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No, add an analog track to the CD. Use it to error correct/average/overlay the digital copy. The quality of the output would end up being much higher than 44k/16 and would be impossible to reproduce using standard equipment. You could have several analog tracks, including one to restore the dynamic range that was destroyed by the nasty compression used by the commercial pablum producers.
It would require a new type of CD player, but all you gotta do is pitch it as a business opportunity.

By adding an analog correction track and keeping the digital track, you maintain backwards compatibility. It can even be done with one read head. You just need to buffer the entire song first.

On the other hand, the physical structure of a record limits the shenanigans you can do with compression. On a CD, the loudness wars has continued at full speed until, in some cases, we're listening to nothing more than modulated noise (less RMS than a sine wave).

Is it then surprising that some people say vinyl sounds better? No, but the reason isn't some magic ability of vinyl. A digital format with automatic Replay Gain (or something similar) would stop the loudness wars (since any dynamic range compression would be compensated by a decrease in volume from the RG check) and sound just as good, but there's no such standard.

I did an mp3 compression experiment with Coldplay "clocks". When compressed via mp3 to 128kbps, it sounds awful. Very noisy, and the note beginnings aren't clear. They sound TOO SOFT. Instead, when compressed to 320kbps, it sounds MUCH, MUCH better, and the "ding" effect when each note is hit, is heard much more clearly. The explanation is that a piano note contains a lot of high freq. harmonics (even if it's not a high note), and these are lost in the mp3 compression. Now, most MP3 music found on the internet is 192kbps, and the last time i checked, a lot of it was encoded at 128.

And that's WITHOUT taking into account the dynamic range loss in modern music (eew).

In short: Yes, the quality loss can be recognized by a human - specially one with music training. Of course, if you're the type of person who plays his iPod too loud with his earbuds, then your ear is already damaged enough so you won't be able to tell any difference. Too bad for you.

The problem isn't just compression. It's that the full dynamic range of CDs is no longer being used for most popular music. The wide dynamic range of a CD is a major reason why it is an advance over the LP--it's what gives CDs their great signal/noise ratio. There's more on the issue here:

http://georgegraham.com/compress.html
http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicrange.ht m

and pretty graphs here:
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynam ics.htm

I mean, I spent about $1,000 on a decent sound system, why would I do that just to listen to sound quality matched by a $50 ghetto blaster?

Good point. For most modern music 128K bitrate is just fine as even the CD's are comptessed to the point of distortion and clipping just to sound loud. Those CD's have no headroom decent S/N ratio, or dynamic range. They are not hurt by a low bitrate.

I have a pair of Yamaha NS-1000 speakers and a pair of Acoustic Research AR3's. I know I'm dating myself here, but I have more invested in quality high fidelity speakers than most people have in their entire sound system. I agree that a buck a track for a low bitrate file just doesn't cut it.

What's a crime is the way they have distorted the sound on CD's to increase the average volume at the expense of dynamic range and signal to noise ratio. Distortion is high on these recordings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
http://georgegraham.com/compress.html
http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicrange.ht m

That last bit about artists' reputations suffering from sales of inferior quality pirated copies is kinda questionable in this day and age. A pirated CD should sound the same as the real thing, sometimes better since they'll remove any DRM crap from it.

The part that sucks is the part where your great CD's source has been compressed to make it loud instead of maintaining headroom and dynamic range.

http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynam ics.htm

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_arti cle/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

http://georgegraham.com/compress.html

http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicrange.ht m

The first link is the most telling. It shows the clipped and maxxed out audio on some modern CD's compressed and squashed to just be loud constant noise. It's one of the reasons I quit buying CD's. The quality is gone to the point they sound just like a tape that was recorded at +20 Db on the VU meters. The clipping, loss of headroom and dynamic range is just the same.

You mean this I think.

http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicdeath.ht m

Check this out.

I'm not sure that we really need any more dynamic range than is offered by CDs, actually. 16 bits actually provides tremendous dynamic range -- so much so that almost no CDs actually use the range that is available.

The current CDs offer a very good dynamic range by itself, but as of late (well they've been at it for a few years already) labels have undergone a loudness war and are all but killing the dynamic range (see The Death of the Dynamic Range). There is also a fairly good article on the subject on the wikipedia including a most telling comparison of ABBA's One of Us 1981 version and 2005 remastering

CDs have a tremendous dynamic range, but it's less and less used in order to sound louder and louder.

As I recall, weren't there multiple "standards" for audio CDs way back when? I seem to remember seeing CDs that were either tagged DDD, DAD, ADD, or AAD - depending on how "digital" the disc really was. I believe DDD meant it was digitally recorded, digitially mixed and digitially transfered, which was the highest quality you could get. That was popular on classical music CDs. But most popular music CDs were of the much lower AAD quality, because they were just reusing the original analog masters.

Wrong.

Just because a disk is DDD does not mean its good. Just because a disk is AAD does not mean its bad.

Some of my best sounding disks are AAD. Today, most all disks are DDD, but they still can sound like shit. Many DDD disks from around 1995 to 1999 sound horrible, this is mostly due to the "lets compress the hell out of this to make it sound LOUDER!". Thankfully, audio engineers learned from the mistakes of the era. Take a look at this URL:

    http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicdeath.ht m

Also, there were not different "standards". Before the DRM days, CDs were all "Red Book" standard.

Keep in mind that music is analog. Digital encoding of analog material is limited by the ADC (analog to digital converter) and to a lesser extent the DAC (digital to analog converter). There are a number of issues with digital recordings. The biggest issue is the harsh sound that digital encoding frequently brings. Today, most mixing in the digital domain is done at much greater than "CD quality". The best thing going for them are that digital sources can be transfered losslessly. You do not get the loss with each analog generation like you used to. But a lossless copy of junk still sounds exactly like the original junk.

The lossless copying of media has scared the media cartels for years. That is why we have DRM and other fun stuff like SCMS.

Yes. I'm an audiophile.