The MP3 is finally...dead!

And yet for all practical purposes MP3 is indistinguishable from Redbook CD by a panel of expert listeners in controlled blind tests.

😀

"The lesson seems to be, simply, that our media will always be as exactly imperfect as we are"

No pun intended :-)

The first time I heard mp-3 maybe some 20+ odd years ago, I thought it was dead.

Not to put too fine a point on it but there are MP3s and MP3s of which I class the BBC Radio 3 broadcasts as some of the finest out there. They have always been famed for simple microphone techniques of which I have seen at many of the concerts I have attended in the fifty odd years of going
and witnessing a crossed pair and a spot for soloists. The usual way they are broadcast is on the BBC i Player at 320kbs and last year they broadcast the Proms in flac and to be honest I was hard pressed to tell the difference between the flac and the MP3 broadcasts. If you can , see if you can download a podcast in your region I'm sure you will be pleasantly surprised.

And yet for all practical purposes MP3 is indistinguishable from Redbook CD by a panel of expert listeners in controlled blind tests.

And what does that statement really mean? Yeah, if the source files burned to the Redbook CD were mp3 to begin with playing an mp3 directly or burning to CD is indistinguishable. So what? If burning a lossless file to CD you certainly can distinguish that from an mp3!

Not to put too fine a point on it but there are MP3s and MP3s

I’ll grant you there are some very high sample rate mp3’s that sound "good". Nevertheless, "lossy is lossy" :)

I think I can hear the difference between 320 kbs mp3 and lossless CD Red Book, but I am not sure I am right. There is indeed a lot of research that suggests that there is no audible difference. The Harbeth User Group is about to organize a test for everyone to join: http://www.harbeth.co.uk/usergroup/forum/subjective-soundings-your-views-on-audio/music-recordings-a...

Well not to tread on anyones toes as I am a relative newcomer here and maybe my rough Scottish manners maybe taken as being a bit all knowing but I also think would anyone like to tell me if flac is as good as uncompressed wav files. I have heard recordings from professional sound engineers of WAV, Flac and 320 MP3s under very stringent conditions and played on a very high quallity setup with quite a few musicians and recording engineers and very few of the people could get it right each time. There were only two people in the audience got it nearly always right and it was two women and as their hearing is almost always better than ours that is what I put it down to. Reminds me a bit about a photographic analogy, who can tell tell the difference between a JPEG and a TIFF file on a ten by eight print, not too many I can tell you , I couldn't and I have been a professional photographer all of my life and long before the inception of digital cameras. I was trecking around the highlands of Scotland with a 5 x4 field camera in the late sixties.

....would anyone like to tell me if flac is as good as uncompressed wav files ....

Yes. Meaning the same wav file (uncompressed) when compressed to flac is definitely "as good". In terms of disk space, flac is preferred because it takes less of it. In terms of sound playback quality, the same, however, it should be noted that the player used for flac must "uncompress" during playback, so a theoretical advantage should go to wav. That said, if you first uncompress the flac to wav and compare the two wavs, they are usually identical (as reported by windows properties, albeit *may* differ by a byte or so). 

See this thread where this was discussed at length:

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/flac-vs-wav?highlight=wav%2Bvs%2Bflac

Thank God.
Happy Listening!