In article , Glenn
Richards scribeth thus
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.
320 odd here thanks .. if we have to have MP3 seeing that disk storage
is now so cheap
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.
Well workshop is a Sony ESS 577 vintage CD player for well CD's
Digital satellite receiver for Radio usually on Bayern Klassik at 320 K
MP2
Audiolab amp and Spendor BC1's with some cable I nicked from a
substation
But the office side is a around a terror byte of storage Digigram
soundcard, Audiolab amp and BBC LS35A's
Bedroom system: Turtle Beach Audiotron Yamaha DSP-AX620 Gale
4/2i/Centre 2 speakers, Paradigm PS-1000 sub.
Nah!, Missus wouldn't allow!..
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).
If it told you what that is I'd be fibbing
...
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?
--
Tony Sayer
Has MP3 killed hifi?
Hybrid Mode
