Glenn Richards wrote:
Doki wrote:

I noticed today in John Lewis that they had no hifi or hifialike gear
for sale at all. Loads of digital radios, mp3 players and sets of
little speakers that ipods fit onto, but no mini systems or seperates
at all.

That's been the case for some time. You want "proper" hi-fi then get
yourself to somewhere like Sevenoaks Hi-Fi. Or even Richer Sounds for
budget to mid-range stuff.

MP3 isn't inherently bad either when properly encoded. It seems to
achieve transparency somewhere between 192 and 224Kbit/sec bitrate - I
encode using LAME's VBR mode on the highest quality settings and the
bitrate averages at around 230.

My office playback system: Creative USB soundcard with SPDIF Arcam
Black Box 50 Technics SU-VX600 Celestion 1 connected with Chord
Company Cobra 2 interconnects and Audio Innovations Silver Micro speaker
cable. (And no I don't want to go into a cable discussion here.) The
speakers are kinda plonked on the desk so I've set up EQ in Winamp to
get rid of the midband peak this produces.

Bedroom system: Turtle Beach Audiotron Yamaha DSP-AX620 Gale
4/2i/Centre 2 speakers, Paradigm PS-1000 sub.

Main system: Turtle Beach Audiotron Arcam AVR250 Mordaunt-Short
908/905C/2x 903S, B&W ASW-1000, Chord Rumour 4 speaker cable (front),
generic 105-strand OFC for rears (looks identical to Gale XL105,
79p/metre at Richer, but comes on a 100m reel for about £20 from CPC).

So I'm not exactly playing MP3 music through crap kit! The other nice
thing with MP3 is that all CDs get ReplayGained after they've been
ripped, so no yanking the volume knob when I go from a 1980s recording
to a recent one.

I also did a little experiment a while back - I ripped and encoded a
track from a CD (no MP3gain applied) then burnt the uncompressed WAV and
the MP3 version back to a blank CD as audio tracks. I then tried an AB
comparison in various systems. The only one I could hear any difference
on was the Arcam/Mordaunt-Short setup in the front room, there appeared
to be a very slight loss of detail on the track burnt from the MP3
version. Although I wonder how much of this was psychological as I
"knew" that track 2 had been burnt from the MP3?


I can quite often hear difference, but I can't do better/worse very
well. I've using a CDP's DAC for the last couple of months (from a Mac
Mini) and it's a sound I feel happy with - it seems smoother/more
detailed than either the Mini's own DAC or via an AV receiver's DAC.
Whether it's 'better' or not, couldn't say ;-)

BTW, couldn't you make your test reasonably blind by simply flipping
between the tracks a few times until you've lost track, ahem, of which
is which?

Also, I archive all CDs to a lossless format nowadays. Storage will get
cheaper, and/or compression/decompression methods will get better, I
would have thought. So, in years hence, I can be reasonably secure in
the knowledge I have the best quality available, all stored on a pen drive.

Also also, while I can reliably differentiate between 128kbps MP3 and
wav, I can happily listen to either. I'd choose the wav if/because I can
- not rational, I know.

Rob