192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

"Alex Rodriguez" wrote in message
...
In article et,
says...

You all must go to pretty fancy clubs where everyone is quiet and the
music
is played softly enough that you can even understand what the singer is
singing. The acoustics in most clubs combined with the ambient noise
makes
for such a poor listening experience to begin with that I doubt anyone
would
notice the difference between an MP3 and a CD. You might notice a loss
of
bass with some tracks though.

You must go to clubs that have crappy gear. Loud distortion sounds like
loud distortion. You can hear it, just louder. Most of the clubs I have
been to have sound systems that play clean and loud. So unless you are
really drunk, you can hear the lousy sound.
-------------
Alex


That was pretty much my point, the music's always sounds crappy in a packed
club. I'm talking about a place where everyone is talking and many are
dancing. Even it the sound system sounds terrific with the place empty, the
guests will not be able to tell over the ambient noise in a full club. You
can feel the bass, so you can dance, and you can make out words (if any) if
you already know the music but that's it. I'm talking about dance music
like: Top 20, R&B, Techno, and maybe some 80's. No one goes to a club for
the quality of the reproduction of the music, you just have to be able to
dance to it.

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

"Codifus" wrote


It depends on the bitrate. 320k MP3 seems to be generally accepted as CD
quality, 128K is about the equivalent of FM radio. I record FM
broadcasts and make them into 192 MP3s simply because I think the lower
bitrates take too much life out of the music. I don't even bother with
320K, I just keep my files in WAV or AIFF in that case. Takes up lots of
space, I know, but CD-Rs are cheap:)


Agree entirely (a WAV from the vinyl sounds satisfyingly close to the
original, DACced and Vacced) but there are two problems here - hard disk
space is not yet that cheap or plentiful (I could fill my new 200 Gig HDD
with WAVs in a couple of days) and CDs have got to be the most 'imminently
obsolete' technology on the planet atm.....

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

"tony sayer" wrote


Yep that's it!, lower the rates till they notice. Lets never, ever,
promote better quality sound 'tho, no that would never do!.

The new digital age dawns.


Er, no, it did that 30 years ago........



Never was so much promised and so little delivered!.....


Agreed, but perhaps we judge too soon/harshly - there may be time yet!

The fact that the 'engineers' have only managed to make 'digital recorded
music' sound *worse* so far is probably only some sort of 'glitch' - give a
million chimps a wordprocessor each for a million years and one of them will
turn out the Complete Works Of Shakespeare, eventually (they say).......

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

"vibrations" wrote in message
om...
just my 2cents worth but

vinyl still offers the best sound in a club environment, in terms of
impact and depth.


Not just in clubs and not to mention texture, tone, detail, depth and
imaging.......


i've seen mp3 dudes drop sets after vinyl ones, and
seen the atmosphere vanish and people leave the floor.


You can flog Joe Public any old crap but you can't make him listen to
it.......


mp3 sounds a little thin for big club tracks - just because something
has the same SPL doesn't mean it has the same 'bounce'


Agreed entirely.

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

In article , Keith G
writes

"tony sayer" wrote


Yep that's it!, lower the rates till they notice. Lets never, ever,
promote better quality sound 'tho, no that would never do!.

The new digital age dawns.


Er, no, it did that 30 years ago........


No that was the proper better quality digital age i.e. PCM used by the
BBC to improve sound links!....

Never was so much promised and so little delivered!.....


Agreed, but perhaps we judge too soon/harshly - there may be time yet!

The fact that the 'engineers' have only managed to make 'digital recorded
music' sound *worse* so far is probably only some sort of 'glitch' - give a
million chimps a wordprocessor each for a million years and one of them will
turn out the Complete Works Of Shakespeare, eventually (they say).......


Eventually!.....




--
Tony Sayer

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

"Ronnie McKinley" wrote in message
...
In uk.rec.audio "Keith G" wrote:

- give a
million chimps a wordprocessor each for a million years and one of them
will
turn out the Complete Works Of Shakespeare, eventually (they say).......

Or get they mate the gorilla to turn it out, and then claim it was
all the work of them, the chimps.

A million years for the 'Complete Works Of Shakespeare' what a waste
of a good chimp's life.



I sat through 'Coriolanus' at the Swan theeter (Stratford On Avon) once -
fekkin' hardest day of my life.....!!!

(Three people slashed their wrists.....)

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

"Ronnie McKinley" wrote in message
...
In uk.rec.audio "Keith G" wrote:

(I could fill my new 200 Gig HDD with WAVs in a couple of days)

That's about 400 'real' albums? - compressed using Monkey's Audio and
one could increase that storage capacity quite a bit. Maybe another 100+
real albums?

Geez Keith, even digitally ripping 400+ CDs (without tagging and art
work) is going to take a lot longer than a couple of days. And
transferring 400+ vinyl LPs to (wav) HDD with proper post-editing,
tagging etc., one would be working like a mad-man.

If the average guy started today with (a new) 200 Gig of HDD and ripped
each CD as it was bought, how long would it take to fill the HDD? IOW
how many CDs does the average guy buy per week and does one actually
have 400 _decent_ vinyl LPs to transfer in the first place :)



Yep, you're absolutely right! That was total ******** wasn't it? :-)

I was getting confused with DVDs. In fact, I actually managed to fill half
the disk in just a couple of days with about 45 Gig's worth of MP3s, a few
DVD-Videos and a few vinyl rips (it was a bit of an eye-opener to see the
disk space disappearing the way it did!) but, as you rightly say, a new 200
Gb disk would take months to fill up with vinyl rips only (WAVs which go
400-500 Mb each for a whole album).......

