CD Quality

I don't know about anyone else, but before this assignment, I was vaguely aware of 3 audio file formats: MP3, WMA, and AAC. And as it turns out, all 3 of these formats are "lossy" compression formats, meaning that when I rip a CD into any of these file types, the song is compressed slightly, degrading the quality of said song. From this we get the cycle of people continuously ripping and burning CDs at increasingly low quality until eventually you might as well listen to radio noise.

So I looked into various audio file types, and discovered that there are many, many formats for sound. I was particularly interested in the uncompressed and "lossless" formats, where the file is compressed using a special algorithm that allows the full file to be reconstructed from the compressed format, giving the impression of 0% compression.

I took my old Linkin Park CD and ripped it into various formats at differing qualities (I chose Linkin Park because they have a wide variety of pitches, from deep bass to shrill treble).

The formats I listened to went as follows:

MP3: 16 kbps, 112kbps, and 320 kbps

WMA: 16 kbps, 112 kbps, and 320 kbps

AAC: 128 kbps, 320 kbps

Apple Lossless Encoder: Lossless

WMA Lossless: Lossless

AIFF: Uncompressed

WAV: Uncompressed

It was fun listening to the progressively increasing quality. The 16 kbps was really shitty poor quality, and I could hear static and scratching in the background. My headphones sounded like it was getting molested during the loud parts, and it was overall a pretty sub-par experience.

The other qualities sounded much better, and the scratching went away, but my headphones still shook at the loud parts and seemed to be very upset with me.

Then I decided to try the lossless and uncompressed. Fuck yeah! It was much better. In fact the 16 kbps was me riding a donkey on a muddy slope with poisonous daggers and flaming rocks falling on me from above, and the lossless and uncompressed was like me driving a Bugatti Veyron at 253 mph down the smoothest road in the world that happened to have no cars while the wind blew in the same direction I was going and a rainbow was off the distance and leprechauns are real. Maybe someone could make the distinction, but I sure as hell definitely couldn't tell the difference between lossless and uncompressed.