Originally posted by iconrad
I Apple's download program works, but I really like to listen to CD quality music and when I listen to MP3's I can tell there is a decreased quality in the sound. I was wondering if anyone could tell me what the audio quality of an MP4 and AAC compared to MP3 and full audio CD's?
It's all about the bitrate. If your MP3's don't sound "right" to you, then rip them at a higher bitrate.
AAC has two benefits:
1) at the same bitrate (and, thus, nearly-identical file size), it will yeild higher quality than MP3; the other way of saying this is that the same quality of sound may be had at a significantly lower bitrate, and thus smaller file.
2) the overall fidelity is more even across the spectrum than with MP3. Thus, where MP3 largely filters out the highs and deep bass, AAC reproduces them. Thus, even at two bitrates where AAC and MP3 have the "same" general quality, you will have better range coming out of the AAC file.
Personally, I can stand MP3s in most cases at 160kbps, am 99% fooled at 192kbps, and on the rare case where 192 isn't enough, 256kbps is indistinguishable to CD audio to me. But, every ear is different.
You may (likely will) get a bunch of people telling you that with better stereo equipment lower-bitrate MP3s sound just as good as CDs ... which is of course wrong. Unless your stereo equipment is smoothing over your audio (which to me would be the sign of low-quality equipment, not high-quality equipment), the more fidelity your equipment has the more accurately it will produce the artifacts left from MP3 encoding.
