Why Audio CDs are still better-A Nostalgic Note

Currently we are testing a pair of Hi-Fi speakers, and checking with both audiophile test discs and MP3 playlists. Included are some tracks by The Police which are in CD as well as a VBR (variable bitrate) MP3.� This is when we re-realized an age old point of the audio community: an MP3 is the audio equivalent of a black and white Xerox copy of an oil on canvas, especially if we are talking about well recorded and well mastered music. And here is the thing—one does not need to be a mad audiophile or even have an exorbitant boutique stereo system to realize this.

Let’s forget about surround sound and stick to pure stereo music for this column. A quick round up for the unfamiliar: an MP3 is a compressed form of the original music, as an uncompressed digital audio file actually measures about 50 MB for 4 minutes of music. MP3s achieve about 10 times compression on filesize, and a discernable compromise on sound quality.

Let’s get geeky (it’s fun sometimes). Digital music means the sound waveform is actually cut up and sampled into many many tiny small pieces, and stored like that. These pieces or ‘samples’ as they are called, are represented by just 2 numbers, or states: 1s and 0s.� These 2 numbers are enough, and the quality of the music depends on stuff like ‘resolution’ and ‘samplerate’. Hold on geekiness not done yet. In audio CDs the samplerate is 44.1 KHz, means 44,100 small samples per second comes flying to your ears, while resolution is 16 bits, which, in very simple terms, means 16 levels of volume level correspondence it is played at, actually 2 raised to 16, so 65,536.

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Now MP3s use something called 'lossy' compression techniques, so basically there is actual data being removed from the original file to make it small. They use psycho acoustical modeling, which means lots of high frequency content in the music, and also softer parts, are removed, with the theory that the ear anyways does not really distinguish them out. It’s not a blatant scam; in fact, it's quite brilliant, but our ears can actually perceive everything if given the chance and experience. Plus, if you highly compress the file then the sound is even more thin and tinny. The highs are very weak sounding.

Of course MP3s are available in different bit rates, like 320 kbps 128 kbps etc. The higher the bitrate mean more data in the file, thus it sounds more filled up and detailed, especially check the high frequencies. But still, an audio CD, not even a superior quality SACD, just a good old jewel cased moulded piece of plastic, has much better quality music than streams of MP3s. there are many lossless compression formats like flac, monkey audio etc, but there is still some nostalgic joy in the almost obsolete CD, with just 13 -14 nice tracks. They sound bigger, better, louder and more detailed. If anyone agrees, please share a thought.