Posted By Binokular on 20 Sep 2007 6:37 AM Posted By Strangegravy on 20 Sep 2007 6:08 AM
Mp3's take out the bits they think you can't hear.. but you can feel them man!! ;-) so do CDs, the range of frequencies on a CD only corresponds to the human audible hearing range as they simply could not fit any more on to the format at the time. The lower frequencies that you can't hear are simply not on CDs, only vinyl, which is one reason why DJs persisted with vinyl. MP3s ripped from CDs may suffer some quality loss in conversion, especially if you don't rip at high quality or just use a crap encoder. However if we take CDs out of the picture altogether and look at a pure digital future, where music is distributed via the internet and properly encoded to MP3 or other digital audio format from the original recording, I see no reason why MP3s can't be superior to CD. Yes 320kbps MP3s are big, but who burns MP3s to CD anymore? that's so three years ago. With home networks and high capacity storage in MP3 players and USB sticks so common place now, it really isn't an issue if a three minute song takes 15mb.
I only have a 4GB mp3 player at the moment and my PC is as old as the hills with not much hard drive space on it.. so big wav/mp3 files with a decent sound card hooked up to my stereo isn't going to happen for a while for me!
But down the line, as hard drives and mp3 player's get bigger and cheaper, yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised if the auld CD went down the same road as tape cassettes and music was mainly released online in digital format.
I'm a big fan of having decent CD artwork though.. would hate that to get lost in the digital revolution!
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