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MP3 better than WAV..?

TRC

TRC

Well-Known Member
At a local computer shop recently, I was told about a music format called "CD Audio" which supposedly surpasses WAV. This man told me that WAV was the earliest form of digital audio and now considered the worst. He said that MP3 is now far better. He said the best is CD Audio. This format I'm not familiar with, plus, I was always of the thought that WAV was the best and MP3 was the worst. Your comments please.
 
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I would think that CD audio is just that Compact Disc Digital Audio or "CD quality".
.WAV is a lossless and uncompressed while .MP3 is lossy and compressed. I would think that would indicate .WAV is therefore better quality. On my Mac digital files I use .AIFF which is from what I understand similar to .WAV. The.WAV and .AIFF files are larger in file size compared to their MP3 counterparts.
 
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It is fascinating how many stupid things so called "experts" can say and stay unpunished...

CD Audio is the name for a medium, and that's the CD "formated" for audio. It carries audio in 16bits with sampling at 44.1kHz.
As far as audio formats go, it's inferior to DVD-Audio, which is lossless and multichannel and at higher bitrate (both bit depth and sampling rate).

WAV is just an envelope format for audio and contains digital audio. It can contain as bad or as good a sound quality you care. It can contain "CD-Audio" level audio - you can rip a CD into wav files and I dare anyone identify the "wav" from the CD. It can contain higher bitrates than CD quality (like 24/192) in which case you have high definition audio. Or it can contain 8bit at 8kHz sampling rate, in which case it will sound as good as a telephone line does.

MP3 is yet another envelope for compressed audio and again it can contain various bitrates with varying quality - from unacceptable to pretty descent. And while many will point out that a well produced 320kbps MP3 is as good as CD audio, it still is missing a lot of data and is in theory inferior to CD quality - let alone a high definition audio stored in wav format.
 
Your shopkeeper is full of beans.
CD Audio is the native encoding on Compact Discs, Linear Pulse Code Modulation
WAV files are lossless and a bit perfect copy of the LPCM can be encoded in a WAV file.
There are more useful formats such as flac and Apple Lossless that have room for data about the tracks and are much smaller while remaining a bit-perfect copy.
Any MP3 is lossy, they can be quite good for some purposes at high bit-rates, but information has been programmatically discarded to make the files small.
 
Working in a similar line of work as that shop keeper...... I try so hard not to do **** like that.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
 
yes he is clueless ,
as far as lossy formats go mp3 done at 320 kbps is a good trade off for size vs quality but being hard drives are big enough and cheap enough it makes little sense to not use flac or Apple Lossless

wav files can be uncompressed audio also but they take up too much space for no better quality so that is why flac or ALAC are still the files of choice for those wanting the best sound .

i do have a couple of High Definition Bluray audio discs and to my ears it does not sound any beter than my SACD or HD DVD discs do
 
TRC said:
At a local computer shop recently, I was told about a music format called "CD Audio" which supposedly surpasses WAV. This man told me that WAV was the earliest form of digital audio and now considered the worst. He said that MP3 is now far better. He said the best is CD Audio. This format I'm not familiar with, plus, I was always of the thought that WAV was the best and MP3 was the worst. Your comments please.
Click to expand...

there's always wma....
 
MP3 not acceptable for my needs. AAC is. WAV is but BWF is better. MP2 better than MP3 for my needs. Why rip it twice? Why transcode lossy? Only makes it worse.
 
MP3 is all right at higher bit rates ... I've been fairly happy with Amazon's downloads fer instance. As long as the MP3 is created from good clean original source, most would be hard pressed to tell the difference between that and lossless formats.

Where lossless shines is if you're into editing with multiple saves. Lossy formats will degrade with every save or conversion, where lossless still gives you bit for bit transcription. Short version, if it sounds worse when you're done, it's your fault, not the format.

One big disadvantage of WAV is it doesn't support internal tagging, as in track titles, artist name, album, etc. There's klutz workarounds, but you're better off going with FLAC, which is also lossless and a lot easier to work with in the digital library.

MP3 and similar formats are killer for portability due to the much smaller file size.

My main library is all FLAC (including the aforementioned Amazon downloads which I convert on the fly in jRiver Media Center), and the "five star" tracks are also saved in high resolution MP3 ... best of both worlds. Got a cute lil program called Flash Shuffler that I can just point at the MP3 folder and tell it how many gigs of random tracks to grab to fill up a thumb drive for the road.
 
