wave vs mp3 in quality

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

i know wave is much bigger than mp3 but is the compressed mp3 worse quality?

[DanU]

That depends on the bitrate you use to encode the music with. For casual listening, I've found 128Kbits/s to be acceptable. In fact, most music mp3s you download from the net is encoded at 128kbits/s.

Critical listeners may demand 256kbits/s, but since I don't have a super-HiFi component stereo system, I don't bother with it. They take up twice as much storage and they don't sound any different on my portable mp3 player.

[Target]

The answer is it depends.... Figure you want a clear-cut yes/no answer, but its not that simple.

MP3's can be encoded from WAV or CDA in different bit rates....and I am pretty sure WAV files can be created in much the same way (varying the selection of bitrate used to do the encoding). So, its a bit like comparing apples to oranges.

There are even differences between the rippers and encoders, so comparing say an MP3 track ripped from one utility to another made with a different utility, could yield different sound qualities.

The output device you use can also make a huge difference. I mean, playing an MP3 through your computer speakers, even if they are good ones, is going to yield a substantially different sound than if you played it through your home stereo with a set of Polk Audio speakers.

The key is whether or not YOUR ears can tell the difference.

This is a bit of a blanket statement, but most MP3's created, if using a bitrate equal to or higher than 128, will sound pretty close to say CD quality. Obviously, the higher the bit rate, the better it will sound when compared to the original. I'm too old, and too hard of hearing from listening to loud music over the years http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif to really be able to tell the difference anymore between say an MP3 recorded at 160 vs 192 or higher.

But I think its safe to say that the compressed MP3, provided its created at a high bit rate, will not sound any different than the same trac in WAV format.

[RayH]

Can you tell the difference if your monitor is running at 24 bit or 36 bit?

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

Thanks for the replies it answered my question. And Rayh no actually i cant tel the difference
I was actually going to post a small topic on it. when i go to settings in the desktop properties i have a choice of three 256 16 and 32 bit color and under that is a little bar with colors.
I can tell when the bar changes from 256 to 16 but when i change from 16 to 32 even when i put why eyeball up real close to the screen i can tell NO difference at all. it might be my piece o **** monitor though.

[club_med]

Does CD quality = MP3 quality ?.

To me CD quality seems so much better, I have tried it again and again, and I always prefer CD quality music, hence I think WAVE is better.

cm.

[radbasa]

The reason there seems to be no difference between 24-bit and 32-bit color is we humans can only see 12 million (if I remember correctly). Saw this once on the discovery channel. 24 bit is already 16.7 million colors. 32 bit is 4295 million.

[MTAtech]

Increasing the bit rate will improve the sound quality. However, according to a friend of mine who's an engineer at Lucent, MP3 is not a 'no loss' compression algorithm. Therefore, there is inevitably loss when converting WAV to MP3 format. One can reduce that loss by increasing the bit rate but there is loss nontheless. Then it comes down to how sensitive ones ears are.

Many audiophiles say that they can hear the difference. On easy listening music I cannot hear the difference. On more challenging music that I am familiar with, I can. This could be an interesting test for an audio magazine.

[RayH]

The analogy I was trying to make with the video comparison, is maybe you can and maybe you can't tell a difference! Your ears have to be the judge!

[Warthog]

If you encode at 128, there WILL definately be a noticable difference (IMO) between that and the real cd. BUT, if you encode higher, say at least 256, there will be no noticable difference (IMOO.

A WAV file will be slightly better, but as I said, there shouldn't be any difference if you encode high enough. After all, you are compressing the sound file.

Warthog

[otheos]

MP3 is a lossy compression. So no MP3 matches the original wav's quallity. Whether you can hear it or not is a subjective matter.

Remember that each encoding/decoding process further degrades quality (hence the bold in original above).

So you take a wav (1.wav), encode it. -> (1.mp3) with loss
decode the 1.mp3 to wav. -> (2.wav) with loss (depends on decoder)
reencode 2.wav to new mp3 -> (2.mp3) with loss

so the mp3 from the firs step (1.mp3) and the mp3 from the last step (2.mp3) will be hugely different! Why? if the input wav for the second mp3 (2.wav) is at best as good as the mp3 before the decoding (1.mp3), then you encode a wav (2.wav) with a lesser quality that the original wav (1.wav). Since the effects of compression are far from linear the quality loss over the the whole process (from 1.wav to 2.mp3) is huge. (it's less with high bit rates, but relatively speaking still huge).

