I've read that decoding an mp3 to a wave will not result in a the wave sounding any worse than the mp3 which of course, would be expected. The thing is why, after decompressing an mp3 to wav using lame 3.90, does the resultant wave sound very different to the original mp3 from which it came from. To me, it sounds like the treble has been greatly increased on the wave file.

I'm using winamp 2.91 to play it back. Its not a one-off and its happened with many of my mp3s before now. Could it be the Winamp equalizer? Is it known to behave differently for mp3 and waves?



Cheers,
Paul

Edit: sorry, it's late here and I read through your post too quickly... I will try again to answer now...

there shouldn't be any difference in sound quality for decoded mp3 when you have all equalizers switched off. There was an old test made by David Robinson (aka 2Bdecided) where he found that the current winampdecoder (made by fraunhofer) and lame decoder are equal. http://mp3decoders.mp3-tech.org/overall.html

If you have the equalizer switched on you can expect a difference, even though playing back the wav file as well through winamp. This is because it uses different equalisers for mp3 and for other sound files. If you want test this with eq on, you should download and install an external eq as a dsp plugin, and then switch off the built in one.

I would suggest that 1) you decode with the same codec you encoded with and 2) ABX the files. B)