OSNews > Thread > "RE[6]: About time." by Dave

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 2nd Apr 2007 15:23 UTC

This morning, Apple and EMI announced the availabilty of DRM-free music in the iTunes Music Store. DRM-free songs will feature a higher audio quality (256kbps), and will cost USD/EUR 1.29 per song. They also announced that they are working on getting The Beatles' music in the iTMS.

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RE[6]: About time.

by Dave_K on Tue 3rd Apr 2007 18:41 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: About time."

Member since:
2005-11-16

Exactly. Its all about RANGE. Mp3s get their compression by discarding things in the upper and lower frequencies.

That's part of it, but there's a lot more than that to the psychoacoustic model used for MP3 compression.

This is perfectly acceptable for an mp3 player while exercising, or a ringtone on your cellphone, and a lot of other uses. It is not acceptable however when using it with a sound system that is very capable of producing those frequencies that the mp3 discarded.

Being able to reproduce frequencies seems a little pointless if the human ear can't actually hear them.

In another post on here I said that I recently bought an expensive (well, $2k is expensive for me) audio system and it is like night and day between 256 and FLAC.

I'd find this kind of claim easier to believe if people could back it up with blind testing, and if many audiophiles didn't claim similar 'night and day' differences when testing snake-oil products like expensive power cables...

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