So I've got a fairly decent high set up but have been increasingly downloading music on to my phone and playing through my system just connected via the headphone jack on the phone.
The other day I was sat here listening to some new stuff (from recommendations from a thread on here) and thought, this sounds really flat in tone, maybe time to upgrade the amp.
Next day back to a old faithful cd and Boom, good old proper quality sound.
So guessing it's the way mp3s get downloaded.
Is there a way to improve this? Other than buying cos for every album I listen to?
Are you paying for the songs or downloading elsewhere? If the latter, try and find an HD downloader. FLVTO are good ime
So guessing it's the way mp3s get downloaded.
The quality that they're encoded to is what makes the difference, that and the mastering.
Depending on where you're getting you're music from they maybe be lower quality mp3s encoded at 128kbps, I think the free version of Spotify uses this level of encoding. If you're paying for Spotify/buying songs they should be at 320kpbs and sound a lot better. If you're getting good quality mp3s and it still sounds duff its probably because they've been mastered to sound good on a set of iPod headphones so you'll probably lose some of the subtlety.
Anything encoded under 320kbps will be somewhat lacking on a decent system.
There's a few things here... A headphone jack to 2 phono is a pile of turd for a start. You're better off getting a digital signal out from the phone And running that from a dac to your amp. I use a sonos connect for this. Does a good job.
But - iTunes downloads Are still only 256 I think. I rip CDs at 320 and then try them side by side through the dac v cd. They're pretty good... But still lacks some of the detail and punch of cd.
If any audiophiles can offer better ideas- I'm all ears!!
Sticking them on the phone and playing through the headphone jack won't help either.
iTunes doesn't sell true 320's as said above, which is why I refuse to buy from there.
But in reality, no one can hear the difference between a 320 mp3 and music from a CD, if you wish to challenge that, please spend some time watching this:
TL;DW: No, you can't tell the difference between a 320 and CD quality.
So, that leaves us with the quality of MP3, or the quality of your MP3 player.
Whilst i'm not sure the headphone jack of your phone will degrade any quality (Again, watch the video above - you can't really hear any degradation down to 8bits audio, and any modern DAC is many times that.) but I can't comment specifically, only my knowledge from the video.
Soooo, that means the MP3 you downloaded was poo.
If it says its a 320, it's possibly a transcode (encoded lower, then re-encoded at a higher rate just so its says 320 - **** knows why people do this.).
Or maybe its the track itself. If you were listening to something super squashed with little dynamics against something from the CD that has a lot of dynamics with nice brilliant highs etc.
TL;DR Many factors, I don't really know if its the iphone jack, but it certainly wont be 320 vs CD if you blind test with the same music.
EDIT: although sticking it on an iPhone will mean it plays from iTunes, right? So yeah, see above - itunes converts to some quality less than 320. So that might be your issue.
You're doing
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Just tried that FLVTO site alpineharry - so good, thanks man. 🙂
That ^ pono player is a joke, both stylistically and sonically, in an anechoic chamber with a pair of Sennheiser HE90's you just might be able to detect a difference between a 44.1kHz/16bit recording and a 192kHz/24bit recording but i would not want to bet any amount of money on a successful series of A/B tests to determine which.
Not sure if this is relevant to you, but if you're asking "is there anything better than MP3 for music", then the answer is 'yes', though it depends on the source.
For example, if you're ripping your own CDs to listen to them on your phone or MP3 player, you don't have to sample them as MP3 files. Now that phones/laptops have a lot of storage capacity, I rip my CDs at 192kHz/24Bit, i.e. loss-less digitisation. I save this data as WAV or FLAC - if I was an Apple user, I'd choose ALAC. I can always convert these files to MP3 at a later stage, but at least I've got the best possible quality to start with. It's the same as scanning in an old photo and saving it as a TIFF, instead of a 'lossy' JPEG.
In terms of buying digital music online, then most sites are still limited to lossy MP3 formats, but some are now moving towards FLAC, as it's a non-propitiatory loss-less format that some devices support. I don't think it'll be long before everyone's buying 'High Resolution' digital audio instead of MP3.
In the past I've been able to choose WAV instead of MP3 when buying music, but I can't remember who that was with.
Hope this helps.
I rip my CDs at 192kHz/24Bit
I'd just stick to 44.1kHz/16bit if I were you - seeing as that's what's on the CD's - upsampling introduces distortions IIRC.
I'd stick to FLAC for downloads if I were you. I think ALAC is FLAC with an Apple 'coating'.
Ogg is supposed to be good, but I've never tried it.
EDIT free music:
https://archive.org/details/audio
, I rip my CDs at 192kHz/24Bit
As gofasterstripes says - it is utterly meaningless ripping your cd's at such a bit rate - they do not have the amount of information to begin with to benefit from ripping at 192kHz/24bit so it'd be like buying a book, then randomly inserting words to the effect that more words must surely equal [i]better[/i] reading.
jim25 - how/where are you downloading music from?, and what type of phone do you have? - this will have a bearing on suggestions regarding how to improve the listening experience for you.
Ogg Vorbis was quite the [i]thing[/i] 10 odd years ago but is easily surpassed these days.