I have an Eclipse 3434 head unit. It has an mp3 decoder. Now, all things being equal, considering that my mp3s were encoded the right way, using alt-preset extreme setting (variable bitrate) in Lame, and my WAVs ripped using Exact Audio quality, would there be any difference in playback quality between an MP3 CD and a WAV CD?

 

for some reason, my wav cd sounds clearer than mp3s. it might be just my head unit though. if i convert the same exact song to wav, the sound is much crisper.

 

what head unit are you using?

 

His sig says a Kenwood. I notice my Alpine plays raw redbook PCM (aka wav) noticably better than mp3. MP3s always sound muddy & muffled, even though I encode at 320kbps CBR LAME.

WMA on the other hand souunds much better. Just try it yourself.

 

yeah, i'm using a kenwood hu.

i encode it at 192 kbps, and it still sounds muffled when compared to .wav

 

WAVs are not compressed, MP3's are compressed. The differences in the size of an MP3 and WAV are enormous.

 

MP3 files are compressed using a lossy CODEC. That means that sound data is dropped in an effort to make the file smaller. WAV files ripped from CD's at 44.1Khz are exact copies of the music. Just in a slightly different format than what is on the CD. Both iTunes(AAC format) and Windows Media Player (WMA format) have lossless CODECs that produce identical sounding files but they are about 50% smaller than a WAV file.

-Robert

 

As always Robert, good info.

I am going to convert all of my songs that I currenlty have in the MP3 format to WMA (from the original CD ofcourse). As soon as my new computer gets here I will start feeding it my CDs.

 

Robert J, man you know your stuff!!

 

I know this because I am extremely picky about the quality of my music. The only MP3's I have EVER downloaded and kept were out of print or never released recordings. Napster was mostly a waste of time because of the horrible quality. If I liked something I would occaisionally get the CD.

Right now the only maintenance I can perform on my car is checking the air in the tires. Some of these guys doing the engine mods are amazing to me.

-Robert

 

Well just make sure it's WMA lossless. You'll be able to store twice as many songs as a regular music CD with no quality loss and full tagging.

 

Thanks THX, I will try that.