Obviously, the analog vinyl and tube amps are the very best for people that like to spend huge $$$. If you are on a limited budget, spend the money on speakers over anything else and forget the mp3, get flac (compressed but lossless file) that is the same as the original but smaller and NO loss of quality).
ANYONE that says mp3′s sound good have not heard the same music uncompressed with a good amp and speakers. Spend $200 on some Audio Engine speakers (3.5″ and built in amp) and any sub,and flac or CD music and you BEGIN your journey of audio pleasure. Anything less then this and your missing out.

Chris: You can barely hear the difference between mp3 and the cd? Your essay neglected some important info — what are the components of this system of yours? Kinda important don’t you think? Since you’re right and all.

As I said, very short discussion.

Haven’t listened to anything he’s sent over since, although someone told me they use WAV files now…

Great ! Enjoy your mp3s

Personally I can hear the difference in my car, on my (decent but affordable) hi-fi and on standard iPod earbuds. Enough to make me not want to listen.

But everyone is different, and that’s cool.

Cheers !

Ian

I’m almost 23 now, I study electrical engineering, I’ve been playing guitar for a couple of years, and recording and producing music in my bedroom ever since. I listen to a lot of music from the most different genres, especially folk, pop, rock, some house, dance and jazz, but I do not neglect other styles like rnb, classical, bossa… you name it. I also can still hear frequencies up to 18khz (just tested this yesterday and while not being sure of the relevance to the matter, I’m just being safe and assuming it may be. 18khz is not a lot, but enough for any type of music I believe, and maybe a lot more than some of you older guys out there can hear).

I may not be the very best audiophile and I’m surely not even a professional but I do believe that my oppinion does have some significance due to all these factors. Just today I have been ripping some songs in very agressive pop, rock and dance styles, in wich differences between good and bad quality should be more noticeable due to the bigger dynamic range and faster tempo, to wav and then encoding them to mp3, cbr and vbr, ranging from 128k to 320k. I have never done this before since I found more practical to simply download music from the internet instead of ripping it, and I was completely amazed.

From the seven songs I encoded, only in the beginning of one I could somewhat clearly tell a minor difference between the wav file and the 128kbps encoded mp3. Yes, you read it right! 128kbps! In another one, playing through my speakers with the volume crancked up, I believe (but I’m not sure if I could really feel it or if it was just the placebo effect) I could notice a difference in the feel of the music, due to the resonance of my bedroom and body. And this was at my place using my production equipment, wich may not be spectacular, but does the job and would certainly be enough to allow me to tell the difference between an untouched wav file and a crappy mp3.

I believe that NOWADAYS, the practical difference between most cd’s and most mp3′s at 128kbps are almost nonexistent. I would say with a very high level of confidence that the vast majority of dedicated listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a cd and a well encoded mp3 file at 128kbps in the ambient and setup in wich they usually hear music. This, to my own amazement, happens, I believe, due to the compression technologies and processing hardware having improved so much over the last decade. I do have some older mp3 files encoded at 128kbps, and even at 160 and 192kbps that sound terrible! Is this because of the mp3 file format? NO! It’s just because at that time, people compromised sound quality for faster rips and also because such efficient compression algorythms simply weren’t available! Well, today, they are, and there is absolutelly no reason to compromise sound quality since even some of the cheapest computers today surpass the processing capabilities of the most expensive computers over a decade ago!

I may agree that maybe, if you are talking about really high end systems (wich you can find in good clubs) and loud volumes, you may be able to tell the difference from an mp3 file (even at bitrates up to 160 and 192kbps) and a cd track, especially in your body and dancefloor responses to the bass, and the overall distortion of high and low frequencies with crancked up volumes. Appart from that, it is my final oppinion that for personal use, encoding ANY genre of music above 192kbps VBR (I’m introducing a safe margin of error here also due to my testing not being all that extensive) is simply a big waste of time and space and total overkill.

In the end, it’s all about application and if you can set up a good system no matter what format is being used, if you can please other people and yourself, nobody has to know what’s being utilized

Let’s agree to disagree.