Somethin I wondered

[Greg12]

MP3 works by cutting out unhearable noises.

What if you cut out light spetrums that we can't see.

[patrickm]

we're not really recording a lot of info in the IR/UV spectra and beyond. basically, the digital images are made up of components of three main colors, red, green, blue. the colors chosen (different for tv/monitors) don't exactly make up every color we can see, but it's very close.

and MP3 actually throws away quite a bit of audible stuff, not just 'unhearable noise'. it does try to take advantage of 'auditory masking' where a quiet sound is concealed by a louder sound, which usually means it doesn't get noticed a lot, but it is there and would be audible otherwise. and while i don't consider myself an audiophile, and i'm not a professional musician, you'd have to be almost deaf not to be able to tell a CD from a 128kbps MP3 on any decent stereo system. and even if you can't, take a WAV off a CD, encode it to an MP3, then decode that to another WAV. then use an audio editor to subtract the two WAV's, and listen to what's left over.