Before 2001 I used to wear a backpack even when it had no books. I
wasnt a backpacker, I just loved to listen to a lot of music. I could never
decide what CDs to take in my Sony walkman CD player so I took as many as
my impulsiveness demanded. Those days are now over and the MP3 has taken the
forefront in our music listening ventures. Usually, when new technology takes
front seat it is because it is significantly better. In this case the better
comes in the form of convenience A small MP3 player could carry our
entire CD collection, much more than a backpack ever could.
The Problem with
convenience is that it often comes at a price. Most times when we are trading
something of good quality for something of poor quality, but when it comes to
sound it was easy for us to be fooled. Sound is by nature an abstract concept
to most and subjective to others. In the excitement of storing as many songs as
our iPods would allow we did even noticed the trade-off. The truth is that MP3s
come with a trade off. If MP3s were cars they would be the Pintos of the lot.
Wavs and AIFFs are the Cadillacs are Mercedes, and you shouldnt settle for
less.
When a file is compressed to an MP3 an algorithm calculates which
are the least important of the frequencies and removes them. This is the simple
way to put it and I have created a file for you to listen to that will help
demonstrate the difference.
(This will work best on headphones)
I have separated the Left and Right of this next song from Nas’
Illmatic album. The left side is an MP3 and the Right side is the Wav. See if
you can tell the difference specially in the shine or highs of the track.
The MP3 sound significantly different when listened to this way. With devices holding much more information now it is very easy to rip your own library to your device using iTunes or Windows Media Player (in lossless format) and load a few albums at a time to your device.
The MP3 sound significantly different when listened to this way. With devices holding much more information now it is very easy to rip your own library to your device using iTunes or Windows Media Player (in lossless format) and load a few albums at a time to your device.
listen/download the audio file here
2 comments:
I concur my friend. I'm a lover of things that sound good. I will prefer a CD over anything else right now but as you state, it is much more convenient and economical to carry an I pod as opposed to a CD player. People would probably look at you weird if you carried a CD walk man today anyway. Good post!
Thank you Rich,Im glad Im not the only one that feels this way. I recommend that people use either VLC on Mac or Windows Media Player to rip their own library of CDs, then transfer those to your device for listening. Unfortunately iPods wont play WAV files. Its a matter of how much effort you are willing to make to listen to quality music.
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