[JacobM5727]

well first off, let me say that i can tell the differenece between 24 and 36 bit color on my monitor. i can tell because when i have a background picture on my desktop, if there is not a higher color setting the colors will not be as smooth as they would be, like there would be distinct color differences... when i ripped songs i encoded then to 192kbps or 320kbps, it is still a large file but not as big as wav, and im starting to be able to tell between 128kbps and wav. there are subtle differences that can be heard


note- i currently cannot rip music because of a cdrom problem and i also have my moniter in 16 bit color with no background image

[This message has been edited by JacobM5727 (edited 06-01-2001).]

[Kuasimodem]

I use the *.wma format for storing music on my 'puter. At 190kb/sec it only uses 65Mb for a full 650Mb CD.

[zskillz]

otheos... I understand what you are saying, but are you positive that you're correct??

becuase I'm not so sure

I know that you lose quality when you move the first wav to mp3, but after that I'm not so sure...

my understanding is that when you compress from wav to mp3 you are cutting out parts of the wav that are (for the most part) undetectable to our ears anyway... so it seems to me that if you expand the mp3 back to the wav, it just returns to a wav of the same sound quality as the mp3... then if you recompress the wav to mp3, since those parts of the wav that are inaudible (to most) were already removed on the first compression, you won't lose any more sound quality...

I thought that this was how it worked...
-Z

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

well let me first say hi to jacob. hi jacob i hope your non-ripping days will soon come to an end. And also when i said that i couldnt tell the difference beetween 16 bit and 32 i meant that there was NO difference between the two. Im telling you i put my eye up to the screen and constantly changed between the two setting and the color bar changed not. maybe my monitors just suks though i wouldn't doubt it. i will try on other monitors though.

[seeker205]

I can tell the difference on 32bit color too. Only on the wallpaper though, sometimes the wallpaper is really grainy and layered looking when there is gradients present. When
You go to 32 bit color the gradients are smooth and the colors flow in to each other like how there supposed to look.

[otheos]

zskillz, yes I am positive.
The quality degrades with every step.
when you recompress the second wav (the decoded mp3), the algorithm will not just repackage it to the mp3 it came from. It will go and compress by futher reducing the quality as it did in the first place.

Think of it's analogy in the video mpeg compression where it's visibly different.
It is the way the codec is designed.

[JScottieC]

Okay... I'm no expert, but this is what I have heard. Music digitaly recorded onto a CD contains the full spectrum of sound acrossed most all ranges - including those inaudible to the human ear. Mpeg 1 Layer 3 (mp3)simply put, hacks off the parts of the sound that we can't hear (your dog could tell the difference) and algorithmicaly compresses the rest. Therefore it will never match the original CD quality sound. A wav file, likewise is the least compressed digital audio format - containing almost everything from the original sound, limited by only the recording equipment used. Personaly, I can't tell difference between high quality mp3 file (>160kbps) and CD or a WAV. I'd also rather listen to a good song ripped in 56kbps than a CD of trash: for me a question of quality of content and that of quality of medium. Oh well, my .02.

Also, I think the difference between 16 and 32 bit color becomes most apparent when with moving video and high resolution photos. Other than that, I don't need above 16 bit for day to day use - anything above is just a drain on system resources.
Scottie

[OuTpaTienT]

otheos is most definitely correct. Everytime you manipulate a song by converting a MP3 to WAV and back to MP3 you're going to introduce more quantization errors. So if you download MP3s your best to leave them as is and don't try to change their bitrate.

btw:
CD audio is 1,411.2 kbps

when converted to WAV the uncompressed wav file will also be 1,411.2 kbps

the very highest quality MP3s are only 320kbps

http://www.netropa.com/lincomatic/mp3/mp3quality.html

[flakgordon]

which is better quality BMP or JPG? Well, gee, JPG "throws away information" to make the file smaller.

[club_med]

sometimes an error happens and a jpg image is saved as bmp (in ie), the bmp image looks terrible, how come ?.

don't bmp's hold more information usualy ?.

cm.

[RayH]

A woman might be able to notice the difference more as women are able to hear higher cycles than men.

How much difference you're going to hear depends upon your ears and your equipment.

I'm an oldtimer. It took me a long time to enjoy CD audio, although technically it produced magnificent sounds. Some of my favorite music is on the scratchiest vinyls. Each scratch reminds me of a good time in my younger days.

Over the years, I've come to realize that with vinyl recordings, new groups didn't have the finances or backing to produce high quality albums. Their early recordings would be rough. Very rough. As they became more established, the recording companies gave them better support and their sounds became more refined. Maturity as it were.

Music is what YOU make of it!

[OuTpaTienT]

(¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.->BumP<-.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯)

I'm bored, so I'm on a bumping spree of old post with good info to share.