Re: New Thread: Preferred Formats

It has been a while since I went to wave, but my experience was that
when I had EACed and LAMEd a Who CD and played it with my AT, my
subwoofer sat mostly idle.  So much so I thought something was wrong.  I
popped in the same CD and the subwoofer came to life.  I sat the wife
and daughter down and they each identified the CD version as 'much'
better without knowing which was which.  Now all my CDs are stored as
WAV files and I create my own TOC files and all is well, except the sad
news is that now they can not tell the difference between a WAV file
played with the AT and the CD played with a $1,200 Pioneer Elite
Universal player.  So by accident, I convinced my self to stay with WAV
files.

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Turtle Beach Audiotron User Forum
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brent Aliverti
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 11:31 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AT] New Thread: Preferred Formats

> Previously, I ripped everything to 320K MP3.  However, after listening
to
> that for over a year I pulled out the original CD and was amazed at
the
> difference between the MP3 and the CD.  I'm slowly converting to WAV
now
> and all new music gets ripped to WAV.  I still keep the MP3 around for
> portable players.

Hi Howard,

When you compared 320K MP3 to WAV and were amazed by the difference,
what
was your methodology? And which MP3 encoder had you used initially? The
reason I ask is, if you were comparing the two, and you knew which was
the
WAV and which was the MP3, it's entirely possible that your brain was
subconsciously influencing your decision more than you realize and more
than
just what your ears told you. The mind is tricky that way. If you (like
most
people) are predisposed to think that non-compressed music is always
better
than compressed music, it's possible your mind tipped the scale that way
to
validate your mental model. I'm not saying that you didn't hear a real
difference, but I would be interested to know if you see the same
obvious
difference with a true blind test (using ABX software or with a friend
queuing up tracks and not telling you which is which until the test is
over).

Cheers!
Brent