What’s the difference in sound quality or comprehension between an MP3 at 320kbps and a 24 bit audio wav file. – Also, what effect will playing these over bluetooth have on the sound and sound quality.

Question

What’s the difference in sound quality or comprehension between an MP3 at 320kbps and a 24 bit audio wav file. – Also, what effect will playing these over bluetooth have on the sound and sound quality.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Unless you’re somehow using a 20 year old encoder inside a virtual machine, 320 kbps MP3 and 24 bit wav will sound indistinguishable. MP3 encoders (the industry standard being LAME) have improved so dramatically since MP3’s introduction that a modern MP3 codec is considered **perceptually transparent**, especially at bitrates as high as 320 kbps.

For bluetooth, it depends on the codec your devices end up using. I’m not familiar with the bluetooth-specific codecs but AAC at least is also considered perceptually transparent at the relevant bitrates. I wouldn’t assume the same for the Bluetooth specific codecs though (aptX and SBC) since they seem to be designed with different goals in mind (being fast and easy to compute, rather than being high quality).

There might also be some sort of interference you get when re-encoding from one lossy format to another (e.g. MP3 to aptX). But in any case it’s probably still accurate enough that you won’t hear any difference in practice, even if you’d be able to distinguish between the two in a controlled test.