ok Granny I can try.

Everybody has a different set of ears and a different brain to interpret what those ears hear.

there are times when pieces of audio equipment will sound differently depending on how they were designed.
Speakers also vary in how they reproduce sound.

so take the fact some equipment will sound better to some people and you have the start of a pseudo-religious battle.
some people will become entrenched in a belief and regardless of the technical data placed in front of them will not, for love or money, give up on that position.

now here is where it's gets interesting.
there are other people who recognizing that there is money to be made will create "products" which support the belief of the zealot and make lots of money from him.

you may remember that when CD's first came out, some people used to use green highlighter around the edges to make them "sound better."
some people even sold special markers for this purpose.

it didn't do anything at all to the data coming off of the CD but people KNEW that it was better and would swear at how much better they sounded.

but play two CD's side by side and nobody could guess which was which.


now as I stated I used to be in the business and to a certain extant some equipment is better than others but people get carried away with it.

so to answer your question....

your hearing has some notes that you hear better than others.
The MP3 file doesn't actually have all of the original music.
It is a compressed file to make it smaller in the MP3 player.
In the act of compressing the file to make it an MP3, I suspect it suppressed some of the notes which your hearing found offensive and brought others up that you found pleasant.

 

The bonded-pair HDMI cables are expensive to make and require more copper. The price of copper has gone through the roof, or so I've been told. BJC's standard HDMI cables are very reasonable. Monoprice.com is cheaper, but I'm not fond of the jacketing material used in much of their wire and cabling.

 

Work, work, and more work. My ears started burning this morning, so I thought I should stop by.

Sorry about that. What did I miss about BluRay? Did you get a player? Oppo is coming out with a new universal player, the BD-83, that includes BR that should be very nice. I'm looking to trade up to it from my Pioneer Elite BDP-95FD.

 

Lainey, I think they've found a new way to talk dirty, so I'm leaving.

 

The talk may not be dirty to you but this stuff gets some guys more excited than a Playboy centerfold. Sort of like being a car nut. Only we don't have a fancy name like "audiophile" for being a car nut. Plus we are much nicer to be around and more interesting to talk to. (I'm usre that when I start to talk about flywheel mass or slip angles or sway bar setups, the glazed look in my wife's eyes is probably a side effect from our hvac system's poor filtration.)

 

Gearhead is fancy? Right? Oh, maybe not. But it's better than Gearphile.

 

I wound up getting a Sony BDP-550, and the Integra DHC 9.9.
I had heard that Oppo had canceled their BR because of price, but then I see that they are doing a wait list, oh well, I guess I'll wind up with one at some point later.

As for cables, I used to buy cables from BetterCables.com. Good cables at about half the price, but comapred to many of the others now they are but higher.

I have been buying from http://www.ramelectronics.net/ They are a former sponsor of AVS and their HDMI prices are great and I think that they have a very nice cable, not just nice for the money, but plain good.

 

Nice combo. I've had the 9.8 for about a year and I've been very pleased with it.

Now that you've gone BR, give the Dave Matthews Live at Radio City BR disk a listen. I'm not a DMB fan, but it's an excellent hi-res multichannel audio recording. David Gilmour's Remember That Night - Live At The Royal Albert Hall is also very good.

 

Oookkaaaay! Thanks Bolt, but I sure must have some picky ears because everything sounded richer with the MP3, the horns, violins as well as my much-beloved distorted bass. I couldn't believe the difference in the fullness of the sound without touching the volume knob or any other settings.

 

My PhD is actually in psychoacoustics. I spent 18 years at Bell Labs in sound quality research. I was also involved in writing the AAC standard, which actually is one of the MPEG-2 audio options.

The criterion for MPEG-2 audio was "transparency." Transparency was defined as the inability in a well designed listening test to tell the difference between the source material and the result of decoding the compressed material. Note that I said a well designed listening test. This is not a simple matter. all sources of possible bias or error have to be eliminated. An appropriate subject pool has to be used. The proper experimental design and statistical analysis have to be used in oder for the results to be valid.

The other audio coding options in MPEG-2 are backward compatible with MPEG-1. To allow better quality backward compatibility was abandoned in defing AAC.

Many properly designed listening tests have shown that only current state of the art digital amplifiers can reproduce source material without detectable distortion. The current fascination with tube amplifiers only shows that people actually like some kinds of distortion, Perhaps this si not too surprising given the kind of distortion that amplifiers used in rock music introduce into the audio signal.

The holy grail of audio reproduction is of course the ability to render music exactly like it would be perceived in the concert hall. While not impossible it would be extremely difficult. What is heard in the concert hall is a product of both the source (the orchestra) and the acoustic characteristics of the hall. What the listeners in the hall hears depends on where they are located in the hall. What gets on the recording depends on the placement of the microphones. Finally, the acoustic environment of the listening room is added to the perceptual space. All this adds up to the fact that a person listening to a recording of music will never have the same experience as would have been obtained by personally listening in the hall where the music was played originally, even if no distortion was added in the recording, transmission and reproduction chain.