Fred Kaplan makes the case. I hadn't been aware of how much the quality of the sound was degraded to compress it into an MP3. Of course, I've never gotten into the MP3 thing, other than to listen to interviews and the like on my Treo. When I want to listen to music, I still go with CDs and vinyl.

And I don't think that Teachout is going to persuade very many people to give up their high-end equipment. One would think that he, of all people, would remember the old dictum that there's no accounting for taste.

Rand,

You are partly correct. The mp3 music you buy off of the internet is compressed such that its resolution is significantly reduced.

However, the associated software that comes with any mp3 player allows you to select the resolution of the music that you download into the player from your CDs. I select the highest resolution, which is the same resolution as the CD itself. Of course, this means that I can put only half the advertized amount of the music on my mp3 player. However, now that the 4GB players are getting cheap, I am still able to put all of the music that I want on my mp3 player.

An MP3 is badly degraded if you record it at low bit-rates - say 96kbps. And for cheap ear-buds on an iPod that may be good enough.

But they sound great at CD-quality 256kbps. That's how I record mine - mostly for use on high-end big 'ol headphones. When trading with friends (I'm in Canada - it's legal and we pay a tarif to the musicians in exchange) if I get anything less than 196kbps, I flag it for later replacement.

The files take up more space in my Pocket PC, but memory and storage are cheap these days.

Many car stereos now support MP3 CDs - you can fit several times more songs on a one of these CDs. A car I looked at recently even came from the factory with a USB port on the stereo. Just plug in a flash drive with a few hundred songs, and it'll play them.

I have to agree w/ the convience argument. I rip my CDs at 128k but this doesn't bother me cause of the enviroment I listen to it in. Mostly I listen in my car so any music is fighting w/ street noise. More important to me is that I can have ALL my music w/ me. 'till I got my MP3 player, I'd pretty much stopped listening to music cause it was such a pain to haul the little bit of music a CD offers around w/ me.

I concur with the guys above. MP 3s are good for portable music when you want a good sized selection. I carry about 300 songs on my PDA's added memory. I usually carry book on the installed memory.

Neither format is ideal nor as good as the norm. But it's certainly more portable than a book, a CD player and 40 CD's would be for a trip long distance or just to the dentists office.

The loss of sound quality with MP3 compression also depends a lot on what kind of music you're listening to. 128 kbps compression drives me crazy on classical or jazz tracks where there are large dynamic and frequency ranges that end up getting clipped. I don't notice much of a difference with pop or rock tracks, which already tend to be highly equalized and have little range to start with.

audiophilia taken to the extreme:
http://www.ilikejam.dsl.pipex.com/audiophile.htm

Cable Elevators ?? To lift the cables from the carpet ? for JUST 160 bucks ?
Hey can i have like dozen of these bad boys !

When I was in grad school, my professor read some of this audiophile cra -- er, stuff, about how plain copper wire was no good, it distorts signals and all that. He panicked, since were were detecting weak audio frequency signals, sending them over plain copper wires, Fourier transforming them, and analyzing them in a way that was sensitive to distortions. So I was assigned to find out how much the meters of plain copper wire were distorting our signal.

After weeks of unnecessary work, the answer was "Zero, zilch, nada, nothin'." You audiophiles can kiss my butt. I could have spent those three weeks chasing coeds.

It all depends on how *much* lossy compression you do.

CDs are 150 KB/sec, which is 1200 Kbps. You can use a totally lossless compression system such as Apple Lossless or FLAC to cut it down to roughly 500 - 700 Kbps, depending on the music. When decompressed this produces precisely, bit for bit, the same data as the original CD, so there is certainly no harm done in doing this and it can be regarded as a baseline for MP3 or AAC or Vorbis quality settings.

It's generally accepted that AAC or Vorbis at 128 Kbps or MP3 at 160 Kbps is about the minimum for not sounding obviously bad. (MP3 at 128 Kbps is very noticeably crap). But it's certainly not enough to keep anyone with good equipment happy, being compressed around a factor of 4 - 5 from what you can do without loss of quality.

Similarly, most people seem to find MP3 at 320 Kbps or AAC or Vorbis at 256 Kbps to be very hard to distinguish from the original CD. This is good, but it's not *actually* CD-quality as Roger Strong claims. But it's very very close, if the encoder software has been well written, and is what on line stores have been starting to sell recently, with both the DRM-free iTunes+ and Amazon stores selling music in this quality.

But this better quality lossily compressed music is also only around twice as compact as totally pristine losslessly compressed music. I"m not sure it's worth the bother any more with disk prices being what they are. OK, flash-based portable players are still quite limited in size (even my 16 GB iPod Touch), but I've been going back and re-ripping all my CDs into lossless format for storage on my server (before the CDs degrade) and using AAC compression for the iPod.

This is similar to the scheme I always imagined as a high school kid in the 70's that I was going to use once I had money -- buy vinyl instead of tapes, but only ever play the vinyl in order to make a new tape for day-to-day use. But then this scheme got gazumped before I'd even left university by the advent of CDs.

and why is "on line" (as one word) questionable content preventing posting, while "crap" is ok?

...why is "on line" (as one word) questionable content preventing posting, while "crap" is ok?

Because comment spammers don't use the word "crap." There aren't very many customers for it...

"This is similar to the scheme I always imagined as a high school kid in the 70's that I was going to use once I had money -- buy vinyl instead of tapes, but only ever play the vinyl in order to make a new tape for day-to-day use. But then this scheme got gazumped before I'd even left university by the advent of CDs."

I did the same thing in the early 80's.....until I got a CD player for Christams in 1985.

I just bought a new Lincoln, which has factory-equipped THX II certified audio, with 14 speakers at 600 watts. I thought I'd use an Ipod to make my CD collection more accessible in the car via the Ipod jack. There isn't a compression scheme available in Itunes that comes close to the original CD, playing in the built in changer.