent, I’ll welcome death.

 

Just fired up my Minidisc recorder to make a few disks in sympathy with all the 'dead' media

 

or WAV>FLAC>MP3(Lame), all at their highest bit rates

better?

for testing purposes. u tell me.
TESTING

btw, I'm using a PC audio out, fed to a Yamaha RX-A2040 with a pair of Salk SingTowers with a SVS SB-2000 sub in "Straight" mode. this what my ears keep telling my head.

 

This......

 

i guess we'll agree to disagree

 

If you're hearing a difference between FLAC and WAV then the most likely explanation is that something in your playback chain is treating and processing FLAC differently than WAV. Could be a configuration problem in your software.

 

I remember back when MP3's starting being popular, people claiming 128kps MP3 was CD quality!

 

don't think so. i'm using dBAmp to rip all three formats at the highest kbps in their respective formats from the CD. must be a placebo effect with me. don't get me wrong the gradations of improvement are minuscule but they're there nonetheless for me.

 

Spotify through Chromcast Audio is something like 320 OGG transcoded to 256 AAC. It sounds horrible, so not really the best for comparing lossy to lossless streaming. Spotify over Airplay sounds much better.

 

Neither were cassettes, but advances in technology improved the format over time.

MP3's obviously are still not "audiophile" grade, but at high bitrates it's very much acceptable for music playback enjoyment. At least for myself.

 

By connecting the Chromecast to the internal DAC of the Halo with a toslink cable I thought was bypassing the Chromecast converter and sending the pure 320 OGG digital (or the Tidal lossless) directly to the Halo's DAC. Am I wrong then?

 

No, the Halo can't decode OGG, and neither can Chromecast Audio. That's why it has to be transcoded to AAC.

 

Sorry but that's not quite true. Both MP2 and MP3 (actually: MPEG1 audio layer II, and MPEG1 audio layer III,respectively) were originally intended for "broadcast quality", either as audio accompanying a video stream, or audio only (mostly radio, or for professional use over dialup lines such as ISDN). The difference is, MP3 was developed years after MP2 - which was already around in the 1980s -, and it achieves the same audio quality at lower bitrates, but at higher computational costs. So it's not true to say that MP3 is lower quality.

I think it's mostly due to the fact that DVD and the early digital television formats were standardised in the 1990s. MP3 existed then, but you needed a faster / more expensive CPU to decode it. That's not an issue today, but it was then. They wanted their DVD players and set top boxes to be made cheaply, so they went for the less demanding codec. More recent video standards do use MP3 or even more advanced codecs.

 

Heh, you were late MP3 files have been exchanged on the internet since about the mid-1990s, most of it was pirated music. There were no dedicated boxes at the time, you would play them on your PC - Intel 486 or faster - through a soundcard, whose output you might connect to your stereo. My AMD386DX40 was too slow to decode MP3s in real time, so I didn't take part in all that then, but I do remember seeing files being exchanged on irc and people discussing about it.

 

No, FLAC and WAV are equal. Neither > nor < belong between them.

 

MP3 was intended for Internet streaming and MP2 was intended for digital broadcasting via over-the-air or cable transmission. I've been following radio and TV broadcasting technology since the 1990s and I've never heard of MP3 being used in any professional broadcasting applications other than Internet streaming (and even that has largely been replaced by AAC-HC these days) and briefly in the late '90s/early 2000s when advertising clients would send in radio commericals by e-mailing an MP3 file to the station. You may recall this era when many radio commercials had really bad MP3 compression artifacts but the radio stations didn't care as long as they were getting paid to play them!

For professional applications MP2 is favored over MP3 because of its higher tolerance for transmission errors (so you don't get those annoying "chirps" we've all heard from corrupted MP3 files), lower latency, higher tolerance for transcoding, lower processing overheard for encoding/decoding, higher bitrates available (up to 384 kbps, whereas MP3 originally topped out at 256 kbps and then was later extended to 320 kbps), and its compression artifacts are less noticeable and annoying than MP3's, especially when played through the dynamic range compression and multi-band equalization that radio stations use in their audio processing.

And don't forget MP1 (MPEG-1 Layer I), which was used on the ill-fated Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), and to my ears can sound surprisingly good -- I like it better than the ATRAC compression that Sony used on MiniDisc, which always sounded cold and metallic to me.

 

dBpoweramp is a good ripper. But also complex and has a lot of features. It's easy to add DSP processes and other processes that change the sound of the ripped files. dBpoweramp will report a perfect rip, then go and alter the files to make them unperfect. So be careful when using it. Doublecheck your settings and configuration to make sure it isn't doing anything that will alter the audio content of the rips or conversions.

If I was hearing that WAV sounds slightly different than FLAC on my setup I'd be looking very carefully at my setup to figure out what is wrong that might cause WAV to sound different than FLAC.

I'm able to hear a difference between CD and high-res, mp3 and lossless, different resampling methods, different digital filters (like minimum phase vs linear phase). I don't hear a difference between WAV and FLAC.