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
ok,
there are 2 concepts you have to understand, Bitrate and sampling frequency
a digital audio recording makes images/samples of a audio recording at a specific interval being the sampling frequency, and with a specific size which is the bit rate.
a CD does 44.1Khz at 16bit, which means it takes 16bit samples at 44.1Khz, and uses a codec called PCM, which uses around 10-12mbps and is considered lossless since all the information is stored but that’s debatable.
Now the issue is lossless vs non lossless.
Mp3 is a compression format, its actually Mpeg 1 Layer 3, it first filters the audio for frequencies most people don’t hear, and then uses mathematical algorithms to reduce the size of the samples, this can result in audio sounding more metallic, bass and treble sounding weaker, clipping… so a lot of people prefer using 192Kbps or even 320kbps, some people prefer 256VBR (variable bit rate) but others claim that variable bit rate causes distortions in the sound.
but we have to differentiate between a digital recording and a compression format, PCM, DSD and such are more storage oriented and use as much space as they can to store the music while you have Flac, ALAC, Mp3, AAC, MQA and such which are compression formats.
Now you have 2 categories in which they separate to, you have formats like Flac, Alac, Ape which are lossless, meaning that they do not discard any information and just compress the information to keep the sound identical.
Others like MP3, AAC, MQA “shave off” information they considered not necessary for the listener, and then compensate during the decoding, so the audio is incomplete but the part which was removed is indistinguishable for 99% of the population, and considering 80% of the population listen to music from their iphone by airpods which are at best mediocre quality…
now the bluetooth thing is something different.
The idea is that between your phone and your bluetooth audio device there’s a data link. that data link has 2 important factors, available bandwidth and latency.
Now depending on the protocol you use, the bandwidth and the latency will improve.
So you have basic SBC which allows “acceptable” audio quality, AAC which improves sound quality and then you have 3 Major proprietary protocols which come from 3 different companies
– APTX from Qualcomm. which includes a HQ mode, Low latency mode and Adaptive mode,
– LDAC from sony which has normal LDAC which is pretty good and LDHC which is a higher bandwidth version for higher quality.
– the H1 and W2 which are proprietary for apple devices only.
The problem with these is that for APTX and LDAC you have to pay for a license from the manufacturer, Sony for LDAC and Qualcomm for APTX, Also Qualcomm has its own Bluetooth chips in the QC series, but if you build a cheap speaker or headphone and use a mediatek or realtek chipset, you get the basic open codecs which are AAC and SBC.
You can Expect LDAC or APTX from a set in the 100-200 dollars from Bose, Sony, AKG… but a pair of Soundpeats that cost 35 bucks on amazon, i don’t think they splurged for the APTX license.
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