Quote:
Originally Posted by HejiraNYC
The quick answer is not necessarily. It depends on the source of the recordings burned onto the CD.
As far as I'm concerned, if the mp3s were created at a decent sampling rate, i.e., 192 kbps or above, then it is pretty much "lossless." Only a dog or a spectrum analyzer could detect the difference between that and the lossless original.  |
Yeah... this is absolutely true. If something is burned from a lossy source onto an audio CD, it remains "lossy". If it is re-ripped into a WAV file, the file size is huge, but the quality remains the same (it's the same audio information that it had available when it was burned). MP3s are great for saving file space and having reasonable to excellent sound quality (depending on the bitrate), but you can never get back the audio information that was lost when it was encoded.
Hejira is right too that it's hard to tell the difference between high quality mp3s and lossless sources. Some audiophiles claim they can hear a difference, but there have actually been tests done where people have failed to actually tell the difference (despite their claims to the contrary). I tend to think it's psychological, but I believe I can hear a difference between a 192kbps file and a 256 or above... but above 256kbps (320kbps in particular), I can't hear a difference. It's probably a bit obsessive on my part, but there is something oddly comforting to me about knowing I have a lossless file, so that I haven't lost any of the audio information from the source.