Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I rarely sit down and just listen to my music collection these days. Most of the time, any music I hear is on the radio, computer or CD player while driving, or working, or generally doing something else. My largest weekly block of music listening time is using an MP3 player during treadmill workouts.

So, it was interesting yesterday evening when I started noticing how bad MP3 encoded tracks sound compared with the original CDs.

I’m old enough to have actually purchased physical media (first vinyl, then CD) for nearly all the music I presently own. However, I have rarely gone back and played the actual CDs I’ve purchased for several years, as the first step after removing the wrapper is to encode them and put the bits on the file server. When my daughter was a little younger, duplicate CDs were being replaced weekly after being stepped on, spilled on, turned into art projects, and other mishaps. Other sets have been left behind on airplanes, rental cars, etc. Having everything on the server has allowed us to enjoy the music without worrying about physically destroying or losing the original.

Back when I started doing this several years ago, I remember trying a comparison of original CDs vs 128kbps MP3 and deciding that the encoded recordings would be good enough for general use, more or less replacing cassette tape. 192kbps and 256kbps encoding seemed extravagant — disk storage was much more expensive then, I was planning to encode all of my CDs, and the modest degradation in quality didn’t seem too bad.

I may have to revisit this, now that hard drive capacity has gone up, costs have gone down, and for some reason the “audio haze” added by the MP3 encoding has suddenly become more noticeable to me.

My old turntable and albums have been in storage for years, since our daughter was born. It might be time to set them up and give her a demonstration of what vintage vinyl sounds like. I think I might still have the old Mobile Fidelity pressing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon somewhere…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Media / MP3 / PVR, Personal Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.