For the majority of people, mp3s seem to be "just as good" enough.
I remember some low-bitrate songs encoded with some very early encoder where you could hear a difference. Not necessarily "the" difference but "a" difference. After a couple of years the worst encoder anyone could find was better already and since 192kbps bitrates mp3s were 99.999% there.
I'm sure that a trained ear can hear differences between 256kbps vs. 320kbps in a special studio with high-end audiocards, amplifiers and speakers but 99.999% of all people don't and they don't own the equipment either.
The conventional wisdom is just that - MP3s don't sound any different than their CD counterpart, but we all know that they don't have the same degree of fidelity to the original mastered audio files. While it is true that most cannot detect the differences between MP3 (and other lossy formats) and PCM (lossless) audio, this is beginning to change as consumers become used to a higher quality of sound delivery than before. The popularity of Beats headphones, for instance, meant that hip hop producers could no longer just push the limiter until the sub bass begins to sound farty - their fans were all equipped to hear the differences now.
Vinyl playback, in the pre-CD days, had consumers interested in a whole different kind of audio fidelity. The noises in the record were largely ignored, and nobody tried to get past them. Now, all listeners notice the sound of a vinyl record immediately, and people either love it or hate it.
The point I'm making here is that audio fidelity and quality are separate topics, but while fidelity is an objective measurement of audio, quality is a subjective one, and it shifts with the culture of the day. The problem with the MP3 and other lossy audio formats is that they are taken to be the same as their lossless origins. Consumers will catch up to the decay that MP3 codecs cause and feel the same way about them that a millennial feels about VHS tapes. It may take a few years, or even decades, to arrive there, though.
>The popularity of Beats headphones, for instance, meant that hip hop producers could no longer just push the limiter until the sub bass begins to sound farty - their fans were all equipped to hear the differences now.
I think you're being overly charitable about how well Beats perform.
Not really. They're terrible headphones in the grand scheme of things - especially in terms of their price:performance - but they're a huge upgrade for most consumers.
That's probably the weakest compliment that I've heard for a set of headphones ever. I have something like 7 pairs of earbuds and I pine for the bass that I remember from my crummy Philips HS820 (foldable neckband) headphones.
For some reason the only place to get good earbuds is from someone who is selling something else: Samsung's in-ear earbuds sold with Galaxy devices and Apple's earbuds are both somewhere between OK and pretty good.
>For some reason the only place to get good earbuds is from someone who is selling something else
Or you buy quality stand-alones from Shure, Sennheiser, Beyer Dynamic, or Sony (and many more probably)? I always throw into my e-waste bin the Apple earbuds since they're both really low quality. The Shure SE215s are so much better than any bundled earbuds it's barely an opinion.
> Consumers will catch up to the decay that MP3 codecs cause and feel the same way about them that a millennial feels about VHS tapes. It may take a few years, or even decades, to arrive there, though.
I'm not sure if that's really a fair comparison. The difference in both video and sound quality between a VHS tap and a DVD is easily noticeable. There is also improved cost and improved convenience. Cost and convenience won't vary much with the higher quality or lossless digital formats, so you're solely relying on quality, which most people seem to have a hard time distinguishing between.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of: DVDs don't need to be rewound, discs take up less space than tapes, DVDs don't degrade with repeated viewings, you don't have to futz with tracking when watching a DVD (I totally forgot about tracking until now! Good riddance!), DVDs come with multiple audio and subtitle tracks (anime fans especially love these), DVDs can be watched on a computer without specialized equipment (seriously, this was the main reason I switched to DVD as a teenager: I could watch one on the same screen I did everything else on!), DVDs can have all kinds of special features...
If it was a simple matter of a quality difference that was barely perceptible to the human ear, especially on consumer-grade equipment, DVDs would have never replaced VHS.
Oh, and audiophile equipment still hasn't trickled down to the consumer level yet. Every other technology that starts as a high-end professional thing trickles down to the consumer, but audiophile equipment stays right in the ultra-high-end so-expensive-your-wallet-cries sector forever and ever and ever.
The trouble with audiophile gear is that it is really a scam to separate people from their money. I've found that, for me at least, the best deals for music fidelity are in studio-type equipment. A good pair of powered mid-field studio monitors and a Focusrite FireWire audio interface gets me sound that would cost $thousands if I bought audiophile-market gear.
Also, there are some interesting audio cards for the Raspberry Pi that are quite reasonable and offer great sound. I've set up an old Model B with the Wolfson card and RuneAudio, and plugged in my monitors. Outstanding sound from a box that cost less than $100.
