Hi!
Lot of people doesn't know that MP3 is a lossy format. Beyond that, they think that when they encode at 128 Kbps ("CD quality"), their files sounds like a CD, and (that's the best), they think using 192 Kbps will improve the sound, so it sounds like a DVD audio or something...
I'm impressed by that, and I wonder, who had the "great" idea to call "128 Kbps" --> CD Quality??????
That's my question.
Byes.

Comando Gruya

P.S: sorry for my poor english...

I have no idea who was originally guilty of this grossly misleading statement, but very clearly they had a hearing defect!!

No lossy codec has achieved CD quality only near, very near, super near depends on the user but anything 44.1khz, 16bit can be called CD quality.

For casual listing to a song 5, 6 times on PC speakers 128kbps will do the job without any complaints for most users or there would be more 192 or 320 mp3’s out there or even less 128kbps Xing’s. For Mp3, the age of the 56k & Napster it was how low can we go while still being able to enjoy the music & for most it was 128kbps.

BTW Tell your friends to use WMA 64kbps=CD quality, if I remember correct.

Both in the Fraunhofer page (www.iis.fraunhofer.de) and programs like Musicmatch "JunkBox" claim 128kbps is CD quality.................

I agree with John that it is a "grossly misleading statement" to say that 128kb/s lossy compression is CD quality. Even bothering to use the words "CD quality" rings much more of marketing hype than of scientific conclusion. It was interesting to me that as recently as September '98, Mike Cheng said in exact words that 128kb/s mp3 was CD quality in his rationale for LAME found at the LAME homepages. So, even if developers knew better in the first place, it doesn't seem that this idea was widely contested.

Today, it's still somewhat hard for me to fathom how someone (whether it was FhG or another developer) could have made these claims in the first place. Despite the fact that some music is transparent for me at 128 mp3, some of the most noticable artifacts such as pre-echo and flanging are painfully evident in many samples at 128 kb/s. What's harder to put up with and has now become easy to ignore is the pure hype of those (like Musicmatch and to some extent Ahead) who continue to make this claim (or very similar ones) today. :x

It is all about marketing, obviously. Sounds better for the customers to hear that they can fill a CD-R with 10-12 complete albums than to hear they can only fill it with 6. I think that the statement is very clever, since we have to take in account that the majority of people have poor speakers plugged in a cheap sound card. Many of us would not be able to hear any difference on such equipment. Also, only few people really cares about the sound quality. I'm used to rip CD's at 128 kbps, fast setting, with LAME, and then burn them to CD-R, for my friends (I'm of course don't use that setting, I use MPC), and I haven't received a single complaint to the present day. So we should educate people first, but that task seems very difficult because, usually people doesn't want to be educated .

128 kbit is CD-quality for the vast majority (incl. me).

When 55% vote for George Bush, it means he's president.
When 95% thinks 128 kbit is CD-quality, it means it's CD-quality.

Like it or not.

(edit : ok, bad comparison - but still)

When 95% thinks 128 kbit is CD-quality, it means 95% thinks wrong and don't have educated ears (incl. you).
When 55% vote for George Bush, it means...it means that I better stop writing before causing a flame .

AHAHAHA!

So - if 95% of all mainstream users think Ogg Vorbis is crap, that means it really is. Like it or not.

Man, you are so funny.

"CD quality" is a CD or a losslessly encoded files.

Acceptable quality for CD's that I own is Vorbis -q 6 or like MPC quality 6 (so roughly 192Kbps VBR with newer codecs).

If I'm getting the music for free, I don't care. If I like it, I'll go end up buying it or finding a way to encode from original myself.

The problem with these up and coming "download your music and buy only one song" is that they give them to you in like 192Kbps MP3 or something. I want to download a FLAC, If I buy a song I should get the same song that people who buy the CD get.

Some people change opinion.
After 6 years, 128 kbit still seems to be the bitrate of choice.

OT, but it only goes to prove you can fool most of the people some of the time!!

"CD quality" is one of those lovely buzzwords that unfortunately is about to get outdated. I remember an ad from not too long ago (two years, perhaps) where a major cable-TV provider here in Sweden marketed their set-top box with the argument that "both sound and picture holds CD quality". I wonder how that picture looks (sounds?).

