[Laurence Payne]

On 5 Nov 2006 00:46:06 -0800, "Radium" wrote:

Lets say there is a 44.1 khz, monoaural, 32 kbps WMA file and a 44.1
khz, monoaural, 32 kbps MP3 file; which one would rather listen to?

I'd prefer the WMA. I readily notice the difference in WMA artifacts
and MP3 artifacts; the differences are very difficult for me to
describe, but they are signficant. Both resemble "digital tones" of old
video games and binary signals but they are noticeably different from
each other.

BTW, what is responsible for those differences in audio artifacts
resulting from a low-bit-rate WMAs vs. low-bit-rate MP3s?


Both systems make a remarkably good attempt at the impossible -
squashing audio to a small file size while retaining quality. They
both do this by discarding "redundant" information, and both think
their definition of redundant is the better one!

At 32 kbps both are going to sound crap. But differently crap. You
would only use this sort of rate for an application where quality
didn't matter but small file-size did. Like a telephone answering
system.

Over 128 kbps both systems can sound acceptable, and the differences
will be less noticeable.