oatnet

I think you meant to say "lossy" not lossless <grin>

I play MP3's Josiah! Basically so does everyone else get with the program man ! Remember, MP3s are more compression than lossy - and heck CDs are lossy to begin with anyhow, right? But that Vinyl/CD argument was settled long ago.

I consider myself somewhat of an audiophile (although there is ALWAYS someone with a better system) on home systems and I did a lot of side-by-side testing to determine the best rate to rip CDs at. With a 192kb ripped at ultra-high error correction, I flat-out can't tell the difference, even on my 15k home theater. At 128kb I can hear some difference... and at 96kb the difference is huge. So I ripped all my CDs at 192kb; I would have gone to a higher bitrate if I needed it, but I didn't. Others with a more discerning ear may need a higher bitrate.

I would wager that the imperfect acoustics of our beloved s2000's are far more lossy than a high-bitrate MP3 anyhow.

-JD

flitcroft

Lossy, yeah.

Just trying to fan some flames

Incubus

My Zen Touch plays with 97 decibal signal to noise ratio. That's better than just about any car's factory stereo can do.

MacGyver

Anything digital based is going to list a 96-97dB S/N (assuming it uses 16 bits)... that's just the nature of the beat. Sony lists a few at 120dB, but they must be considering some oversampling in their numbers (I find that a bit weak).

All that means is it's possible to get that kind of a S/N ratio out of the electronics... it doesn't mean the material played is going to allow that. In fact, if it's MP3 material, I guarantee the S/N has already dropped below that due to the encoding process.

Incubus

I was under the impression that the encoding was taken into consideration...Still sounds good enough for me.

flitcroft

That's the nail on the head. It's all about the listener. I paid too much for my system and can easily pick out imperfections in MP3 compression. This was not the case on my old system.

On S/N ratio, just to give you an idea -- my deck is listed at 100db S/N ratio and 0.006% total harmonic distortion. With my super-bright speakers, the fluttering at the high end of MP3 compression (think crashing symbols and electric guitars) sounds terrible to my ears.

BUT, the S/N ratio is at the jack of the head unit. That's like measuring horsepower at the crank -- it's only a part of the equation in the real world. People care only at horsepower at the wheels and likewise only care about the final output of the stereo system as a whole. This means wires, electromagnetic interference, speakers, etc. In this context, any portable player may claim a certain S/N ratio, but you'd be hard pressed to get that clean of a signal out of them without lots of care. (It can be done though, look up Sennheiser 650 cables on Google to find $1000 headphone cables with time correction, Kryptonite and popcorn, and whatever else is the flavor of the month).

Finally, it all comes down to the music source and the stereo system. If you like MP3s on your system that's great. I like them too, just not in my S. I'll wait for mix DVD-Audios or something

I think you meant "sound quality" here. The S/N ratio of a component's output won't be affected by the input source. However, (clean) garbage in, (clean) garbage out... If your files sound like crap, they're gonna sound like crap on your speakers.

MacGyver

Nope... digital info gives you roughly 6dB of headroom to play with per bit used (it's something like 6.01 blah blah blah... I'd have to redo the calculation to give you an exact figure). So, over 16 bits, you get 96dB and change.

Add in a lossy compression scheme to the mix, and the compression itself adds in noise. Granted, the noise is below our threshold of hearing if the compression is set low enough (as is the case for all but the most Golden of ears for 320kbps MP3), but it does make a difference.

So, you can consider the 96dB figure theoretical, but not truly achievable in practice.

flitcroft

Oh, I didn't know that. I would always think of digital as a perfect analog signal, but engineering-wise this way makes more sense. Here's a bit more from Wikipedia for those following along and lost (like me):

pikkashoe

Hmm I was wondering about this the other day, I thought I was just going crazy, but with this new system, I can tell a huge difference between MP3 cds and normal CD's, I guess its just like some one said earlier, you can pick out the imperfections in the compression, I could not do this before with the stock head unit and stock speakers.

MacGyver

You also have to look at the noise floor of the internal amplifier. All of the bits in the world aren't going to help you out if the internal amplifier has a poor noise floor and screws up the perfect sound coming from the CD.