Sound quality

So I'm sitting here, Enuff Z'nuff comming through a pair of speakers either side of me, wondering what to blog about. I decide to play it through the CD player instead of the crappy 192K MP3 that's on the PC (This wasn't my doing, I swear), and then it hits me. The most popular audio format today is MP3. There is no arguing with that. People download albums as MP3s, convert other formats to MP3 (For iPods/MP3 players), even when they go out and actually buy a CD it'll be converted to MP3 and never touched again.

"What? I was not aware of this! Who are these monsters!?" I hear the more knowledgable of you cry, and you are not alone in shedding a tear for these poor, misguided fools. As for anyone else, you may be wondering why this matters in the slightest.

Well, a few numbers you've probably heard thrown around with MP3s are 128, 192 and possibly 320. These are bitrates, which represent the quality of the file. 128kpbs sounds worse than 192, which sounds worse than 320. It basically represents how far the encoder has gone to cut the size of the file using compression techniques and just plain shaving data off. You might think "That's not so bad though!" (at least, most of you will. The audiophiles cry themselves to sleep at the mere mention of MP3.)

CDs are encoded at 1411kbps. That's not a typo, that's over 11 times as much data as a 128K mp3. Of course, the idea of compression is that you aren't losing 1277Kbps of data, just fitting the data into a smaller space. But MP3 is what's called a lossy format, meaning that some data is lost. So how big is the difference?

Compressing it down to a 320K mp3 will just take the edge off it slightly. Instruments will have slightly less punch, the seperation won't be quite as good, but if you don't have decent speakers/headphones to play through and your ears are trained for this sort of thing then you probably won't notice.

Compressing a song down to 192K has the same effect as compressing to 320K, only it's to the point where the average listener may start to notice. Ironically, this is what many services offer as "high quality."

Compressing down to 128K or lower (Often advertised as "Normal quality") is where the real problems start. At this point, the songs don't just lack punch. The quality loss is obvious here. The stereo image is reduced, the song lacks all punch, the frequency range is reduced dramatically, and the highs are so compressed that they sound like someone put a flanger on them. 128K mp3s are actually painful to listen to to me.I would say it's like putting a puppy in a trash compactor, but that'd be wrong. It's like making all of its legs identical, making all of its teeth identical, cutting its ears off, shaving it,  THEN putting it in a trash compactor. (Yes, that's why the audiophiles are quietly rocking back and forth in the corner. They're better people than you.)

"What? That's horrible! Why would anyone do such a terrible thing?" you shout, pitchforks at the ready. Admittedly, iPods and MP3 players don't play CDs. Surely people could still use 320K MP3s instead of 192/128? Wrong! Keeping file sizes down is important, how else are you going to fit a reasonable amount of music on your 128MB MP3 player?

...what's that? None of you have 128MB MP3 players? In that case, I don't know why anyone uses these formats either.

I'm going to go get some CDs now. Bye!

Can't sleep.

Again. This is the third night in a row. Or the fourth. I'm not sure.

Why?
It's fucking WARM! Why is it warm? In a country thats gloomy weather is only rivaled by its gloomy residents, we're having a summer or somethng! Yes, I just craeated a blog to tell my millions of followers (Thats what happens when you maake a blog, right? You get millions of followers? Or is that twitter?) that it's warm.

Well, not entirely. More I need something to do until I pass out. I figured setting up a blog would be nice and time consming,, but nuuuuuuuu, they go and make it nice and easy! Bloody google... >.>

So now I'm writing a blog entry. Depending on how the night goes, it could be a loooooooong entry. Long and rambling. Ah well, set the bar nice and high for the rest of it! :D

Except fuckit, there's nothing to say. Maybe tomorrow I'll post a long, well thought out entry about a subject that matters slightly to someone. Tomorrow when I'm not tired. I'm going to try sleeping again now.

Goodnight (hopefully)