Does it annoy you that CD and MP3 sound quality sucks?

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I’m very detail oriented when it comes to music. I sometimes like to concentrate on small background sounds that add to the mood. It bothers me that recordings are so low quality these days. I find that when there’s too many distinct instruments/sounds layered together in a musical piece the sounds will start to bleed together into a mush and lose their richness. Does this bother anyone else?

Vinyl FTW!

Sí!

depends on who's making them. I bought a magazine with a DVD's worth of 'studio gear' (VST), which can allow me to overmix and overdo track after track, after track...

MP3's are a compromise between size (speed of downloading), and fidelity. Since they're a lossy sort of conversion, you do lose quality. But as many people have ear buds blasing away, they may not hear the difference.

Spent many a year making songs with cassette tape (8-track, 1 way). Compared to that, MP3s sound fairly well...

to each their own.

Are SACD or DVD-A still around?

Ya. I adamantly refused to rip my cds to my computer at anything but a rather high byterate, but the real issue is getting them to fit on your ipod at a high byterate, so I needed to switch to the same s**t quality you get when you usually download them from itunes

Yeah, it annoys me. There are some albums that I can't even listen to for this reason. Most high bitrate mp3's are okay for me, but what annoys me is not the compression, but the modern mastering. Remastered albums from the last few years just have clipping all over them in order to make them compete with the new albums volume-wise while destroying the dynamic range of the track. I do listen to alot of vinyl, and prefer it, but unfortunately I can't fit tens of thousands of songs in my pocket that way. I only listen to mp3's that are 320 cbr or 256 vbr though. Anything lower just sounds like garbage.

CDs are fine with me... if they are used to the fullest. But nowadays with the loudness wars... I can notice the problems with modern production and I don't like it. I don't care if it's a crappy recording because that's all the musicians could come up with... but if it's a professional, high production value CD I expect it to sound good.... and the noticeable clipping is very annoying. It shouldn't be there...

Lossy MP3s aren't a problem, since I can get all my music on CD. If the lossy version is the only way to get the music... then I'd be upset.

I just buy used CDs off of amazon.com... try to get them for less than 10 with shipping. Rip them to my computer and encode using flac. Encode the flac to mp3 for my portable use...

I was big on using ogg vorbis, but I stopped caring about that format since very few players supported it... and decided to stick with the old standby mp3... there maybe better formats... but there is something to be said for support over all portable music players.... if you already are making a compromise with a lossy format.

I'm all about getting the best quality with the fewest amount of resources/hassle. Used CDs encoded into flacs played through my squeezebox is all I'll ever need.

IT is not so much an issue with the medium, it is how it is amplified, I find. Speakers are severely limited in their ability to reproduce sound. There are some decent speakers out there, but they still fall short as you cannot have the ambience exactly replicated as during the recording.

Vinyl is no better as it is even worse than CD. Vinyl has superiority with smaller ensembles while CDs have superiority with larger ensembles. Vinyl is one of the reasons why we ditched the orchestras of the 19th century in the first place.

Original "Vinyl" type records were not electric, but wind-up. Orchestras were the only thing loud enough to record on them in mass production before electric amplifiers were invented. Those discs spun more than twice as fast as later electric turntables.

Digital sound can never exceed the quality of original Analog because Analog has an INFINITE sampling rate and NO DATA LOSS FROM DIGITAL COMPRESSION. Considering that CDs can only playback 44100 pieces of any sound per second with a limited number of bits of accuracy, and that if a loud sound uses all of those bits, a pin drop must be removed to make room for it, where could any higher quality than the original sound come from? And then where could it be recorded on the CD? And MP3, if 320kbs is the maximum, that's only the bits, which would be at best equivalent to 40000 pieces of any sound per second, and it's method of compression even more aggressively leaves out and throws away any sounds that it calculates that it doesn't think you can hear anyway.

But the real problem is crappy recordings, players, and cheap speakers and headphones that most people have to play music with these days, because most people cannot hear defects in well-done recordings of any kind that they have. CD and MP3 maximum frequency range is about 20,000 Hz, just a little above average hearing range.

oh yes, I'm a big sound-quality pervert. I hate bad mastering. good speakers and headphones are a staple, I can spend ridiculous amounts on that kind of stuff.

I don't have a problem with CDs per se, except when they skip. MP3s at poor quality lose some of the details which can be annoying if say a particular small detail really makes a song. But "poor quality" for me is somewhere below 128 kbps. Otherwise I'm not picky at all.

I'm not bothered by the sound quality of most CDs nor most Mp3s.

The issue is the needle to record and read. A laser approximates the ones and zeros and doesn't need to be exact to get those ones and zeros. A vinyl burning needle itself colours the sound as it has the same quibbles as the laser, but has no way of rectifying that error. Also consider that the burning needle itself has finite compression too, even more debilitating than the bitrates. -96 dB on a CD is silence. -96dB on a record is pink noise.

Also, electric amplifiers (op-amps) were invented before the phonograph. It was how the Telharmonium and the record player was able to be used.

From 1890-1900, nothing but orchestras were used but as 1900-1910 came along, competition came from the smaller cakewalk ensembles from the US as they were being proven to have superior sound over the orchestra. When the record players overwhelmed the piano in the following decades, orchestras and the grand maestro fell out of favour. It was only until the CD came out that orchestras were able to come back into the scene and reintroduce grand maestros who had been relegated to film scores.

Consider this: when dj's started in the 60's to play in clubs, tey chose rock and funk tracks. Rarely ever orchestral. Then the 80's came and the djs were feeling experimental. Orchestral albums were on the cheap so they bought them and used them. Orff's Carmina Burana was probably the most used, and only then they used single hits. If you listen to CD recordings of those 80's tracks, you'll see that the orchestra hits sound terribly distorted and warped (but cool none the less). So much so that they can't be replicated by CD samplings, thus they need to be sampled from the original vinyl to get the same effect.

anything above 128kbps is fine by me ^.^ would you rather have a well mastered and polished 16bit recording or an old crappy 4 track tape recording of an out of tune guitar in pristine 24bit? XD

Depending on the context, I might find the out-of-tune guitar to be more exciting.