Thought this might be of interest to people.... http://www.electronicbeats.net/TV/Tech-Talk-Funktion-One-Slices-2-10
Aye, his purist view was really quite cool. Made me really think about my habit of going for 320kbps mp3's, and just how BAD the average speaker setup really is.
I do exactly the same with 320kbps - I can hear the difference between that and anything lower on my current PC speakers and all I have is a Logitech Surround set. Would be interested to see how 320kbps would play out on a Funktion One system and if you could tell the difference between that and WAV/CD...
Well, i had 22 quids worth of tunes from beatport bought last night .... by the time i'd set them all to be WAV files, the price came out at 37 quid. Ouch. The price of perfection eh I just wonder if my soundcard and traktor are now the weak links in the chain. I think i have them set to CD quality. I'm assuming i can bump that up, but doesnt that leave the weakest link in the chain at that point as being the rate/depth of the WAV files?
One of my mates (who's a sound engineer and puts together/runs rigs at live events), was less impressed...
Hahah nice to hear an alternative view. Hard to deny his comments about MP3's and the like - Obviously cost is the driver here, but it makes no sense to be putting compressed audio through club systems. I remember when everyone was moving to CDJ's and people were asking about this, but in recent times it seems to have all but stopped being an issue people even discuss - most people i'd bet just go for 320kbps mp3's without a second though. One thing i'll give him, is that his installations at glade festival were awesome. The sound cancelling on the open air origin stage in 2008 was pretty swish - you near enough had to stand INSIDE the ring of speakers to hear anything, and outside of that they had cancelling set up so the volume suddenly dropped off. Swish.
CD quality audio is WAV. A piece of software like Traktor should be fine as well. I've got a collection of WAV and MP3. Wav prices can be a bit of a piss-take. I bet most people couldn't tell the difference in a blind test though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV .... seems like that is the case. I wonder what the ones from Beatport fall under. UPDATE : Just checked, and their WAV files are 44khz at 16bit