RE: RE:Why I hate .mp3 (was Freeserve Time)

["Harrison, Mark (Alliance)" <mark.harrison@xxxxxxx>]

Here I go... (as a home automater, audiophile, and former technical
director of a now-defunct classical recording label.)

I like MP3, for completely different reasons to Keith, and dislike it for
the same reasons as you.

MP3 is great, because:

- It's a good proving ground for technology soft transmission of sound
- It's forcing telecoms providers to sit up an listen to the demand for
bandwidth
- It's getting the public used to soft delivery of software
- It's a _real_ soft downloadable, to act as a testbed for eCommerce

However, it's not hi-fi, and it's way over-hyped.

Even a cheap source is better than a reasonable soundcard.

I speak with confidence, having run some genuine blind tests comparing a CD
with the same CD digitally pulled to MP3 at 128k/sec bit rate. The CD and
MP3 were synchronised to run the same track at the same time, and switching
(or pretending to)
between them, and asking my wife (who is _not_ an audiophile) if she could
tell when I'd really switched rather than pretended to, whether she could
tell any difference, and which she preferred. She got it right every time,
and always preferred the
sound of the CD.

The CD I used was the Hyperion recording of the Durufle Requiem. The
sources were a Pioneer CLD-950 (5 year old laserdisk player) and an AWE-32
soundcard. The amplification was Shearne Audio Phase 2 and Phase 3, set up
in bi-amp mode. The speakers
were Linn Keilidhs.

Regards,

Mark Harrison
European KMIT Manager, BP/Bovis Alliance
Tel : +44 7010710239
Fax: +44 20 8276 2555
SMTP: Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx

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