this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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It's useful because it's ubiquitous. Everything that can take in music files supports it.
Is MP3-encoded audio of the best possible quality? No, of course not. But for most people it's Good Enough, especially if you do most of your listening in a noisy environment. MP3s are to lossless formats what CD was to vinyl for so many years.
A lot of people cant tell the difference between MP3 @320Kbps and a fully lossless FLAC.
All people. 320kbps mp3 is completely audibly transparent under all normal listening conditions. It's a low-tier audiophile meme to claim otherwise but they will never pass a double-blind test.
MP3 has some disadvantages over more modern formats, regardless the used bitrate. It's been a long while since I was very interested in audio formats, so I may not be up to date on some newer developments but unless anything major changed, MP3 can't do truly gapless playback between tracks (used in live albums), for example.
Aren't there unofficial extensions to mp3 for gappless playback? IIRC you can tag tracks as gappless and many audio players will make them so.
Yes and no.
IIRC an MP3 track is divided in fixed-length frames and unless the actual audio matches perfectly with the end of a frame, it's not possible and that's why cross-fading plugins for audio players were invented. The padding data is there either way but can be documented in the metadata section of a file.
Last I checked (and that was years ago, so I may be wrong) this approach was never perfect and prone to breaking. It's an inherent flaw with the format where some form of workaround exists.
That said, for most use cases this is irrelevant.
Audio playback is such a low-demand process, surely a player (e.g.VLC) can spare a thread to line up playback of track 2, a few seconds before track 1 ends? It knows the exact length of the track, why can't track 2 be initiated when the audio level in track 1 drops to zero (or minus infinity dB) in the last frame?
Workarounds in a specific player don't negate the fact that the format has limitations.
From what I understand, vinyl and CDs can both output in a range greater than human ears can detect, so the medium isn't as important as the mastering and the gear being used to listen to the recording.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4303
This is what we were all told for years and years- that it was impossible that anyone could hear anything in vinyl that was supposed to be there but that couldn't be reproduced with digital at cd quality. Then DVD came out And people could genuinely hear the difference from CD quality audio even in stereo. It turns out that dynamic range is limited by the audio sampling rate and the human ear can easily detect a far greater range CD audio supports.
Dynamic range isn't limited by the sampling rate. It is limited by the resolution, which is 16 bits for the audio CD. With that resolution you get a dynamic range of 96 dB when not using any dithering and even more than that when using dithering. Even with "only" 96 dB that dynamic range is so vast, that there is no practical use of a higher resolution when it comes to playback. I know that the human ear is supposed to be able to handle 130 dB or even more of dynamic range. The thing is, you can only experience such a dynamic range once, afterwards you are deaf. So not much point in such a dynamic range there.
There are good reasons to use a higher resolution when recording and mixing audio, but for playback and storage of the finished audio 16 bits of resolution is just fine.
CDs can, by a very narrow margin, reproduce sounds beyond which the human ear can detect. There's a theorem that states you can perfectly reproduce a waveform by sampling if the bitrate is double the maximum frequency or something like that, and CDs use a bitrate such that it can produce just above the human hearing range. You can't record an ultrasonic dog whistle on a CD, it won't work.
It's functionally impossible to improve on "red book" CD Digital Audio quality because it can perfectly replicate any waveform that has been band-passed filtered to 20,000 Hz or thereabouts. Maybe you can talk about dynamic range or multi-channel (CDs are exactly stereo. No mono, no 5.1 surround...Stereo.) It's why there really hasn't been a new disc format; no one needs one. It was as good as the human ear can do in the early 80's and still is.
The Nyquist limit?
You need sampling at twice the frequency as a minimum to extract a time domain signal into the frequency domain. It says nothing about "perfect" especially when you're listening in the time domain.
There is a lot of data in the time domain that impacts sound/signal quality. As others have said though, it probably doesn't matter without high quality equipment and a good ear.
It's also good to note that you can train your hearing. A musician or producer or audiophile are going to hear things and qualities you don't. It's edge cases though, and generally irrelevant to regular listening.
You definitely can hear the difference between MP3 320 and lower mp3 bitrates though.
It is my admittedly limited understanding that we really can't do better at digitally recording an audio signal than how red book audio does it, such that the microphones, amplifiers, ADCs etc on the recording end and the DAC, amp and speakers on the playback end are going to be much more significant factors in audio quality.
Yes it does. You can use a higher frequency, but that does not change anything except increase the maxiumum frequency possible. Even with perfect ears and the best equipment, there is no audible (and mathematical) difference to be had.
Everyone who claims otherwise should watch Monty's explainer videos. I know they are quite old at this point, but everything he explains is still perfectly valid. If that does not convince you, nothing will.
Vinyl is lossy in that any dust or scratches on the record can be heard in the output, so this is only true if you've got an absolutely pristine vinyl.
The original idea behind the superiority of vinyl was that the ambient audio was being recorded directly to the media. Of course, this wasn't even true when it was first made, as they were using magnetic tape by then to record in analog. However, there is still some merit to the idea that an infinitesimal amount of quality is lost when translating sound waves to digital data.
Most of the actual differences between cd and vinyl, though, can be chalked up to the loudness wars ruining the mixes on cd.
I'd argue you've got that backwards; CD is to vinyl what lossless is to .mp3. That said, I know what you mean.