Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed?

FunkeyMonk writes "The Christian Science monitor has an article discussing the gap between music fans and audiophiles when it comes to portable music. Would you pay a few cents more to have lossless downloads from iTunes and other online music retailers? As a classical musician myself, I choose not to download most of my music, but rather rip it myself in lossless format."

Comments

Re:GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out

[thc69]

Care to provide a link saying that satellite radio is 64Kbps? AFAIK, only the talk and comedy channels run that bitrate.

I am NOT an audiophile. However, 64Kbps is usually quite obvious to me, sounding muffled or warbled. Talk and comedy channels on XM and Sirius sound like that to me. It's especially obvious when such channels play music; it sounds horrible.

I think there's more to it than commonly known, however. I have one mp3 file that's 22.1kHz, 32kbps, and sounds better than any 64Kbps mp3 I've ever heard. I _can_ distinguish it from 128, but it's not intolerable; no artifacts, just slightly muffled. It takes up 700Kb and is ~3 minutes long. I'm unable to explain it. I wish I knew how it was encoded; I bet that for another 10% in size it would sound as good as 128.

Anyway, the music channels on Sirius sound as good to my unpretentious ears (on my basic equipment) as CDs. When I had XM, the integrated power cord/FM transmitter was awful and made everything sound like schitt, but the XTR7/Starmate/Streamer (same Sirius unit with different brandings) has the best FM transmitter I've ever used (I wish I could hack an input to use the XTR7 as a FM transmitter for other devices).

All that aside, there's no getting around a point others have made: Most people are listening to "portable music" on low-quality equipment in noisy environments.