Audio is engineering, not magic. Sure, people can spend big bucks on AudioQuest cables with Extra Bling, but I'm not one of them. I even consider Monster to be a ripoff.
I know somebody who used to buy Monster, but only because he worked at Best Buy (this was years ago: he quit Best Buy in 2007), and his employee discount was so good that he was paying considerably less for Monster than he would've paid for dirt-cheap cables anywhere else.
He would show off, too: dude had his apartment wired with Monster outdoor cables, just because he wanted to show off that his employee discount was so good that even a broke-ass college student can afford to buy Monster outdoor cables on it and use them everywhere.
Maybe. The competing standard for many, many years was analog FM, though. Most places now don't even have the 300kb/s digital radio.
192kb/s is definitely good enough for the vast majority of people. There are always going to be audiophiles and artists who make derivative works, but those aren't the people who are served by the widespread piracy of media.
Music consumers won't catch up to the decay that mp3's cause, _by definition_. Consumers only listen to music. The most sensitive, highly trained ears listening to the absolute best equipment in a perfect environment cannot reliably tell the difference between a decent mp3 and the original CD. Anybody who tries to distinguish guesses wrong as often as they guess right. Anybody who thinks they can tell the difference either got lucky the first time and quit testing, or is doing a flawed test (improper blinding, bad encoder, etc.)
The only way any consumer will ever notice that music is from an MP3 is if it's a bad encoding. That's the fault of whoever chose the encoding parameters, or picked an obsolete encoder. But even CDs aren't immune from stupid people. Lots of poor quality CDs are produced. I actually bought a major label CD with a song that clipped! It was mastered so loud that it clipped, and they didn't even bother to fix it. That's the sort of problem you can detect with software -- if you're deaf, because even my grandma could hear the flaw. How that got released, I'll never know. Yuck!
Only music producers may notice the "decay" you speak of. MP3 compression throws away data. It's data that no human ear can possibly hear, but when you're in the business of making music, you want to do things like process samples to change how they sound. It's possible to transform uncompressed audio data to bring out sounds that weren't audible before. Those inaudible sounds are likely to be thrown away by an mp3 encoder, making that sort of processing impossible.
But even CD quality PCM audio isn't lossless. It's perfect for listening to, but it's not great for processing. Music is often recorded and processed at higher bit-depths and frequencies before being compressed down to CD quality. You can't possibly hear the difference among studio quality 24 bit 192 khz, CD-quality 16 bit 44 khz, and a good mp3 encoding -- but the studio quality data gives you more processing headroom.
The photography world has analogous issues. Professional photographers and serious amateurs often shoot "raw". Their camperas are capable of producing normal jpeg files, but they don't use that feature. Instead they shoot and process massive, uncompressed files containing the raw sensor data. They then export the processed raw files to jpeg for publishing or printing. You can't see the difference between a raw file and a jpeg. (Actually, a jpeg straight off the camera often looks better than the raw file because the camera does a bit of processing.) The reason photographers bother with the big, unwieldy raw files is that they have more processing headroom. If a raw photo is too dark and there's a big black shadow in one corner, you can ofter brighten it up in postpressing and reveal the flowers that were there. If you do the same to a jpeg, which has much less information, the big black shadow will often brighten up into a big gray shadow. The "invisible" detail in the flowers has been thrown away during compression. The point is, the original unprocessed images looked the same. The differences are invisible in the same way that the differences between CD audio and good mp3s are inaudible. The differences only matter when you go to process the data.
I appreciate what you're saying, and largely agree, but I'm not sure your photography analogy holds up. Although this could just be my ignorance of photography because I'm not 100% sure what data "raw" formats hold. But from the sounds of it, that might be closer compared to a tracked out song, meaning pre-mixdown, where you're accessing individual instrument recordings.
As an aside, I know producers who have sampled from lossy formats and had those songs put on major labor records. It's not that big of an issue, though I suppose how the sample is used could make in impact on it.
You speak of ...compressing down to CD quality. That's wrong. The samples stored on a CD are not compressed, as opposed to compressed formats like MP3.
The issue is that you can't reencode. I can't take a 256kbps MP3 (or even 320) and then reencode it at 128kbps for my portable media player without significant lossage.
I remember some low-bitrate songs encoded with some very early encoder where you could hear a difference. Not necessarily "the" difference but "a" difference. After a couple of years the worst encoder anyone could find was better already and since 192kbps bitrates mp3s were 99.999% there.
I'm sure that a trained ear can hear differences between 256kbps vs. 320kbps in a special studio with high-end audiocards, amplifiers and speakers but 99.999% of all people don't and they don't own the equipment either.