How to improve SQ - part 1

The Meat of the System - Source File


Okay here I wanna talk about the first of the many methods of how to improve the sound from your music system, by improving the source file. Good news is that this is one of the most effective upgrade you can make so here we go.

There are numerous digital formats in which sound files are stored in a computer (I'm assuming that no one is using analog files such as tapes anymore). However, there are just two that I would recommend as they are fairly compatible now with most digital music players. They also do not have any digital rights management (DRM) features that may make them difficult or impossible to copy and play.

.mp3 – By far the most common way music is stored on computers and portable music players. This is a “lossy” format, which means that the stored music is not a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the original. A complex algorithm is used to reduce the amount of data it takes to store the music. The advantage is that it takes less hard drive space to store your music; the disadvantage is that the quality of audio will be reduced quite significantly depending on the encoding bitrate selected.

.flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec) - Is a "lossless" digital audio format that is compressed such that the file size is reduced significantly without any information being lost. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to 50–60% of its original size, and can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. Since this format replicates exactly the original sound file while being compressed, it is usually the format of choice for archiving music collection. It takes a lot of disk space though.

If you’re a dedicated MAC, iPhone, iPad or iPod user, and are willing to accept that some file formats may not be playable on your oh-so-wondrous Apple hardware, there are three more formats worth considering: .aiff, .aac or .alac




End words, so to Lossy or Lossless?
Hard drive space is quite inexpensive these days, so there is little penalty for storing all your music in lossless .flac files for your music system. However, since it lets you put four times as much music on your portable player I generally recommend high bit-rate (192-320 kbps) .mp3 files for your music library if you’re going to be using a portable player regularly. Personally, I'd go for the best. Cheers.