Do compressed digital audio files like MP-3 really sound the same as regular CDs?
MP3 and other lossy digital audio compression schemes are very effective at making large digital files much smaller, which is quite useful for transmission over the Internet or storage on devices with limited memory capacity. They only sound the same as CDs if your CD replay system is of low resolution (or the CDs themselves are also of low resolution!) . On a good system, the difference is not particularly subtle – music is robbed of tonal character, dynamics and spacial openness. CDs are generally considered to be at the low margin of acceptable resolution for high fidelity reproduction – over the years enormous design effort has gone into squeezing every bit of information into and out of the CDs 16 bit, 44.1 kHz constraints. The better lossy compression codecs throw away about 80% of that data, while the more aggressive compression rates throw away in excess of 95%! (Many people are surprised to find out that CDs have a data rate of 1,440 kbps, more than ten times the typical 128 k
