> As can I. :-) One thing about mp3 that has gotten my curiosity up is
> whether or not different sound cards can affect the sound quality of an
mp3.
> I have an older SoundBlaster 32 and I've *always* been able to tell the
> difference between a source and the mp3 equivalent up to 320 kbps. It
hasn't
> been so much that the music sounds altered like it does under 192 kbps but
> that the bass and treble seem to be cut. Would that be a product of my
sound
> card or the actually encoding scheme?
It can make a huge difference - when I upgraded from an old SB16 to my
Vortex2, it was definately noticable. It's still not as good as non-PC
sources, but a worthwhile improvement.
Bear in mind that PCs are very (electrically) noisy places, and you've often
got an unshielded soundcard inches away from loads of other chips. Added to
the fact that consumer cards tend to be designed for use with an average set
of PC speakers and they don't sound that good really.
CDs played through your CDROM drive should sound just as bad :)
> The reason I ask is my father, who is an avid mp3 downloader, burns most
of
> his selections into CD-R. Played over my same system, those songs sound
*so*
> much cleaner than when through my sound card -- not just in frequency
> response but also there's less of the sparking/warbling/annoying as hell
> sound from mp3s. That would lead me to think the decoder is better, but
like
> MD shouldn't the end result always be the same? Regardless, MD wins hands
> down. He's got some songs burned into CD-R that were 80 kbps. He claims he
> can't tell anything wrong with him. Poor, poor old man. :-)
It's not the compression scheme that's causing (most of) the quality loss -
rather the soundcard for the reasons described above.
Try extracting the audio from a CD to a .wav, make a copy of that and encode
it at various bitrates. Then convert those mp3s back to .wav and burn the
lot onto a CDR. Then you've got a reasonably fair test of the compression
method, without external factors like soundcard/cable quality coming into
play.
Simon
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