The advent of digital audio technology has seen an explosion in the way we buy, store and listen to music today. Although in many ways this has been a good thing, but are we sacrificing quality for convenience.
Ok the first generation of digital was awful because of the restrictions of the technology and the cost of doing it properly. With the first two constraints add the narrow bandwidth of the internet at the time and the MP3 was born. Now we have ended up with people that have been deprived the experience of quality sound.
Good quality sound is clean, transparent, spectrally (tonally) balanced, free of distortion and has sufficient resolution (quantity of clean information) to produce a stereo sound stage of depth and dimension.
To put some perspective on the MP3 format. Even a CD wav file at 16 bit 44.1 KHz is not enough information for true audio and an MP3 is only 10% of that! 24 bit 96 KHz is more like it and that could exceed analogue in transmission of detail and information.
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| An MP3 image |
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| CD WAV file |
When listening to an MP3 version of a CD wav file there is missing bass and also the notes are shortened so the tails are missing which altogether makes it sound weak. The high frequencies on the other hand are the opposite of translucent and crystalline, full of fuzziness and crunchy to the ear.
This loss of space and dimension is depriving listener of involvement, feeling and spiritual motivation.
Even though we now have the technology to easily exceed 25 year old analogue technology we don’t, vinyl is still the most human!
A high quality stereo audio generates a 3 dimensional left, centre, right sound stage. This is so the listener is submerged in an all encompassing sound field.
Ok what´s the answer then? We all have huge collections of MP3 music that we are not about to give up, me included. So for better or worse the MP3 is here, for the time being anyway.So your music is stored on a hard disk in MP3 format and you want to get the most out of this in your audio set up. Well adding decent cables (wireless streaming is like trying to clean your windows with dirty water!), digital to analogue converters, amplifiers and speakers will help.
I myself have the above for my multiroom audio system, but I also have a special place where I go to “hear” music. With an old skool amp made by a Hi-Fi manufacture, a classic Technics 1210 turntable, CD player and a small but high quality bookshelf speakers. I also have a pair decent headphone for when you need to tap the volume up that little bit more...
