turboman786

Ive just got an MP3 player in mycar...Im of the opinion that the sound quality is not as crisp as with CDs....is this true or am I imagining things?Anyone shed any light?

andyVI

MP3 is a compressed format the lower the bit rate the lower the quality.

judgejules

It all depends on your rip quality. I rip at 256kbits as I could swear that I could hear artifacts caused by the compression at lower rates. Personally I think anything above this will not be noticable unless you're in a purpose built listening room.

~Jules

nom

Yep. You're hearing right! MP3 is not as good as CD, IMO even at the highest sampling rate it's still quite noticeable. But not when the engine is on... So the whole trick is to find the lowest sampling rate that you find OK. Something else to bear in mind is that not all rippers are of the same quality - use RealPlayer or Winwhateveritscalled (the one with 'windows') & even the highest rate isn't very good - or at least, wasn't good last time I gave it a bash, which admittedly was some time ago now . A very good one is LAME with ExactAudioCopy as the front end. You can do a lot lower sampling rates to get as good a quality with this one. 192 variable at the 'high quality' setting is the 'break even' point to me - it's very much diminishing returns after that; some MP3 players can't cope with the variable bit rates, though, so a higher sampling rate needs to be picked, unfortunately, to get the same apparent quality.

Sorry for the drivel. Hope some of it helps!

chiark

In the car on the move, with 192kbit or above you'll be hard pushed to hear IMHO. With a very transparent set-up you'll notice it when stationary, but only if you're actually listening...

IMHO.