Do you still play your actual audio cd's?

[p_l]

I still keep one rotary phone hooked up because if there's a prolonged power outage, other house phones which depend on a power source eventually stop functioning. About ten years ago, there was a big ice storm here and the old rotary phone was the only one that was still working after a few days of no power.

I remember push button light switches in the house I grew up in. Even back then I considered them an antique novelty, if you'll pardon the oxymoron.



Speaking of retro-futuristic push button technology, that reminds me of the dash-mounted push button automatic transmission in my 1964 Plymouth Valiant, which was already a vintage car when I had it in the early 80's.







I really loved that car. However, one retro technology I don't miss is eight track tapes, although once in your life you should have experienced a tender music-inspired moment interrupted by the jarring ka-chunk of the tape changing tracks.

[lordhutt]

Always play my real cd's!!!

MP3's just sound like crap to me through the home systems & vehicle systems, regardless of the bitrate.

I'm glad I don't have that 'problem'.
I can hear my cat walk across a shag carpet but I can tell the difference between a 160kbit mp3 and an original cd !!

So, that would be no cd's for me.

[FulciLives]

I voted "YES" because I mostly listen to music on my stereo and that means putting a CD into a DVD player (haven't had a CD only player in a while now). I do have a lot of MP3 and mostly FLAC on my computer and I do sometimes listen to stuff that way on my computer speakers as the computer and stereo are in another room.

I don't have a cell phone nor any dedicated MP3 capable player. No iPhone or iPod here.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[SingSing]

My car has a six-CD only changer, so that where most of the CDs go.

My wife SUV has a JVC player that can play CD or MP3 on CD. The MP3s sound thin even they are ripped from CD at very high bit rate. The only advantage is that one can fit at least 6 CD worth of audio tracks as MP3 on a CDR.

I would really prefered to play Vinyl in the car, I am still working on the gas filled Gimbal mount !

[dadrab]

I have a phone like that one in my shop in the back yard. I have an even older one - with a metal dial - in our pool room. The decor in that room is retro anyway, so it sort of fits, but the kids give it a weird look sometimes. They just figure it doesn't work, but it does.

My 12-year-old had to show one of my 16-year-old's friends how to use it one night. Of course, it then became the new toy of the day.

[Captain Satellite]

For me, there is no substitute for the CD player, tape deck and turntable attached to my home stereo when it comes to really enjoying recorded music (though I could use a better turntable and phono preamp). I own an iPod shuffle and it rocks solely for its tiny size; it can be worn while doing any chore/project without getting in the way. I've pretty much decided that my Nakamichi's days are numbered: once I get all my valued tapes to digital it'll hopefully find a new home via ebay (I've also got boxes of metal and SAX casssettes that'll go with it).

I also mourn the loss of Tower Records. I grew up in Sacramento, CA where Tower started and I bought my first few LP's there in my pre-teens. About 80% of my CD collection was purchased at the Tower Records in Mountain View,CA. I really liked how they had separate rock, classical, and jazz stores: awesome for browsing.

Indeed. I purchased my Laser Discs at that very store. They had the best selection in town.

[2Bdecided]

I bet few of you saying mp3s sound awful could ABX a decent one against the original!

I listen to whatever happens to be in the room I'm in, which could be CD, mp3, LP, or even cassette (just dug out some old ones for some nostalgia!).

It could even be one of these:
http://www.david.robinson.org/pics/gramophone1.jpg

I mp3 content from any of these formats as and when I "need" it, but the originals stay around (so far).
(Yes, I do have copies from my own 78s loaded onto my mp3 player).

Cheers,
David.

[dadrab]

I bet few of you saying mp3s sound awful could ABX a decent one against the original!

You're joshing, right?

[2Bdecided]

I bet few of you saying mp3s sound awful could ABX a decent one against the original!

You're joshing, right?

No, either your encoding is wrong, or your playback is wrong.

There are sounds that can't be encoded properly to mp3, but if everything you've ever encoded to mp3 sounds terrible to you, something is wrong.

That's especially true for the, ahem, older posters here, who are very unlikely to be able to hear above 16kHz - the region where lower quality mp3 often goes wrong.


Even at ~140kbps, with good encoding, many listeners can't hear anything wrong at all, and most don't find the differences annoying...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_listening_test

By the time you max out the bitrate (320kbps), detectable problems become very few and far between, and most of these are only detected by highly critical listeners.

People who think "all mp3s sounds bad" aren't usually critical listeners - it's far more likely that they've never heard anything better than a 128kbps discrete stereo mp3 from a lousy encoder! Or else they are imagining problems - play them an mp3, tell them it's a CD, and they'll think it sounds great!

Cheers,
David.

[dadrab]

By the time you max out the bitrate (320kbps), detectable problems become very few and far between, and most of these are only detected by highly critical listeners.

You said it...not me. 8)

[lordsmurf]

CDs in a drawer in wallets. Cases in box in attic.
Listen to ripped MP3 of favorite songs on computer. Compilation CDs in car.

[2Bdecided]

By the time you max out the bitrate (320kbps), detectable problems become very few and far between, and most of these are only detected by highly critical listeners.

You said it...not me. 8)

Yeah, but you cut my next paragraph.

We get clever guys saying mp3 is terrible arriving at HydrogenAudio every now and again, but we don't get many who can actually ABX 320kbps mp3 on most tracks. In fact I can count the number on the fingers of one hand, and still have five fingers spare!

Some people listen only to genres of music that mp3 has trouble with - some IDM, and some solo harpsichord, for example.

People who listen to regular pop, classical, jazz etc and think mp3 never sounds right aren't doing it right!