Back when television was the latest thang they used to label products with "TV" just to make them sell more. Nowadays it's "Digital" that makes people think they're getting outstanding quality "for only $9.95!" And now, we have "24 bit" to take over in the audio realm. Everything labeled "24 bit" (bigger label means better sound), even SoundBlasters, simply sounds oustanding! But in all fairness, you'll probably get better sound out of that than out of your "CD quality" Xing 128 kbps mp3's.

/ Uosdwis

No. This is a fallacy (ad populum).

Majority does not necessarily dictate what is right and true.

95% (or more) of the everyone thought the world was flat hundreds of years ago, but that didn't make it true.

The world is a sphere... that's a fact.
128 kbit is not CD-quality... that's an opinion.

Just one more comment on those numbers. They seem to be backwards... Bush got less than 50% votes (not as low as 45% I hope but anyway...), and at least around here less than 5% say 128 kbit is CD-quality. Conclusion: the worse alternative wins anyway...

I remember the big "CD quality" thread on the r3mix forum a while ago and if I remember correctly it escaladed into a argument over whether CDs themselves were actually CD quality.

BTW, George W. Bush is CD quality, it's a fact.

Yes. Originating from a 64 kbit WMA !!!!!!!

This has nothing to do with the argument you proposed (this is fallacious in it's own right).

In your argument, you basically proposed the following:

Premise: The majority feels that 128kbps is CD-Quality. (which in itself is non-qualified).
Premise (implied): When the majority feel something is true, it is. (fallacy)

Conclusion: 128kbps is CD Quality. (invalid)

This is fallacious on many levels. Also, there was the fallacy of weak analogy (your comparison between a majority of people voting on something, which in a democracy, by definition leads to that thing coming to pass, making it "true"; and of the majority of people thinking something, which does not lead to that thing necessarily coming to pass, or which does not lead to that thing being necessarily true).

And btw, opinions can be "wrong" if they are weakly supported and based on faulty reasoning and false premises.

The only types of valid conclusion you could draw from "95% of people think that 128kbps is CD Quality" would be things like:

"many people think 128kbps is CD Quality"

or

"many people think 128kbps is CD Quality so it's possible, but not certain, that it is indeed CD Quality".

whatever - I can't be perfect.

As for me "CD quality" means "indistinguishable from the original record".
In fact I can hear a difference bettween 128Kb/s MP3 file and the original wav file in most cases. Many people hear the diference too. The more, some of them are very surprised, when they are shown the difference in ABX tests: it's much more noticeable, than they thought before.
What about the "author" of calling MP3 128Kbps "CD-quality" it seems to be Fraunhofer's commercial trick.

Good... but who mastered the record, and has a subsequent reissue done a better job? For a real-life example, I happen to be a fan of the Kinks Pye-era recordings ("Lola," "Waterloo Sunset," "Love Me Till the Sun Shines," "All Day and All of the Night"...). For a few decades the only CD transfers of those early albums were severely-muffled and often distorted, and only available as over-priced imports with visually-dull artwork released by Castle Communications. A couple of years ago, Castle created a new label (Essential Records) and thoroughly overhauled the Kinks catalog - the Pye-era, that is; their later albums were overhauled by Velvel - with stunning artwork, crystal clear remasterings supervised by Ray Davies himself, and a comprehensive selection of bonus tracks/unreleased material/the stuff of Kinky fantasy. Very nice.

Now, just to prove a point to myself, I extracted several tracks from the remastered versions of those albums. Then I knocked up a friend who still has a copy of the old Xing encoder (that's right - the one with the 12 KHz cutoff!). Don't ask me why he still has it; he doesn't use it, but he installed it anyway. Some people are like that. Anyway, we encoded the "remastered" songs with that awful encoder... and they still sounded slightly clearer than the earlier, muffled CD versions ever did.

The point is, when those older muffled CDs were the only Kinks I could find, I played them all the time. I nearly wore out the CDs listening to them (and I take care of my CDs, so for me to "wear one out" takes some doing), and I thought they were great. Sure, I knew the quality of the transfers sucked... but enjoying the music made putting up with the only available transfer a required sacrifice. Today, if I had to regularly listen to something that was "indistinguishable" from those, I'd go crazy! CD mastering has come a long way, baby.

