Am i hearding things?

[stan03]

my mp3 quality is 128kbits.... and when i play music it doesn't seem to be very clear... i have an Audigy 2 and Z 680s.... i can't figure out why it sounds so bad.... is it because the quality is 128? i thought that was better than cd quality. oh an i heard somewhere that if the southbridge is too hot it might make the sound quality degrade, but mine is not hot at all, just warm.

[stoopid]

128kbps is usually too low for my picky ears (can hear some flanging on cymbal crashes/loud sections). 192kbps is ideal for constant bitrate. I usually encode my personal listening stuff with audiocatalyst and use the normal/high VBR setting, this limits the file's size but during louder passages allows for a higher bitrate to retain a high quality sound.

[shiyan]

I think generally, the better your audio gear, the higher your bitrate has to be for you not to hear anything that annoys you. Up to your own hearing ability's limits.

[stan03]

could this be driver related or do you think its just the bitrate is too low?

[shiyan]

could be driver related. the audio certainly shouldn't be any worse than before. what I meant was that with better audio equipement you'll hear the differences between different bit rates more readily.

higher bitrates should sound better with better equipment, but lower bitrates certainly should not sound worse than before.

if you are playing MP3 Pro, make sure the player supports MP3 Pro and not just MP3, as otherwise a lot of the high frequencies are not played.

[stoopid]

Originally posted by shiyan
if you are playing MP3 Pro, make sure the player supports MP3 Pro and not just MP3, as otherwise a lot of the high frequencies are not played.

excellent point/observation :)

MP3 pro works at half the bitrate, but the codec (decoder) does all the work at making the file sound as good or better than standard MP3. If you don't have the Pro codec the standard MP3 codec will play it at the lower bitrate (which means it will sound really crappy).

You could also look into custom equalization (raise the bass/treble a notch or ten to give the music more depth/crispness). I don't do a lot of it anymore with my logitechs, but did with my component system.