5 pounds for .MP3?

[Random Tox]

A bunch of musicians and production whizzes will be even more discerning. Underworld is state or the art and don't normally skimp on quality. MP3 is no gift to those of us who value UW enough to listen with discretion.

LIke I say, £5 for 25 minutes of quality UW material would be a bargin in my book. But if you think a £5 .mp3 is a gift, you are a push-over. (The problem with 'fans' is they think whatever turd their band lays is worth something and they stop thinking about what is good/bad.) With no manufacturing or marketing cost, and no record company taking a fat slice, UW is probably getting over 90% of our £5 per download. With traditional CD releases they may have seen 10% return. They could encode a .flac and plop it on the site while they wait for a a cup of coffee to cool.

If you don't do a comparision then don't talk about it sounding the same. You don't know until you try. Rip your fave CD track to both .wav and .mp3. Make sure there is no gain correction so the levels are identical. (Louder always sounds better, even if the difference is barely noticable.) Play both back simultaneously and switch between them with whatever mixer app your computer uses. If your speakers really suck so bad you can't tell the diff, use headphones. If your computer is not plugged into the system you listen to, decompress the MP3 to wave and burn both to a cd. The loss occurs during .mp3 compression so the resulting .wav will sound like the source .mp3.

If you still don't hear the diff, lucky you. Your collection of crap quality pirated MP3 will still have some value for you. I can hardly wait for my hearing to be that shot and I can quit spending money on decent audio.