The Sony MD standard as alwys used ATRAC thought there have beens a few versions. I think ATRAC3 is the latest? You can upload MP3s to a MiniDisc player but most of them do not play MP3 directly, instead the MP3 is converted to ATRAC before being uploaded to the player! Makes you think that uploading MP3 to a MiniDisc play might degrade the sound quality even more given that the MP3 is decoded and then recompressed???
Compression standards such as MP3/OGG and others are lossy compressors therefore some quality degradation is to be expected. Most compression schemes will attempt to do as you mentioned which is to remove information that human ear cannot process anyway. But when you restrict the compressor to a specific bitrate such as 128kbits/sec then the compressor will unfortunately remove more information from the original signal that will be detectable by the human ear. You can play with this by compressing the same song at two different birates such as 64kbits/sec and 256kbits/sec. Playing those two samples one after the other will show the difference and all the loss that the lower bitrate is causing.
But sound quality is subjective like many things. Therefore if MP3s at 128kbits/sec sound alright to you then good an MP3 Player costing less will be perfect for you needs. If you are a more demanding listener perhaps you will need to investigate other Players such as MiniDiscs,CDs or perhaps DVD-Audio or even SACD althought I don't think any company as made portable players out of those standards ?:-)
I speak two languages (French/English) for em the combination of two have been very usefull when traveling. French gives me access to Spanish/Italian/Portuguese... and English comes in handy for Swedish/Norsk/German. Sometimes the help knowing more than one language provides is not the ability to understand immediatly but sometimes it helps pronounciation a great deal!
I would expect the english Language to remain dominant for some time mainly due to economic and political positions English Speaking countries enjoy.
I also ask myself if english will not suffer the same fate as other languages (French in my experience) that is, an influx of people suddenly speaking english will probably pressure the language in some type of evolution that may well make it evolve into something else ? 1 billion Chinese suddenly using Mandrin and English might make a new fork in the english language that cannot be overlooked ???
I went to China 2 years ago for business and I had some meetings with ISPs in Beijing. I was surprised when a techician from one of the major ISPs in China mentioned that the Chinese Government actualy filtered content. But he also mentioned that another tactic used it to keep access links to the outside(namely the internet) to a minimum therefore encouraging the consumption of internal Chinese content instead of trying to access out of china coutent that came in at a crawling pace.
Surely they understand that defeating filtering is not a hard task for technicaly able users. I also think this is pretty much a useless effort they will eventualy have to stop. Instead they should concentrate their efforts into bringing China into the new millenium and open themselves to the world.
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The Sony MD standard as alwys used ATRAC thought there have beens a few versions. I think ATRAC3 is the latest? You can upload MP3s to a MiniDisc player but most of them do not play MP3 directly, instead the MP3 is converted to ATRAC before being uploaded to the player! Makes you think that uploading MP3 to a MiniDisc play might degrade the sound quality even more given that the MP3 is decoded and then recompressed???
Compression standards such as MP3/OGG and others are lossy compressors therefore some quality degradation is to be expected. Most compression schemes will attempt to do as you mentioned which is to remove information that human ear cannot process anyway. But when you restrict the compressor to a specific bitrate such as 128kbits/sec then the compressor will unfortunately remove more information from the original signal that will be detectable by the human ear. You can play with this by compressing the same song at two different birates such as 64kbits/sec and 256kbits/sec. Playing those two samples one after the other will show the difference and all the loss that the lower bitrate is causing.
:-)
But sound quality is subjective like many things. Therefore if MP3s at 128kbits/sec sound alright to you then good an MP3 Player costing less will be perfect for you needs. If you are a more demanding listener perhaps you will need to investigate other Players such as MiniDiscs,CDs or perhaps DVD-Audio or even SACD althought I don't think any company as made portable players out of those standards ?
alp!
I speak two languages (French/English) for em the combination of two have been very usefull when traveling. French gives me access to Spanish/Italian/Portuguese... and English comes in handy for Swedish/Norsk/German. Sometimes the help knowing more than one language provides is not the ability to understand immediatly but sometimes it helps pronounciation a great deal!
I would expect the english Language to remain dominant for some time mainly due to economic and political positions English Speaking countries enjoy.
I also ask myself if english will not suffer the same fate as other languages (French in my experience) that is, an influx of people suddenly speaking english will probably pressure the language in some type of evolution that may well make it evolve into something else ? 1 billion Chinese suddenly using Mandrin and English might make a new fork in the english language that cannot be overlooked ???
I went to China 2 years ago for business and I had some meetings with ISPs in Beijing. I was surprised when a techician from one of the major ISPs in China mentioned that the Chinese Government actualy filtered content. But he also mentioned that another tactic used it to keep access links to the outside(namely the internet) to a minimum therefore encouraging the consumption of internal Chinese content instead of trying to access out of china coutent that came in at a crawling pace.
Surely they understand that defeating filtering is not a hard task for technicaly able users. I also think this is pretty much a useless effort they will eventualy have to stop. Instead they should concentrate their efforts into bringing China into the new millenium and open themselves to the world.
http://www.BarreObliquePoint.org/