"GSV Three Minds in a Can" wrote in message
...
Bitstring , from the wonderful person
Stimpy said
GSV Three Minds in a Can wrote:
Does anyone have any opinions/facts on what level of WMA or MP3
resolution it is worth ripping/storing music to which has come from LP
by way of cassettes (Dolby B/C, and a decent cassette deck .. even a
decent turntable and pre-amp .. but even so, I guess using the
160kbit/sec WMA format that I usually use for CD ripping is probably a
waste of time, space, and money).

IMHO, anything less than 320kbps is a waste of time. Disk space is so
cheap
these days that the audible loss of quality with (say) 128/160/192kbps
isn't
worth putting up with. Imagine in 5 years time when computers routinely
have terabytes of disk space as standard, it'll seem ridiculous to have
to
put up with inferior quality rips for the sake of saving some disk space.

Admittedly I'd struggle to tell the difference between a 256kbps rip and
the
original but, for the sake of the future, I only rip at 320.

That's probably true for CD/DVD rips, but this stuff is coming from
vinyl by way of audio cassette, and I suspect that even 256kbs is
massive overkill??

Not necessarily. If you can make as 'perfect' a remaster as possible from
the audio cassette, for instance, you'll also be getting all the noise that
is inherent in audio cassettes. To restate the "for the sake of the
future", it makes sense to make as good a remaster from a perishable (or
perishing!) medium for more than playback sake. Think of the improved
noise-removal software that will come along as a matter of course. A
higher-resolution copy from the cassette will be most likely easier to clean
up than a lesser one (which by way of compression would most likely have its
own sonic artifacts that weren't ever part of the music).

Just my 2bits.


--
Steve Goodman
* Cartoons about DVDs and stuff
* http://www.earthlight.net/HiddenTrack