So does my old Diamond Rio MP3 player from around the year 2000 have a different quality of audio to an average MP3 player made around 2010? Or a phone’s music player from 2015? Devices of 2023 should clearly be more “hi-fi” but how much gap is there between the y2k mp3 player and the modern music playback device?
This is clearly a topic layered in fact and fallacy, but the question is not so much “which DAC sounds best” or “what sounds the most high fidelity” because those questions are subjective. I’m curious about at what point sample rate, bit rate, and hardware spec meets to find the “standardized” fidelity of digital audio recording or playback which we would acknowledge today? Is there even a difference between the mp3 file of yesteryear and an mp3 file compressed today? Would you hear a difference in quality between a recording compressed to mp3 20 years ago as that same recording compressed into an mp3 file today, on the same old playback device?
Doesn’t matter to me, I’m going to run everything through some bit reduction, add in vinyl crackles, and put a sh!t ton of shimmer revers and dub delays on it anyway before transferring it to my SP404mk2 and chopping it up.
Then I’m going to spend hours painstakingly mixing and mastering it in my DAW, and export it so I can listen to it on some $9 Walmart earbuds.
MP3 is an ISO standard format, an MP3 converted 20 years a go will sound the same as an MP3 converted from the same source file with the same settings today. Wikipedia says the latest release was ISO/IEC 13818-3:1998, April 1998; 25 years ago, whether MP3 compression sounded different prior to 1998 would be interesting to know. DACs have improved over the years, ie better s/n ratio but whether there would be an audible difference between one from 20 years a go and today, probably not for regular home listening. The thing to consider is that MP3 accommodated limited storage space, now storage is not an issue MP3 has been superseded by lossless formats which are indistinguishable from the source material, that’s where the progress lies.
Edit to add - fun little aside, 20 years a go I had a Creative Rhomba, it was an upgrade from a temperamental hand-me-down cassette Walkman so the sound quality felt like a big improvement at the time
I think later MP3s might benefit from better support for VBR, particularly lower rates, which could see improved results (or perhaps just smaller files). But I suspect a high-quality MP3 from 2000 would be indistinguishable from a modern one in an everyday listening scenario, just like a high-quality VST vs an analogue synth in a mix and all the other things we like to think we could tell apart, which will soon be expanded to include everything in the world.
Isn’t this at least a little bit implementation-dependent? My ears can’t hear it, but I read the LAME encoder sounded better than the Fraunhofer one. If you can tell me this is audiophile snake-oil, I’ll accept it.
That may well be so, perhaps a phase cancellation test could shed some light. If you can’t hear it then it’s probably not a significant enough difference to worry about though.
For reasons above, I think we are less likely to see nostalgia for old digital formats are more likely to have nostalgia for digital streaming artifacts.
See Duval Timothy’s “Like” and the way it leans into video call glitches:
For me, yes. But I know my hearing’s sub-par so I try remaining open to understanding wider range of experience. Seems relevant if I ever aim for releases.
There was a time when there was much more active tweaking to the codecs, and the various teams wanted people to detect “killer samples” of tracks that sounded noticeably off.
Of course, with the advancements in storage, it became quickly possible to go from 128kbps to 320kpbs and even to mix in some lossless compression stuff (as the processing power of the players increased to manage that), so it’s sort of an odd case - I don’t know how many people still listen to 128kpbs MP3s encoded with a 20 year old version of LAME, but maybe some?
Yes that’s fair. I suppose it depends to an extent on how you anticipate your audience will hear your music. The slight differences in audio codecs are probably less of a concern than how your work sounds on a massive live rig, or a cheap Bluetooth speaker, iPod headphones, in an average car etc…
As it was mentioned in the thread, MP3 is an ISO standard and theoretically all should sound the same.
The problem with the older files (I’m talking about “downloaded from the internets” of course) is that in the early days people were using codecs on low settings because of performance or did not use some settings correctly or there were just some bugs with popular codecs resulting in crappy sound or unwanted artifacts. That’s why, for example, LAME project eventually stood out and became sort of standard
I could never afford iproducts, although I don’t want to remember the price of the 1999ish diamond player. Cd player would not have fit aesthetically in the photo.
