...but i have yet to put our music into digital format so the present files consist of many mp3s, many older 128kbps versions and i loathe the idea of putting them onto a decent system such as we have across the house...
I ran across a very interesting dilema a few weeks back. I have a ton of downloaded music on my hard drive, and I've been in the process of ripping CD's to the hard drive over the past few weeks. When ever I rip a CD I check to see if I had the song downloaded, and if I did, I erase the 128 kbps version with the 900+ kbps version. Anywho I was ripping my Van Halen CD's and started to erase the duplicate songs that I'd downloaded. Just before I got rid of them I played a few of them head-to-head against the 'superior' 900 kbps replacement songs just so that I could see how much better my new library was going to sound... to my amazement not only could I not hear much of a difference at all between the two versions, but when I could hear a difference, I was actually liking the sound of the 128 kbps versions BETTER!?!?!? WTF????
These weren't different versions of the song, the 128 kbps downloaded song 'Panama' for instance was the version straight off of the '1984' album. However, when I ripped my '1984' CD to the computer and then played the same exact song against the supposedly inferior 128 kbps song, the downloaded song actually sounded more spacious, more detailed, and somehow just sounded all around better to my ear. The 900 kbps version actually had a more 'compressed' feel to it, if there is such a thing. I was baffled. Because it wasn't only on 'Panama', but also the downloaded 'Hot For Teacher', 'Jump', 'Ice Cream Man' and a few others sounded better as well. And the others, I simply couldn't tell a difference between the two versions rather than the ripped version sounding superior.
In the end I ended up erasing the downloaded versions simply because in my head the 900 kbps version 'should' sound better. I know that probably sounds dumb, but it's just the way I am. Had in not done it that way everytime I would have heard 'Jump' or one of the other one's I would have been thinking, "this is the compressed version, so I'm not getting everything I should out of it". But it sure made me realize that had I been in a blind comparison test trying to detect the differences between the compressed and uncompressed versions of the two songs, I would have failed miserably! And it would have baffled me because I surely would have thought that it was obvious which was the compressed song since it sounded so much better, with so much more dimension to it... exactly what I would have EXPECTED the uncompressed version to sound like.
But for what ever reason, it was the exact opposite. I'm still scratching my head over that one!
