Adveser Messages: 434 Registered: July 2009 Location: USA
Illuminati (1st Degree)
CD's are not obsolete.
CD's are required to make FLAC files.
MP3 just doesn't sound good to me anymore. The compression is always there, even when you think it's being modeled accurately, it isn't. Basically an album has to be pretty flat at 20-22Khz and you have to manually turn filtering off on an MP3 encoder to keep the very top end. The thing is that it compresses when the level gets low enough and not when it isn't present, if that makes sense. So a light guitar piece will see half it's signal disappear until something loud like a crash symbol forces the algorithm to allow up to 22Khz. WAV files don't do that. The guitar would be there in full force from the beginning. Imagine if in the studio they used crappy noisy mics for everything except the mics on the cymbals. That is the absolute best case scenario for MP3. They don't do that though. They record using all the bandwidth they can even past the limitations of CD and when it gets mixed everything is still there. Going down to an MP3 is like deciding anything that isn't loud as hell should be cut. Not rolled off, but just eliminated. Who knows what is going on in the mids and the really important frequencies. The screenshots of the frequency analyzer are shocking enough.
If you go out and buy a Panasonic DVD Player, then you'll have HDCD which we can't really duplicate all that well on a computer without flat out rerecording the entire album and chopping it up in a wave editor. A LOT of Cd's are HDCD. I was pretty surprised how few of them advertised it when the light came on.