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

Ronnie McKinley wrote:

... I don't agree that HD space is really all that expensive.
IMO, HD space offers good value for money, with 120Gb, I think, now a
good bit below the £100.

At my local shop, 120gig 7200rpm drives are 66 quid, or 68 if you want an
8meg buffer on it. If one of those can hold about 180 CDs, then the
cost-per-CD is about 37p.


--
Wally
www.artbywally.com
www.wally.myby.co.uk/music

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

"Ronnie McKinley" wrote in message
...
In uk.rec.audio "Keith G" wrote:

as you rightly say, a new 200
Gb disk would take months to fill up with vinyl rips only (WAVs which go
400-500 Mb each for a whole album).......


Months indeed :) .... and with CDs one would have to be buying at least
one CD per day. every day ..... 30+ CDs a month!!??!! :)


You know my view on CDs - I never buy 'em! (Deadest format there is -
already shot through the head, just hasn't fallen over yet.....)


You know my view on mp3 - annoying, wearisome and ultimately fatiguing.


Agreed. (True of all digital music, IMO.....)


I don't agree that HD space is really all that expensive. IMO, HD space
offers good value for money, with 120Gb, I think, now a good bit below
the £100. I think anyone with a PC based audio system, and who wants a
reasonable degree of 'high fidelity' it would seem just silly to rip or
transfer files as mp3. With a couple of 120Gb drives on board and that
should accommodate a reasonable size music collection in wave format,
compress using ape files and the 240Gb (2x120) should serve the function
of most average type people ..... for a good while, at least :)


I don't really disagree with any of what you say. My 200 Gb disk cost about
£117 - better value than 2 x 120 Gig but, more importantly, there isn't room
for more than 2 drives in the computer I'm using atm. (A cheap but brilliant
little eMachine jobbie). My usual method is to have all my programs on a
smaller disk (40 Gig) which doesn't get changed and the data on the larger
disk which I upgrade periodically - makes it easier to recover the machine
if/when summat goes tits-up.

Anyone who has yet to get into mass storage would do well to consider how
long it takes to move stuff about (even over a LAN) and definitely to
consider what a disaster looks like when you get over, say, a hundred Gig's
worth of stored material go down the pan! AFAIAC, hard drives are a rapidly
moving feast and I will 'disk hop' until such time as I can build a box with
enough storage space (2 or 4 Tb?) to allow me to comfortably store all the
'digital music' and video material I want.

FWIW, up 'til now my MP3 collection has been more for having than actually
playing. Now that I'm happy with my PC to 'HiFi' setup, I swipe a range of
MP3s and play them as background music. I have thousands of tracks not yet
heard - if anything really stands out (presents itself, as it were) I make
the effort to chase it down on vinyl and am now continually buying vinyl
online and have a number of eBay bids on the go. (Charity shops are history
now - having all jumped on the 'vinyl bandwagon' and reduced a healthy trade
in secondhand bargains into a dreary, tatty, ****-shovelling exercise...)
Any MP3s which really are ****e get deleted.

Anyway, I dispute this continual wailing about 'MP3 Quality' (now, there's a
good example of an oxymoron if you want one!) and the various
merits/demerits of different bitrates because by the time I've got them
dacced and vacced (external DAC and valve amplifier) even 128K MP3s sound
perfectly reasonable - easily as good as listening to the radio. Swim bought
me a copy of 'Wot HiFi' the other day and there was a test (surprise,
surprise) comparing MP3 players - IIRC, most of these had 128K of onboard
memory at most - which makes adds to the mockery of compressed music stored
at high bitrates. (Also, FWIW, I have conducted enough experiments to prove
that an Audio CDR made from 128K MP3s is virtually indistinguishable from
one made from WAVs., if that were the object of the exercise - which it
isn't!)

Vinyl recorded as WAVs is a different ballgame entirely - they are very
'listenable' in their own right and knock the **** out of the equivalent
CDs. I record LPs as I listen to them and play them over and over (as you
do) when I need a 'hands free' style of operation. Ultimately they get/will
get squished into summat smaller and chucked on the MP3 pile. (If I didn't
have the other clutter on the 200 Gig disk it would give me a potential of
up to 500 LPs recorded as WAVs which is not 'inconsequential' by any
standards!) Saving on stylus wear etc, is a bonus in this situation.

192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?
 

"Ronnie McKinley" wrote in message
...
In uk.rec.audio "Keith G" wrote:

You know my view on CDs - I never buy 'em! (Deadest format there is -
already shot through the head, just hasn't fallen over yet.....)


Well it's all do with music, right? :)

I can by tons and tons of music, more importantly, NEW music, by
buying secondhand CDs. There are 1000s out there between a couple of
quid (or less) and around the fiver mark. I couldn't in a month of
Sundays buy the same amount on vinyl, and more importantly, the same
amount of new music on vinyl that I can with CD. Even if I had
pockets loads of money. Really rather simple :)


I've said it a hundred times - I *envy* anyone who can get it done with CDs!
But, having said that, I'm not aware of too many places to buy secondhand
CDs round here, anyways - only the same places as sell secondhand
vinyl......


I couldn't buy these on vinyl for that sort of money. Even new I
doubt I could pick some of them up on vinyl in the first place.


OK, discounting utterly any thoughts on format differences per se and only
considering the music, I think the the difference is that the opposite works
for me - there is very little 'new' music that interests me and 'any amount'
of older music that does. I doubt that I could easily find the sort of stuff
I like on CD in any case!

(If it weren't such crap a lot of the time, the best place to discover new
music would be the radio!)