MP-3... Not for Demanding Music Lovers

If you're making the investment to upgrade your home by having a multi-room audio system installed, please remember this point....

MP3 audio quality is nice for headphones but is not as good as uncompressed (CD Quality) .WAV files.

The science behind compressing an audio file supports this, and on occasion I have heard the difference but nothing like I had heard yesterday. A friend had a party to show off his new multi-room audio system. At first glance, it was impressive -- 12 rooms of audio with in-wall keypads and high quality speakers (Polk). But we soon noticed a difference in sound quality when switching sources from his CD player to his ipod. The sound floor automatically dropped several dB and the high frequencies with the song recorded in the compressed MP3 format vs. the same song we had heard previously off of the CD were non-existant.

Simply put -- the song on MP3 sounded dull and flat over the Multi-Room Audio system, but the same song on CD sounded rich and full.

When I had asked my friend what bit rate he had recorded the song to MP3, he told me it was 300 kbps, not a bad sampling rate at all. In fact, when we unplugged the iPod and listened to the song over the small headphones, it didn't sound as flat as it did over the Multi-Room audio system, though admittedly it wasn't as good as the original CD.

We then recorded the song to an uncompressed (.WAV) file format and it sounded almost as good as the CD.

Why the difference in audio quality between MP3 and uncompressed (.WAV)? Well, let's look at the technology. MP3 audio is a specially formatted and havily compressed computer file. Depending on the sample rate, the audio quality can sound close but not equate to that of a CD. An uncompressed audio file of 1 minute consumes nearly 9 megabytes (MB) of disk space. An MP3 file uses only about 1 MB of disk space for that same minute of audio. This reduction in file size has revolutionized the delivery of music, because it is now easier to transmit music over the internet. A song that would have taken almost an hour to download (depending upon the connection speed) can now be download much quicker. However, in exchange for the smaller file size, the listener sacrifices 70% of the data that holds what some describe as the 3-D characteristics of the audio necessary to create staging, imaging, and rich audio texture. An uncompressed (.WAV) music file contains all of the data found on a CD, without any of the compression of loss of data. This offers the listener the highest quality audio available from a CD.

The difference in audio quality is of course more perceptible with better quality speakers and better quality amplification.

If you're interested in hearing for yourself the difference, visit the demo section of our website. http://www.netstreams.com/demos.aspx