Music Reproduction Quality (warning - geeky!)

[chrisj1948]

A few years ago I started switching over from album/CD to mp3 for my music collection; primarily to enable use of a portable player. At first I just ripped using the Windows Media Player default (128 kbps), and that was OK when on the move but the mp3's sounded noticeably worse compared to the original CD when played back over my home stereo [1]. I switched to ripping at 192 kbps, the rate which corresponds to good quality DAB radio. I was happy for a while with this.

Unfortunately I then acquired a colleague who was an extreme audiophile, the sort who has monocrystalline silver speaker cables! I held out against his worst excesses for a while, but he did eventually convince me that even with my age-degraded hearing there was an audible difference between lossy (mp3) formats and lossless ones (original CD or FLAC files). I began an investigation into what worked best for me. The 'contenders' were:

MP3 at 192 kbps
MP3 at 320 kbps
FLAC 16/44.1 (identical to CD quality)
FLAC 24/96 (studio quality)
FLAC 24/192 (more extreme studio quality)

I could normally distinguish MP3 192 as being worse than the others. It sounded 'muddier' and the difference in, say, the sound of cymbals was noticeable. Telling the difference between MP3 320 and the lossless FLAC files was more difficult. For much music there seemed little difference, but orchestral music sounded a little cleaner and more spacious through the home stereo. Not really much in it. Incidentally MP3 files encoded with average bit rate ~245 kbps are widely held to be subjectively indistinguishable from those with a constant bit rate of 320 kbps, but they are seldom available commercially.

I honestly was never able to distinguish between the 3 FLAC formats when sourced from my home mp3 player. When streaming across my rather busy WiFi network the studio quality files also tended to cause bit rate problems which could cause changes in tone (sometimes extreme for 24/192).

So the conclusion was download/convert to FLAC 16/44.1 if possible, but do not be too unhappy if MP3 320 is the best.option you can get.

Regards
Chris

[1] Home stereo system is a 'low-end audiophile' XDUOO3 file player, a Denon DM37 used for the amplifier, and the home-built 40 year old speakers are Kefkit 3's (the speaker set and mounting board used in a Kef Concerto speaker) mounted in damped transmission line enclosures. Streaming supported by a Radiosonics MP401 uPnP renderer.

[Doubles]

Thanks for sharing interesting read¬