Sisters of Mercy

[tapingguy]

--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, Martin Wheatley <martinwheatley@t...> 
wrote:
> 
> Matter of personal preference.    I find that Radio 1
> from Freeview , sent via an amp to the computer
> Line In and recorded as an Mp3 is superior to anything I can
> do with tape

maybe - it depends on the parameters you use - 256k mp3 is 
supposed to be almost transparent to artifacts and you don't have
any tape compression and hiss artifacts to cope with.

The same isn't true when comparing live->mp3 and tape->mp3
since tape adds hiss which the mp3 encoder will attempt to
encode along with the music, as a result you will get more
artifacts in the section of sound you actually want to hear,
since part of the mp3 bitstream has been assigned to encoding
the tape noise which doesn't fit the mp3 prediction models 
so it is very inefficient to code hence the sound quality
drops. For old session stuff, all things being equal mp3
will give worse results.

> It has the additional advantages that it can be edited and copied
> without degrading

the same is true for any signal once you get it in the digital
domain - unless you start to consider extraction errors on cdrs
(and there are ways an means around that problem as well)

mp3 can give 'acceptable' quality sound with 10:1 compression so
the advantage is 10 hours of music on a single cdr. But cdr's
are cheap now so its not as big an issue as it used to be. Storage
space is still a plus point, I guess.

You can use lossless audio coding like shn and flac but they 
typically only give somewhere approaching 2:1 data compression
and the music is stored as data and can be played in winamp. I
use this format quite a bit to archive my DAT tapes so they don't
rot away and survive past the death of the format.

> I am moving away from audio tape nowadays and judging by the stocks
> of blank tapes Woolworths now doesn't have so are most other people
> 
unfortunately I'd say tape is dead, which is a pity because done 
well it sounds much better than MD, but doesn't have the fancy
cd like add-ons in the navigation area. But its like all things
- its only now that people have got past the hype and admitted that 
vinyl sounds better than cd