I pod

[geoffdunk]

To be totally honest, I still prefer to buy the album in the traditional manner, I have over 3000 of them currently and counting. I usually use streaming/downloading when I am short on time and have been put of in the past by the bit rates and the clipping that goes on and found they sound poor when running them through my home hi-fi. If I was to go the full streaming rout I'd look into it a bit more.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[doodlebug]

No problem, I hear you, I'm mostly old skool also.

[boff]

Time to go leave the old skool?? (Vinyl & 8 track excluded)

Bit rate[edit]
The audio bit rate for a Red Book audio CD is 1,411,200 bits per second or 176,400 bytes per second; 2 channels × 44,100 samples per second per channel × 16 bits per sample. Audio data coming in from a CD is contained in sectors, each sector being 2,352 bytes, and with 75 sectors containing 1 second of audio. For comparison, the bit rate of a "1×" CD-ROM is defined as 2,048 bytes per sector × 75 sectors per second = 153,600 bytes per second. The remaining 304 bytes in a sector are used for additional data error correction.

[PetrolDave]

It's not just about the bit rate - an audio CD uses a raw coding scheme that digitises the raw analog signal but MP3 uses a lossy coding scheme which ignores some parts of the original signal on the assumption that their effect cannot be heard (perceptual coding).

MP3 is what's known as a 'lossy' data-compression technique (so-called because a certain amount of the original data is removed and lost forever during compression), and consequently it is inevitable that an MP3 is never going to sound quite as good as the PCM source from which it was created.

The subject of how audible the differences between lossy vs. lossless coding are to the average listener causes endless "discussion" on audiophile forums, so probably something we don't want/need to get into here.

[geoffdunk]

I mentioned this earlier in the thread, i'd preffer to avoid clipping and go with the original source.

[doodlebug]

No streaming service offers that. It'd consume too much bandwidth. Different story if you are ripping and streaming at home.