The MP3 is finally...dead!

The first time I heard mp-3 maybe some 20+ odd years ago, I thought it was dead.

Not to put too fine a point on it but there are MP3s and MP3s of which I class the BBC Radio 3 broadcasts as some of the finest out there. They have always been famed for simple microphone techniques of which I have seen at many of the concerts I have attended in the fifty odd years of going
and witnessing a crossed pair and a spot for soloists. The usual way they are broadcast is on the BBC i Player at 320kbs and last year they broadcast the Proms in flac and to be honest I was hard pressed to tell the difference between the flac and the MP3 broadcasts. If you can , see if you can download a podcast in your region I'm sure you will be pleasantly surprised.

And yet for all practical purposes MP3 is indistinguishable from Redbook CD by a panel of expert listeners in controlled blind tests.

And what does that statement really mean? Yeah, if the source files burned to the Redbook CD were mp3 to begin with playing an mp3 directly or burning to CD is indistinguishable. So what? If burning a lossless file to CD you certainly can distinguish that from an mp3!

Not to put too fine a point on it but there are MP3s and MP3s

I’ll grant you there are some very high sample rate mp3’s that sound "good". Nevertheless, "lossy is lossy" :)