2395 MP3 (and CD's)
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 17:17:22 -0700
From: Ricardo Tanturi <tanturi999@YAHOO.COM>
Subject: Re: MP3 (and CD's)
--- Tanguero Chino <tanguerochino@NETSCAPE.NET> wrote:
> I have bought many CDs because I've enjoyed the sample musics of an
> artist. I've even bought a CD after having downloaded the entire CD
> in high quality MP3 files legitimately. I want to support these
> artists for the selfish reason that I want more choices in tango
> music.
>
For what is't worth, I just want to mention another good reason to buy
CD's - the sound quality is noticebly better than even "high-quality"
MP3's (at least on a reasonably good sound system. Not so much that
if you hear an MP3 you could recognize it a such, but enough that
you can hear the difference if you compare them.
Someone on this list, I think Stephen Brown, mentioned this, and it
surprised me - I'd always thought there was no appreciable difference.
But I did some experiments and found that it was true - the CD sound
IS better than MP3.
"Ricardo"
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:01:41 -0400
From: Ben Bogart <ben@BENBOGART.COM>
Subject: Re: MP3 (and CD's)
If you are ripping your own cds (for storage and ease of DJing -- please
buy music so I can continue to hear new stuff) there are other, much better
compression methods than mp3. .ape (https://www.monkeysaudio.com/) and
.flac (https://flac.sourceforge.net/). There are a handfull of stores, none
with tango yet, that are distributing in flac format.
The high audio compression applied to mp3's through encoding makes the
songs feel and sound flat. It takes some of their life away. While most
dancers cannot tell you if they are hearing mp3's or uncompressed audio,
they can feel it. In my DJing I have found that playing uncompressed (or
lossless) I will get numerous comments on how great the music is. If I play
compressed (mp3) music I have to work much harder to keep peoples
attention. With mp3's I find people have to struggle to stay with the music.
Ben
At 03:00 AM 4/16/2004, you wrote:
>Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 17:17:22 -0700
>From: Ricardo Tanturi <tanturi999@YAHOO.COM>
>Subject: Re: MP3 (and CD's)
>
>--- Tanguero Chino <tanguerochino@NETSCAPE.NET> wrote:
> > I have bought many CDs because I've enjoyed the sample musics of an
> > artist. I've even bought a CD after having downloaded the entire CD
> > in high quality MP3 files legitimately. I want to support these
> > artists for the selfish reason that I want more choices in tango
> > music.
> >
>
>For what is't worth, I just want to mention another good reason to buy
>CD's - the sound quality is noticebly better than even "high-quality"
>MP3's (at least on a reasonably good sound system. Not so much that
>if you hear an MP3 you could recognize it a such, but enough that
>you can hear the difference if you compare them.
>
>Someone on this list, I think Stephen Brown, mentioned this, and it
>surprised me - I'd always thought there was no appreciable difference.
>But I did some experiments and found that it was true - the CD sound
>IS better than MP3.
>
>"Ricardo"
Ben Bogart
Saxes
(617) 407-6747
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:21:58 -0400
From: white95r <white95r@HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: MP3 (and CD's)
----- Original Message -----
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:36:34 -0400
From: Doug Pouliot <doug@THETANGOCATALOGUE.COM>
Subject: Re: MP3 (and CD's)
Does anyone know the sound quality loss, if any, from analog to digital?
When the music goes from the original recording to CD?
Doug
on 4/16/04 2:21 PM, white95r at white95r@HOTMAIL.COM wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ricardo Tanturi" <tanturi999@YAHOO.COM>
>> For what is't worth, I just want to mention another good reason to buy
>> CD's - the sound quality is noticebly better than even "high-quality"
>> MP3's (at least on a reasonably good sound system. Not so much that
>> if you hear an MP3 you could recognize it a such, but enough that
>> you can hear the difference if you compare them.
>>
>> Someone on this list, I think Stephen Brown, mentioned this, and it
>> surprised me - I'd always thought there was no appreciable difference.
>> But I did some experiments and found that it was true - the CD sound
>> IS better than MP3.
>>
>> "Ricardo"
>
> This is definitely true. I tried DJing from MP3s and had some horrible
> results when I used low quality (high compression) MP3s. So I re-recorded a
> ton of my CDs into the computer using the high quality compression (greater
> the 128). Although I got better results, there are times when the quality of
> the music is markedly inferior to the CDs they were ripped from. I thought
> that the problem was with the hardware so I purchased an expensive sound
> card and this helped but still the quality of MP3s can be very inferior to
> the original CDs. I'm a very picky DJ in both the quality of the sound as
> well as the quality of the music itself (gotta have those great danceable
> tangos). I will use my laptop and MP3s for DJing milongas but I still take
> my CDs and a good quality player for back up in case my MP3s sound bad.
>
> Good quality music to all,
>
> Manuel
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:48:47 -0700
From: Kos.Zahariev@EC.GC.CA
Subject: Re: MP3 (and CD's)
>
>If you are ripping your own cds (for storage and ease of DJing -- please
>buy music so I can continue to hear new stuff) there are other, much better
>compression methods than mp3. .ape (https://www.monkeysaudio.com/) and
>.flac (https://flac.sourceforge.net/). There are a handfull of stores, none
>with tango yet, that are distributing in flac format.
>
>The high audio compression applied to mp3's through encoding makes the
>songs feel and sound flat. It takes some of their life away. While most
>dancers cannot tell you if they are hearing mp3's or uncompressed audio,
>they can feel it. In my DJing I have found that playing uncompressed (or
>lossless) I will get numerous comments on how great the music is. If I play
>compressed (mp3) music I have to work much harder to keep peoples
>attention. With mp3's I find people have to struggle to stay with the music.
>
>Ben
There is a little bit of confusion above, I think, over the audio formats you
mentioned. The defining differences between formats like mp3 and the ones like
ape is that mp3 is a lossy compression, and ape is a lossless
compression. Both perform compression on the original CD file.
With mp3, you always lose audio information when you compress. When you
decompress in real time to hear the result, you are listening to this
irreversibly altered file that has less audio onformation. How much less
depends on the amount of lossy compression you requested when creating the mp3
file.
With ape, you do not lose any audio information on compression. It is like a
specialized-for-audio zip algorithm that only optimizes the way the data is
stored. When you decompress in real time to hear the ape file, you are
listening to a clone of the original CD audio file, bit-for-bit identical as
if coming from the CD.
A few years ago disk drive space was at premium and mp3 made sense since you
can achieve easily a file size 10% of the original, whereas with ape you can
achieve size between 30-50% of the original (for most tangos it is closer to
30%). Nowadays, though, disk space is cheap and plentiful, so in my mind this
removes the only advantage mp3 compression has had over lossless compression
algorithms like ape.
Konstantin from Victoria, Canada.
