LinuxQuestions.org - is compressed formats' sound quality that bad?

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is compressed formats' sound quality that bad?

Quote:

Originally Posted by b0uncer (Post 3242726)

If you write an audio cd (a cd with audio tracks, not a data cd with audio data files), the tracks placed on that disc are not in wma/mp3/ogg/wav format, but they are instead decoded from whatever format the original files are to non-compressed audio that is then placed on the disc as tracks. If you rip a cd to wma files (or any other compressed format such as mp3), you lose some sound quality (and get a file size about 1/10 of what it would be without that compression), and if you then write those files into a (regular) audio cd, you don't get any quality back - that is, the second cd has worse sound quality than the first. To get around this problem, clone the original audio cd and do not compress the audio during the process.

I'm skeptical of whether the loss in sound quality from using compressed audio formats is very significant if one doesn't have very sensitive hearing. I've burned any number of CDs over the years using WMA format (I don't burn music in Linux yet because I haven't settled issues of what format to use and what program to burn with), and they all sounded fine to me. Disclosure: I wear hearing aids. But my hearing is supposed to be okay (within the limitation that, as I've been told, I'm not hearing what others hear) when they're on.

It seems like the answer would be rather obvious, but yes, I would have to say your poor hearing is the problem. There is definitely a difference between CDA and a low bitrate MP3 on good sound hardware.

While you can probably function perfectly fine with your hearing aid, it doesn't have the frequency response of a healthy human ear; so you would have a lot of trouble discerning the high and low frequencies that are stripped out of the audio during compression.

If it sounds ok to you, why are you concerned? Other people will have their opinions, me included, but if the sound as you experience it meets your requirements, I don't see that there is an issue.