Sara B. Fans
The Sara Bareilles Fan Community
Technical Question - Physical CD vs. mp3
Does anybody know if there is any difference in sound quality between a real CD or buying something off Itunes and burning it onto a blank CD?
It seems to me that my physical KH album sounds better than my buddies' KH which he downloaded on his computer and then burned on a disk.
IMO, the "real" KH sounds a lot better. Or am I just imagining things?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by James Tallin on -
from what have experienced , the real CD has a slightly better sound quality than downloading of iTunes and burning the file to a blank c.d :)
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CreatorPermalink Reply by Clement on -
Yes, I think so. Although iTunes format is quite good too. But MP3 burned to a blank cd is, to my mind, nothing compared to a real CD.
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Permalink Reply by Simon Kilmore on -
I'm going to get a bit nerdy, but here goes.
CDs are digital and the music is pressed to what is known as the red book standard. That's 44.1khz, 16-Bit audio in LPCM format, which equates to 1411kbps. That is what is known as 'lossless' music, there is no added digital compression. It is the best quality you will get music in digitally, unless the artist releases something hi-res, like DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD which allow higher resolution audio, most commonly 96khz and 24-Bit.
MP3 is a lossy digital compression format, as is AAC which you get on iTunes. What they do is digitally compress the CD audio, taking away the parts of the music it thinks you won't notice missing, in the high end. Most humans have a hearing range up to around 20khz, which means we can hear everything a CD has to offer. Lossy compression formats throw away the higher frequencies and you're usually left with audio that has no frequencies above around 14khz, depending on the level of compression.
Some people say they can't tell the difference but with a normal human hearing range and good speakers/earphones most people should. I know for me personally things lack punch, cymbals sound watery and washed out, it just doesn't have the clarity and high end anymore. I mean it should be common sense really, a CD quality song is usually around 30-40mb, a lossy compressed version can be around a tenth of that size, 3-4Mb. Now logic should suggest if 9/10ths of the music is gone from the file, something is missing. Also remember above I said the bitrate of CD quality is 1411kbps? Well I'm sure most of you know the stuff on iTunes is only 256kbps, and most MP3s are around that bitrate, sometimes higher (320kbps), sometimes lower. Either way, it's not CD quality.
The other thing with lossy compression is the lossy part. That means once the file is compressed, you cannot recover it again. The higher frequencies are gone. For good. You can convert them back to CD format (which is what you're mentioning here) but the quality isn't back.
There are lossless compression formats out there, such as FLAC, which compress the files losslessly, which means once uncompress back to WAV they are the same as before they were compressed. No loss of quality.
I personally hate lossy downloads for those exact reasons, and it's why I will always prefer physical releases. It's a shame so much Sara music in only available as lossy downloads, i'd love CDs of some of the stuff.
So, I hope that clears things up. :)
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Permalink Reply by William on -
Ok, thanks that clears it up actually.
I'm guessing that the "lossy" formats are from the days when digital compression was important because people didn't have the storage capacity to hold "lossless" audio files on their devices so things had to be compressed. And also that Internet download speeds were slower also.
So compressed formats may be not as important as they once were.
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Permalink Reply by Simon Kilmore on
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Pretty much, yeah. MP3 has been around since 1993 but it wasn't until people really started getting online and sharing music that it became the go to format because as you say back in those days people had 56k dial up or worse and small hard drives, so MP3 was chosen as the best music format as it was small but still decent quality. People also didn't have CD burners at home back then.
Now in 2011 the vast majority have super fast internet lossless downloads should be more common, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case, if anything more lossy formats are being introduced. I did hear Apple were thinking about lossless downloads but don't think anything is happening soon. So we're stuck with 256kbps AAC audio from them on exclusive releases there. :(
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