"mick" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 07:48:32 +0000, Stewart Pinkerton wrote:

snip

There's a slight catch in your argument, in that even 128kb/sec MP3
has better sound quality than vinyl................

snip

There speaks an mp3 expert.... with cloth ears.... :-)

Have you actually *heard* 128kb/s mp3s?

That question is almost an insult. Who hasn't heard moderate-bitrate MP3s
given how endemic they are?

The only way that they score
over vinyl is in the lack of surface noise - and you can learn to
largely ignore that on vinyl.

LOL! Obviously we've got someone here whose ears are too shot to hear all
those other well-known deficiencies of vinyl. Noise is just the beginning,
not the end. Not that 128 Kb MP3s are always sonically perfect. But, there
is no mass movement to replace MP3 players with LP players, even where space
and convenience aren't an issue.


You can *never* really ignore the
overall crap sound quality of 128kb/s mp3s though.

Given how endemic moderate-bitrate MP3s are, there's no doubt that we've all
ignored them. Furthermore, its possibe to constrain music so that it doesn't
trigger many of their sonic problems, much as was done with recorded music
when vinyl was king.

It just grates.

Except when it slips by you.

I use 128kb/s mp3 on my pocket player simply because it produces a
reasonably small file size that (sort of) works on music. Anything
less than that should be relegated to speech only.

So what headphones/earphones are you using?

IMHO mp3s only start to get listenable at 192kb/s. Now, if you'd care
to argue about 256kb/s mp3 versus vinyl the playing field is more
level.... ;-)

No argument that with the right encoder, higher bitrates can help.