Why Factory CDs are Superior
Introduction by the Blog Author
There is a lot of witchcraft and gossip about this topic. I found an excellent summary from a computer engineer (who further gives us a dynamite link to an even more thorough analysis) that explains why you should (a) buy the music CD if available –even if it is more expensive than other formats, and (b) keep the CD into the indefinite future, because formats superior to MP3 are coming, eventually, as part of technological advances.
Why is this so? Read on. And take a trip down the road of that boldfaced red link, too.
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Being an audiophile and a computer network engineer, I’ve ripped my thousand or so CD’s to FLAC. FLAC is lossless and a faithful representation of the original content but requires a ton of storage space. MP3 is not lossless. Actually it’s imperfect in the extreme.
MP3 is a compressed format. Compression means loss. The loss brings forward a lack of ambiance and a whole host of undesirable artifacts. The negatives include loss of deep bass, swirlies, phase shifts, loss of musical content during the encode and the addition of digital noise during decode… I could go on ad nauseam but I won’t. If you’re interested in how MP3s work and why they’re not an audiophiles friend there’s an excellent article here:
https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr12/articles/lost-in-translation.htm
Car audio improves exponentially every year or two. By 2020 I’d expect car audio to rival some of the high end home audio systems and a CD or will still be the audiophile preferred medium.
I might suggest another reason for CDs in future cars. With everything connected to a main computer bus they might be the most reliable way for manufacturers to update firmware in any of the dozen or more computers connected to that bus.
Introduction by the Blog Author
There is a lot of witchcraft and gossip about this topic. I found an excellent summary from a computer engineer (who further gives us a dynamite link to an even more thorough analysis) that explains why you should (a) buy the music CD if available –even if it is more expensive than other formats, and (b) keep the CD into the indefinite future, because formats superior to MP3 are coming, eventually, as part of technological advances.
Why is this so? Read on. And take a trip down the road of that boldfaced red link, too.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Being an audiophile and a computer network engineer, I’ve ripped my thousand or so CD’s to FLAC. FLAC is lossless and a faithful representation of the original content but requires a ton of storage space. MP3 is not lossless. Actually it’s imperfect in the extreme.
MP3 is a compressed format. Compression means loss. The loss brings forward a lack of ambiance and a whole host of undesirable artifacts. The negatives include loss of deep bass, swirlies, phase shifts, loss of musical content during the encode and the addition of digital noise during decode… I could go on ad nauseam but I won’t. If you’re interested in how MP3s work and why they’re not an audiophiles friend there’s an excellent article here:
https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr12/articles/lost-in-translation.htm
Car audio improves exponentially every year or two. By 2020 I’d expect car audio to rival some of the high end home audio systems and a CD or will still be the audiophile preferred medium.
I might suggest another reason for CDs in future cars. With everything connected to a main computer bus they might be the most reliable way for manufacturers to update firmware in any of the dozen or more computers connected to that bus.
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