Vinyl or CD

I think they are both right and therefore it is a matter of taste and what one wants to prioritize.

MP3 is substantially the same as CD in terms of sound rendering.

What matters though, in my opinion, is not so much the medium but where we listen to the music: a good quality stereophonic system remains unsurpassed and unsurpassed.

I am quite ignorant on the subject,

but as far as I know, mp3 files are not as hi-fi as people think; in reality, they have something less (a lot, I would say).

mp3s are audio files from which some frequencies have been removed to make them lighter and, consequently, to make mp3 audio players (e.g., iPod) more spacious. In fact, if memory serves me right, mp3 files and mp3 audio players should be roughly contemporaneous.

For this question, we always return to the issue of listening. Vinyl records certainly have an analog sound and are therefore richer. It is also true that vinyls, through repeated listening, begin to lose dynamics. I had an AES (Audio Engineering Society) article somewhere that calculated how much the loudness threshold decreased with each listen. The CD does not wear out because there is no type of friction since there is no reading stylus. In fact, reading is entrusted to a lens that projects a laser beam onto the disc. When this is reflected by the disc, it corresponds to a digit of the binary code, whereas when it is not reflected, it corresponds to the remaining digit (respectively 1 and 0). Obviously, if there is no friction, the problem of hiss does not exist. The hiss heard in CDs is actually due to the noise from the microphone preamplifiers of the recordings. There are also techniques to eliminate them further using spectral analysis, a process known as sound restoration. MP3 is a compressed format. A vast amount of information is removed (it then depends on the MP3 conversion bitrate), in any case, it is based on very complex mathematical, physical, and psychoacoustic algorithms, and once a certain bitrate threshold is exceeded, the MP3 remains indistinguishable from recordings with lossless material made on CD. MP3 was born because in the era of MP3 players, a lightweight format capable of allowing music listening on the go was sought. Early MP3 players had quite small memory, so file sizes were very important. In fact, fitting 40 MB files into a 1 GB device (1000/40 = 25) is one thing; fitting 4 MB files (1000/4 = 250) is another. Essentially, with a file that weighs 10 times less, you can fit 10 times more files than would have fit uncompressed.

For obvious reasons, when talking about audio projects, it is always advisable to maintain lossless files so that they can be reworked in the future without compromising final quality. In fact, working on an uncompressed file to then compress it is one thing; working on a compressed file to recompress it is another: we will witness further loss of information. To draw a parallel, it is one thing to take an original document to make a photocopy, keep the original, and eventually photocopy it again. It is another thing to photocopy photocopies. Sooner or later, through the various steps, the loss of information will be such that the text of the document can no longer be read. In the field of audio, the operation is almost analogous.

Why was I talking about listening at the beginning? Because if you listen to music with 3-euro Chinese earphones, then everything will sound the same; we won't be able to perceive nuances, whether we are talking about vinyl, WAV, or MP3.

I leave you with this article I wrote for the ingegneriadelsuono.com website where the subject is treated in a more scientific and complete way... http://www.ingegneriadelsuono.com/2016/10/03/mp3-vs-waveaiff-lossy-vs-lossless/

Thanks Simone.. as usual.. exhaustive.

Anyway, the rustling of our eardrum is also very important. Before a concert in a hall, there is never the silence that a CD reproduces. Sometimes in certain choirs (I have a recording of Lasso's Orlando made in a cathedral) the voice starts as if it were arising from nothing... very unnatural..

Furthermore, the rustling we hear makes us understand that it is a recording and therefore between us and what is heard there will be the so-called recorded "air," and it is precisely this mechanism of "revealing itself" like a recording that makes us better appreciate what has been recorded.

On the other hand, where they want to eliminate all those sounds that are not proper to the acoustics emanated by the sound sources, in my opinion, damage is done because the ear does not perceive them as a recording of something but "AS" that something... and the flaws come to light, since it is actually a recording and not reality.

In essence, opening the window and listening to an argument in the street is not like listening to it without hearing anything else.... someone saying something, a bus honking its horn, etc. etc.

My ranking (quoting what Simone says about earphones and Daniele about HI FI systems) is:

Vinyl, CD, MP3

Some further reflections

https://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/1131-la-seconda-primavera-del-vinile

Thanks guys for your answers. I just wanted to add a curiosity, we now take for granted that inventions in this field are only, or almost, the work of Asians or Americans; the inventor of the MP3 is an Italian engineer, a certain Leonardo Chiariglione.

But seriously? Come on....then we really haven't hit rock bottom...hi hi hi .

fabio73 wrote:

But seriously? Come on.... then we really haven't hit rock bottom... hi hi hi .

...it depends on who he worked for

https://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/4134-in-questo-paese-avere-un-cervello-è-un-handicap

This is also true...