Should I get over my prejudice/ignorance/snobbery for WAV and change to mp3?
A combination of audiophile snobbery, ignorance, prejudice and an ability to convince myself that I CAN hear the difference has resulted in me only buying WAV files from Beatport and JunoDownload. I am also fortunate enough to have a 500GB ASUS NJ61 that only has my (stripped) OS, Traktor and music library on it. Our currency is about to hit 8 Rands to 1 Dollar and I am reconsidering the cost of WAV upgrades. I’ve read the science (I’m sick of reading about WAV’s “voracious appetite for disc space” and “once lost with compression, always lost to compression”) but want to hear from this community.
Is WAV REALLY worth it?
Will I notice the difference?
I really appreciate the sound quality of the S4 and don’t want it compromised.
Is WAV REALLY worth it? I hate how beatport rips us off for them but I pay for AIFF
Will I notice the difference? I thought you said you did?
I won’t buy MP3’s anymore. Lossy is as lossy does..in other words, its not full audio, and I don’t care what blind hearing tests say, empirically its not the same as a lossless version of the same digital sourcestream. There ar esome people who think CD quality is not even good enough for our ears!
I’m only buying AIFF now where possible. 320 mp3s are totally fine though and will buy em if that’s the only option. Or indeed itunes AAC codec which sounds good to me.
I just don’t like WAV cause of the artwork and ID3 tag limitations. I always convert WAV to AIFF now, not sure that’s saving much room mind.
I tried FLAC and had issues when converting (drop outs etc) and just thought fuck it, AIFF is solid.
To find out if WAV is worth it…get a track in WAV, and convert that track to mp3 @ 320. Normalize the two files to within 0.1dB.
Now “randomly” load up a couple hundred copies of those two songs in a single playlist (e.g. do not just alternate…repeat the same source 1 to 4 times in a block). Put Traktor into Cruise mode and play that playlist through S4 and listen with headphones or your monitors. Put the screen out of view. While listening, flip the faders randomly a few dozen times…this will walk the playlist to a “random” spot.
Now, attempt to identify if the track is WAV or mp3. Write down your “guess” for the next 10 tracks…then compare to the last 10 tracks in the playlist. If you can correctly ID the song source 10 out of 10 times…then you can tell. If you can not get 10 out of 10…then you can not tell. (Hint: You can not tell.)
I have worked with professional broadcast quality video and audio for many years and there were many instances where I had clients insist on having "the best " quality because its going on air, not having any clue that what they wanted far exceeded broadcast standard. I had people look at a machine and know it was recorded in analog as opposed to digital and tell me there is a difference, so I would pretend to do it over, not changing a thing, and then have them tell me “See, that looks so much better” lol. So I can tell you that its all in your head. Once you know that something is so called, top of the line, then anything less than that is inferior and not as good so your brain plays tricks on you making you think you can tell the difference.
playing disco beats?
Nah WAV or good quality mp3 is the same.
Listening to classical music on 4000 dollar hifi system you will probably be able to sort out 192khz/24bit 44khz/16bit and so on.
Still id say your just fine with mp3 when it comes to “digital” music..
I love WAVs but I normally use Mp3s as they can be tagged with information about the content. It’s a shame that WAV does not support metadata tags. At least they don’t work with Traktor Pro 2 any more.
Yeah I think anyone would be very hard pressed to tell the difference between a good quality, properly converted 320 MP3 and a wave file even on a great hi-fi or high quality great cans. When your dealing with large PA systems, lots of background noise in the venue, often not ideally set up/maintained equipment or venue acoustics that are less than desirable then there are so many other, far bigger weak links in the chain that the difference between MP3 and Wave is simply a non-issue.
However agree that metatags is a big issue, and for the waves that I do have a few times have moved collections to different laptops or reinstalled and having to re-name/re- artist and re-genre a few hundred of tracks is a PITA! Someone needs to invent some wrapper format that can still be played back/understood as a wav file with any standard software but allows the addition of tags, they’ll make a fortune
My whole library is 320kbps MP3s. I recently started spinning vinyl records for fun, and I can honestly tell you that after mixing a set on vinyl, going back to playing digital is not as audibly enjoyable. On my decent sound system, vinyl sounds noticeably better to me. I know this doesn’t directly answer your question, but it does make wish my files were better quality.
You cant tell the difference. On DJF 1.0 some members did some empirical analysis. There is a difference, but it is impossible to see, hear or feel it with out computer analyzation.
I can’t get my hands on the website, but someone proved it was wrong.
No doubt it feels better to you, you have music under your hand, physically. Still, to me it’s pure snobbery (no offence intended).
FLAC has tags, can be read & played by Traktor, and is lossless…so the conversion from WAV doesn’t cost much.
I have played FLAC at a gig…but not enough to know if there are any latency issues. I do convert to mp3 depending on usage. 320 for Traktor, 192 for iPhone.
Well I’m not lying. Focusing on just listening, as objectively as possible, vinyl sounds better to me than sound coming from my S4. Maybe it is the way the sound is colored or something.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again Why the F doesn’t any DJ software use Broadcast wav files? You can save so much more metadata with them. And yes, one absolutely can hear a difference between wav and 320 MP3 on any system with decent speakers.