- M.

Here is an interesting read written in 1999, by a guy named Walt Crawford:
http://home.att.net/~wcc.techx/MP3.htm

As far as I'm concerned, "CD quality" is a 44.1KHz, 16-bit WAV file from the original CD (or a CD playing in a CD player). An MP3 at 320kbps is "MP3 at 320kbps quality." Know what I mean jack?

Personally, sometimes I can't distinguish a 64 kbps mp3pro from the original wav...
I guess that these quality issues can be quite theoretical. I mean, hey, I encode
my tracks in api, ape, aps, mpc quality 6+ and ogg q6+ to be on the safe side, but
I doubt whether a 128 or 160 kbps file would sound any different to my ears... Also,
sometimes I feel that an mp3 file played in winamp coupled with a good dsp plugin
sounds better than the original cda on my PC.

What are modern pop CDs?
12-bit or something worth of music is what you get out of those brilliantly mastered CDs
lets push it back to 8-bit, yum yum

I consider "CD quality" or the original wav, or lossless....
or "undistinguishable signal + overkill." B)

I mean......In almost all cases MPC --insane is impossible to distinguish from the source, I haven't stopped to ABX it (with my equipment [SBLive, FPS1000 4.1 Speakers] I cannot ABX over Vorbis -q6 [or maybe on some samples, who knows )

So, If -insane is enough, then apply a security margin: --quality 8.5 (braindead + extra bits).
For portable, until iRiver adds MPC support, LAME --alt-preset insane, if the compile is stable and OK with --alt-presets.

But if I need to burn a CD, I ALWAYS burn it from the wav source....unless I haven't it.

For me -

"CD Quality' is a quality of 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, stereo PCM file generated by bit-to-bit identical copy from the CD

Now,

I have following definitions:

"Transparent quality" - with masking noise, introduced by perfect noise allocation system, in both time and frequency domain less or equal to allowed masking noise judged by some theoretical, perfect, psychoacoustic model that reflects better-than-average human hearing - you see, even in those cases there are people that have hearing or masking properties different (better) from the model, and thus for them it won't be "transparent quality"

Very good MP3 encoder at ~ 192-225 kbps stereo VBR would be very near the "transparent"

AAC would match this at 140-160 Kb/s

It's that whole sfb21 issue with MP3, requiring to massively increase bitrates to adequately represent frequencies above 16KHz... arrgh, the codec is essentially broken when it was invented! >_<

If you can't hear the diffrence now, you wont hear it when you get new equipment either. All this 'extra bits' stuff seems silly to me. Insane is an overkill in the first place (considering you can't abx anything higher then vorbis -q 6).

As for 'cd-quality' - I think that term is stupid.
128kbps mp3 can be 'cd-quality' on crappy 15$ speakers; for my grandfather, 64kbps vma is 'cd-quality'. I mean, that depends on so many things, it's better to leave 'cd-quality' alone. :-)

aaaah, and if u even can distinguish, then it is the question - what is BETTER??? If you pump up the bass, a song starts to sound better - but is it?? its all too subjective, this....

and democracy is a strange institution, indeed... to suppose that more than half of the ppl are right, cq whould choose the best for their country, isnt that a quite stupid point of vieuw??? why whould the majority be right??? Most ppl aren't that clever, dont u think.... How could they make a good decision, not based on how the candidate looked in the spotlights, but on his/her ideas...

anyway, I'm happy to live in the Netherlands, no-one ever knows who's gonna rule the country, here, most of the times they need some 2 or 3 party's in a coalition. so - not just "choose the best of two evil" like in amerika/england, not a million bad partys, but some 6/7/8 stable, very diferent groups who try to get elected...

but, politics isnt interesting, so on the subject: lets indeed leave the "cd-quality" alone, cuz its quite senseless. but continue to argue against "128kbit/s mp3 is cd-quality", cuz at least I can never agree with that...

cheer up!

Excellent idea.

I agree.

...and don't forget that nowadays, so often 'cd-quality' actually means 'Corrupted Disc quality'