Cheers,
David.

[dadrab]

Yeah, but you cut my next paragraph.

I didn't mean to slight your post...and you're right. I can't always tell a good 320 MP3 from a Wav.

I do have a pretty well tuned ear, though and, many times, can indeed tell something's missing.

Here's beers.

[JohnnyMalaria]

People who listen to regular pop, classical, jazz etc and think mp3 never sounds right aren't doing it righ!.

A key point!

You are talking about people who roll their own and can optimize the encoding to their needs.

My gripe is with the stuff you have to pay for that you have no control over and/or web streaming. If I'm going to pay for it, I don't want to hear artifacts (which I do). For me, the biggest offenders are mp3 classical encodings since there is a lot more light and shade compared to other genres.

If you encode mp3 at the maximum bitrate they, IMHO, you might as well use ADPCM. I used that about 15 years ago for the audio portion of an AVI since I had to squeeze a 30-min video with CD quality audio into <1GB.

I think mp3 has a place for streaming and portability but I don't get it for home use where storage capacity is a non-issue. If you can have the 4K uncompressed digital video why settle for 1080p MPEG-2?

[orsetto]

(...) I think mp3 has a place for streaming and portability but I don't get it for home use where storage capacity is a non-issue. If you can have the 4K uncompressed digital video why settle for 1080p MPEG-2?

Exactly: this is one of the key disregarded "backdoor" issues of the MP3 phenomenon. We have pretty much pulled the plug on the options of "good-better-best" in order to satisfy the (to me) ridiculous generation of people who abhor silence and are not content unless they can carry 6,000 CDs worth of music in a wristwatch player at all times. MP3 is great when used appropriately but I'm not thrilled its become the tail wagging the dog.

The problem here is all of these compression systems were meant to solve TEMPORARY technological limitations and allow portability and net accessibility of otherwise impossibly large media files. Unfortunately the usual herd mentality kicked in and turned a stopgap into the de facto standard for everyone. Now we're apparently stuck with these inferior formats forever. In five or six years when iPod hard drives hit godzilla-byte capacity, who the hell wants to be limited to MP3 simply because it killed packaged media prematurely and most people claim not to hear the difference? As it stands, pop CD producers already don't even bother with decent mastering anymore, they produce many of these releases almost at final MP3 quality. Why not give up the facade and just sell pre-encoded MP3 CDs?

Some of us DO hear a difference. It isn't all about frequency response: some of us hear a "closed in" quality with even the best MP3s, and many many MP3 codings are far from perfect. Especially if we're paying for it, the option of best possible starting point should not be eliminated altogether in favor of "convenience". Granted, few people care anymore: there are no dedicated CD players left on the market and quality stereo hardware is now viewed as "old hat". This "majority rules" aspect to consumer electronics can be a royal pain sometimes when the "majority" proves to have their collective head up their ass: if I have a CD player with incredibly well-made transport and painstakingly-engineered DA conversion, and enjoy using actual loudspeakers and an amplifier, why should I be forced to jack an iPod into a Bose dock unless I'm having a party?

[akrako1]

I still listen to audio CD's on my home stereo but I listen to MP3 in my car.
Even though my home stereo plays MP3 I still like the sound of uncompressed audio.

Me too! I really prefer uncompressed audio, but I also don't like the degradation that car interior heat can have on my cd's, so I only bring along cd-roms of mp3's that I already have backed up at home. Discs melt? no problem, burn out the mp3's again on a new blank. Though I do make sure to NOT put them in a holder on my sun-visor. That's about the stupidest thing you can do to your discs... block the sun with 'em.

[2Bdecided]

I think the argument that we "don't need audio compression any more" misses the point - for those people who can't hear a difference, why waste the HDD space storing lossless? Why waste the time transferring lossless? Why waste addition time money and space backing up lossless?

Plus I don't know if you noticed or not, but most recent CDs aren't very high quality to begin with, due to the loudness wars - why would I waste 1.4Mbps on it when encoding at 128kbps couldn't make it sound any worse?!

Anyway orsetto, no one is being forced to use mp3 - there are plenty of lossless solutions out there - even my £15 Tesco mp3 player plays uncompressed .wavs! There's Apple Lossless, FLAC, etc etc etc. I don't think they just made CD players illegal, did they?

Cheers,
David.

[2Bdecided]

If you encode mp3 at the maximum bitrate they, IMHO, you might as well use ADPCM.

No, ADPCM is demonstrably dramatically worse than highbitrate mp3. It's nice and simple, and isn't normally implemented in a way that encourages abuse (i.e. it's fixed bitrate at an "acceptable" quality level).

For the middle ground between lossy and lossless I invented lossyWAV. It's been worked on extensively by other people (I'm not wanting to pretend I did all the work!), and seems to work well. There's a stable version available now:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossywav

Cheers,
David.

[dcsos]

My Computer Speakers
driven by Tascam 2012 Mixer & Quad Acoustical 303 Power Amp

[JohnnyMalaria]

If you encode mp3 at the maximum bitrate they, IMHO, you might as well use ADPCM.

No, ADPCM is demonstrably dramatically worse than highbitrate mp3.

The problem with such a hard claim is that mp3 relies on psychoacoustics and no one model of the human auditory perceptual system can possibly represent every listener of mp3 encoded material.

Personally (and, hence, subjectively), I could not distinguish ADPCM vs PCM for the same material whereas I can here the difference between mp3 and PCM. My PCM sources are CDs and older/non-mainstream at that - i.e., not mastered so hot as to be worthless IMHO. Of course, I no longer have a need for ADPCM.