Now the MP3 guys and FLAC guys can weigh in against each other.
I made a quick little audio WAV file (sorry Mac guys - hope you can play this somehow) that shows the data that's missing from an MP3 that appears in an uncompressed or lossless compressed file.
I was actually surprised at how little detail is lost.
The MP3 was encoded with the Fraunhofer encoder for DOS (s-l-o-w but the best encoder I've heard - they started the whole push, so it made sense to use them as the standard) at 256kbps - which is a good balance of archival quality and file size, though some encoders do go higher, once you get past this bitrate you start getting into nearly the same file sizes as FLAC - why use a lossy codec if you can get a lossless for the same file size?
Sample for sample phase cancellation was used to produce a perfect copy of the differences between the two files, I have not adjusted the levels or "normalized" this file in any way, so it is quiet, you may have to turn up your speakers.
The sampled song used is New Model Army's "Queen of My Heart" - why? Was the closest thing I had at hand that's a pretty good mix of rock and electronic.
A 15 second clip - right click
this link and choose Save As to save it to your local drive.
Bren R.