KentTeffeteller said:
MP3 not acceptable for my needs. AAC is. WAV is but BWF is better. MP2 better than MP3 for my needs. Why rip it twice? Why transcode lossy? Only makes it worse.
Click to expand...

Just to clarify ... a one time conversion of lossy to lossless won't alter the quality of the recording. I only do it for conformity. That also gives me the opportunity to do multiple tweaks on problem tracks in SoundForge if I've a mind to without accumulating transcription errors.
 
As others have said, the computer shop guy has no idea what he's talking about.

There are three issues here:

(1) The resolution of the audio: bit depth and sampling rate

(2) The type (if any) and amount of compression: No compression, lossless compression, or lossy compression

(3) File formats (usually called containers) used to hold the audio information

"CD audio" is a specific audio specification: CD/redbook resolution (16 bit, 44.1kHz sample rate), no file compression, and the file format, as noted above, is LPCM, linear pulse code modulation. CD audio only shows up on CDs. If you rip a CD to your computer, you can retain the same resolution and audio quality, but the ripped files will not be "CD audio" per se; they will be in another file format (see below).

WAV is a file format: It can be CD resolution, but it also can be higher resolution (24 or 32 bit, and/or 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 or 192kHz sample rate). It uses no file compression, and the file container is WAV.

mp3 also is a file format: Its resolution can vary similarly to WAV, but it's rare to find an mp3 that doesn't use regular CD resolution. It uses lossy file compression, throwing out some of the audio information in order to shrink the file size. The type and level of compression can vary significantly. And the file container is mp3.

As the above illustrates, mp3 is superior if you need to save room on your hard drive or iPod. There also are probably some (though very, very few AFAIK) devices that won't play WAV files. And mp3s are easily tagged - you can add artist and album info, album art, etc. while WAV doesn't have as much of this capability.

For sound, though, WAV is superior because it's lossless while mp3 is lossy.

Finally. as others have noted, there are better and more common formats in use now:

- FLAC and Apple Lossless are file formats that use file compression to produce smaller files than WAV, but their compression is lossless so they retain all the musical information, unlike mp3. Apple Lossless is just as taggable as mp3, and FLAC is almost as taggable.

- SACD, DVD-Audio, and Blu-Ray Audio are audio specifications for physical discs that offer higher resolution than the CD Audio found on CDs.

There are many other formats (AIFF is like WAV only more taggable; APE, SHN and others are like FLAC and Apple Lossless, but not nearly as common these days; AAC is like mp3 but offers more efficient compression). And there are many other permutations - for example LPCM is the file container for CD audio, but LPCM also can be a container for higher-resolution audio, like the 16 bit 48kHz audio on many DVD video discs, and the higher resolution audio on DVD-Audio discs.

For computer audio, the simplest thing to remember is that FLAC and Apple Lossless represent the best combination of audio fidelity, file size, and taggability, and that if you are going to use or make mp3 files, the higher the quality setting, the better - 320kbps as someone above mentioned.
 
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KentTeffeteller said:
MP3 not acceptable for my needs. AAC is. WAV is but BWF is better. MP2 better than MP3 for my needs. Why rip it twice? Why transcode lossy? Only makes it worse.
Click to expand...

I'll transcode a subset of my library to MP3 320 for use in the car. The environment is poor and the head does not support flac, so critical listening is not an option, and I can but a whole road trip on a USB stick.

Otherwise everything is flac.
 
Flac Lossless to lossy high bit rate MP3 is fine, not the other way round. In my world, at work MP3 is frowned on since it is not multigenerational. Take an MP3 file and run it through several D/A-A/D hops and it sounds bad easily. MP2 tolerates this as does WAV files. BWF is broadcast wav files, which supports tagging. I wish this was incorporated in the wav standard so tagging would work consistently. I wish every player would play flac natively and handle it without issue as an added option.
 
Could be that some folks assume that the newest format is always the best ... like a "rule of thumb".

Off the top of my head ... I can think of one MP3 example that was better than a WAV file. Editors "An End Has a Start". I assumed it was better because the original CD recording was so compressed that the watered down MP3 copy just sounds better (or not as bad). Like adding more water to Chili that just turned out too hot & spicy ... one too many drops of Vicious Viper sauce.

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WAV doesn't support metadata (album artwork, etc.) as well as MP3. Maybe that part of what he meant?

I suggest FLAC or ALAC. Full metadata support and they don't take up quite as much room.
 
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