Should I get over my prejudice/ignorance/snobbery for WAV and change to mp3?

[mostapha]

It was said earlier, you have to "know how to listen" and what to listen for.

That's actually the reason I think it's not a big deal. It's not blind, but I can hear the flaws in the random country song I'm listening to right now. But…there's no way I could listen that careful in a club at 110dB when I'm wearing earplugs anyway.

Anyone not wearing earplugs has probably destroyed the parts of their hearing that would pick up on the subtleties.

So, when it comes to your audience…you've got 3 groups of people: people who are too deaf to hear it, people who's earplugs are too cheap to hear it, and people who spent a lot of money on custom musicians plugs and wear them clubbing.

Realistically, the 3rd group is effing small. I think I just buy wavs at this point because of a combination of habit and the off chance that I'd want to do an edit. Plus, it bugs me when I'm listening for fun and think about it.

I bet it'd be even more so with 48K 24 bit wav.

I wouldn't bet on it. Filters on DACs are getting pretty good. I'd bet if anything, they'd be objectively worse either because they're distorting to get as loud or just won't get as loud because of reproducing HF content that is basically just noise. It really just depends on the type of AA filtering the sound card did. And for reproduction, 24-bit audio is just wasteful…16-bit audio already has a crap ton more dynamic range than the vast majority of analog DJ mxiers……and people liked them okay.

[JonathanBlake]

Interesting where this debate has gone.

Staying with WAV for now.

.

[sarasin]

Yep, this is where this debate will go on a music based forum!

[JonathanBlake]

Yep, this is where this debate will go on a music based forum!

True Adrian - some of it over my head. This Rand/Dollar rate is burying us 'bru - like Mostapha says, time to 'downsize'.

[mostapha]

Yeah……I hear that.

I haven't bought new music in a while. I have big crates at 3 different online shops stored……but I just can't bring myself to actually buy the tracks right now. Too much other stuff to pay for: other toys, food, fucking gasoline.

[escapemcp]

Skipped to end of thread because I couldn't be arsed to read the whole thread. I saw the first page and all the hoo-haa about 'can you tell between MP3 and WAV', and to do a subjective listening test. Only issue with that is that it isn't pumping out of a 10K system. Music sounds so different at high volume!

As an example, I tried using keylock on a CDJ that had always sounded totally fine at home, but through a large PA, it sounded absolutely awful. I love my 320 MP3s and use them all the time. On a 6K PA I used a 192 (and ashamed to say, a 128 of a tune that I couldn't find anywhere else) and none of these sounded as bad as keylock. I think you'd be better off spending your time paying attention to interconnects and the quality of PA in general, rather than 320 vs WAV, because if the equipment is turd, doesn't matter how much you polish it by putting through a 1000000Mhz 256bit file, it ain't gonna sound good.

Also, no good running WAVs through a Realtek built-in soundcard... it's never going to sound as an MP3 through a top end Echo or Sapphire soundcard solution. Save the money you would spend on WAVs and put it into a pot to buy a better soundcard.

As a final note, no-one ever seems to pay attention to digital outs. Everyone just uses RCA blindly. The DACs on a DB4 WILL be better than the DACs on a CDJ and using this option, you cut out a digital(CDJ)>analog(RCA)>digital(DB4) conversion which inherently adds noise. You will also not get any RF interference on the RCA line from the CDJ to the mixer using this method. Hell, why are we not lusting after all digital connects (AES/EBU) to speaker (esp. now that mixers are going all digital), rather than worrying about the minutiae of WAV vs MP3?

Therefore to conclude, WAV or MP3 should be about #5 or #6 on your list when looking at audio quality. Admittedly, even with a shit system, a WAV will always be an unlossy WAV, so when you do get an absolutely kick ass system, the WAV will be ready to go in all it's uncompressed glory, but you'll STILL be pushed to tell the difference between the two. Save your money and get 320... and a badass soundcard.

[SirReal]

We'll have to agree to disagree on that. My tests were done on a high end, tuned to the 9's flat response professional sound stage and the difference between 320 MP3 & wav was night and day. I do, however agree with your other points about the signal chain, hardware and extra DA/AD conversions, as the overall signal is only as good as the weakest link in the chain.

[mostapha]

I'm with Sir in that I don't think the audio interface makes that big of a difference. It'll never sound better than your source, for one thing, and the differences between a crap DJ interface and a good one are hardly night & day. Diminishing returns kicks in real quick.

[JonathanBlake]

It'll never sound better than your source, for one thing

Essential to this discussion surely - ie your WAV or mp3 at the heart of the source.

[djproben]

@SirReal and @soundmotiondj - did you record or publish these experiments? or do you have links to similar experiments? I'm actually finding less "hard data" on these topics than I expected while researching this, and there's a lot of bizarre claims being bandied about in the "audiophile" press regarding digital data (The Absolute Sound recently had a really strange series of articles comparing WAV to FLAC with some conclusions that defy basic principles of computer science, for example).