How are Hi-Fi Magazines Dealing with MP3s?

Funny, they gave plenty of column inches to Nakamichi and their cassette decks and no one was ever extolling chrome tape as an audiophile format.

I’ve used pretty nice hi-fi equipment over the last few years in my studio (where I listen to most music). I finally got some proper studio monitors (Mackie Hr824s with a matching Mackie sub) and the first thing I noticed was how shit all the music on my computer sounded compared to how it sounded on CDs (using the same output from my computer for both).

From what I can hear, very low frequencies become much less defined and the higher low end 100-500 Hz seems to distort in places. It also seems to affect the very high frequencies that on paper someone pro-mp3 would say can’t be heard by humans, this is true; however, I think it does affect how the other high frequencies that we can hear come across. I really notice this with high pitched droney music, and stuff where the hi-hats have been recorded really crisply.

I don’t like mp3s anymore!

In that sense, audiophiles haven't accepted CD's as an acceptable sound format, because the high end players they cream over are all designed to improve "typical" CD sound (which is considered far inferior to vinyl or certain mag. tape formats).

Thus, I wouldn't expect them to give mp3's any love, either.

And I'm no audiophile, but there's a huge difference in sound quality between 192 kbps and CD-quality wav, definitely as large a difference (to my qualitative ears) as between CD and vinyl.

What about music that relys heavily on the production and the actual sounds involved? I couldn't listen to say, Fennesz over a shitty little portable cd player, it wouldn't work, or this thing tends to happen where or what you are listening to the music on becomes part of the listening experience, which is a whole other discussion...

What about people who really enjoy certain types production, high end audio equipment can make many an album sound shit, suddenly theres loads of bass and the balance is all different. Or you have to spend ages reconfiguring the eq to get it sound how it should.

There are so many details that come out of music once you listen to something through a better system, in a better environment that you may have not noticed before. I don't think this is just an 'audiophile' thing.

Personally, I like to listen to stuff over studio monitors because if your room is set up nicely, it'll sound quite a lot like it was intended to sound by the person who produced it. Also, compared to what you can pay for high end hi-fi equipment, studio stuff is cheap!

Well, some expensive models out there may well do that inadvertently (big price tag doesn't necessarily preclude lousy engineering) and hence develop a bit of a reputation for standing out from the crowded field of similar-sounding CD players, but generally speaking I don't think is the aim of audiophile manufacturers. There is one very expensive DAC on the market which dispenses with brick-wall filtering altogether (technically a step backwards - inducing all manner of aliasing artefacts) but has received rave reviews (and a few brickbats).

Questions of "warmth", "analogue richness" and the like come down far more to the recording itself and the speakers than any particular CD player, I think.

I haven't A/Bed MP3s and CD originals for a couple of years, but when I did I was really struggling to cite a difference at anything over 192k (it's all material-specific, obv.) It's the high frequencies and stereo imaging that go first in my experience; I can't say I've noticed the lack of bass.

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re: the original question, commercial hi-fi magazines don't have much incentive to focus on mp3s and mp3-playing equipment because the readers who empty their wallets to try out each one of the however many amplifiers Stereophile thinks it can get away with stuffing into Class A wouldn't touch lossy compression with a 10-foot interconnect.

Absolutely...three's no sub bass so minimal thumping / tingling feeling in your chest. Vinyl that's been mastered for a big PA will always trump a lossy digital format, even when played through a good compressor.

Maybe there's some low-end roll-off with certain material (though it's not a genuine response limit like with >15k material for example; I've got Cool Edit open in another window and a VBRed Alva Noto track is showing plenty of activity below 30Hz*) but as Graeme says, it's more likely to be a question of mastering - the vinyl heavily EQed to sound massive through PA subs.

(* - I can sense my wife pushing imaginary spectacles up the bridge of her nose as I type that).

--Well, some expensive models out there may well do that inadvertently (big price tag doesn't necessarily preclude lousy engineering) and hence develop a bit of a reputation for standing out from the crowded field of similar-sounding CD players, but generally speaking I don't think is the aim of audiophile manufacturers.

There are such devices- I forget exactly what is done, but as originally posted- it introduces errors that make results in a more 'vinyl' sound

I can't say with certainty that this isn't true, but if people really are paying to have distortion applied to the outputs of their CD players, it's yet further proof of the dictum that there's a sucker born every minute.

But yeah, there are suckers who will pay $2500 to get a CD player that sounds like a $250 turntable.

I remember that everytime I upgraded my speakers/source/amp/etc I re-listened to my collection and discovered new stuff and felt that I was getting closer to "how it's supposed to sound". Of course it must not become an obsession and come before the music, but I find that enjoyable music is even moreso on a good stereo.

I'm tired of seeing CBR (constant bit rate) rips everywhere when the only good reason to use CBR over VBR (variable..) is when you are going to be streaming the audio and need to know exactly how much bandwidth you need.

But for most of the rips that are floating around (up to 256kbps, lets say), VBR is definitely a better allocation of ressources than CBR, even in the cases when the file ends up being about the same size as its CBR counterpart.

What frequencies would they be then? Over 22kHz? Are you sure you're not thinking of SACD, where the extreme noise-shaping involved to get greater-than-CD dynamic range in the audio band produces a lot of supra-aural trash? Some people have speculated that this is somehow a good thing - very low mush leaking through yr super-tweeters.

I'm fairly sure Michael and I are thinking about the same thing ... smoothing of a digitized waveform ( = creating a greater than CD dynamic range). It's a lot easier to draw it out than to write about it.

No, dither is not part (or has no reason to be part) of the playback process; I know there are a few models around (it all makes sense now - I'd totally forgotten about this little gimmick) - an upmarket Rotel springs to mind - which offer dither options but it's of dubious value on playback. As Palomino says, dither is used in mastering when reducing word-length to decorrelate the quantisation error; at the expense of a very slight increase in noisefloor, you effectively preserve more of the dynamic range of the (say) 24bit master. Dithering and noise-shaping means you can get 19-20bit performance in the areas to which the ear is most sensitive on an ordinary CD from a 24bit source. Standard practice for many years - and it's already on your CDs, no end-user hardware requirement.

Low jitter doesn't automatically come with a big price-tag either; I recall some run-of-the-mill Sonys showed much lower jitter figures in tests than fancy audiophile units - just good design around a stable clock. Certainly, the fashion (until the mid-90s at least) for two-box high-end CD players almost always guaranteed worse jitter performance.