Well, Chris, for a newbie you're getting off to a very poor start. Your CD versus vinyl argument is rubbish, and I don't know of anyone who has CDs from the 1980s that have degraded in any way, including hundreds of mine.
Leaving the rubbish aside, what is it, specifically, you don't like about the MP3 spec?
I have had the odd commercial CD get the dreaded
bronzing, were the metal turns a rusty gold and the edges of the metal layer become ragged.
As far as MP3 is concerned this is now an old codec and on its way out. It requires at least 320 kbs of bandwidth to be any good, and even then can have digital artifact, pre echo, twinking HF distortion. In addition it saves only 10% more bandwidth than loss less FLAC.
Because of cost, broadcasters need better codecs that can best mp3 at 320 Kbs with less than half the band width. I alluded to this on the previous post. The savings to broadcasters are in the hundred of thousands of dollars per year.
These new codecs are even better than Dolby digital and Dolby digital plus.
The best results come from AAC Plus which is MPEG-4 HE-AA v2. In addition any codec can be combined with MPEG DASH. This latter is a real game changer as it allows timing and gaming of the system. The upshot of this is that good DIY PCs with lots of RAM will work far better and sound much better than off the shelf commercial devices. I can confirm this.
The other issue is the encoder. Commercial options I understand have significant performance issues affecting audio quality. Both the BBC and Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall have designed and built their own custom encoders to improve quality. I understand the development of these advanced and improved encoders have resulted in enormous expense to both organizations. To me the results are impressive and result in much higher streaming quality.
The other issue is that these codecs undergo improvement all the time, without fanfare announcements.
iBiquity for HD radio use a proprietary Lucent codec. Lucent were one of the founding partners of iBiquity. It has been hard to get information on this. As I understand it, it is basically MPEG-4 HE-AA v2 with the addition of some ambiance and shaping features. It has pretty good quality at 48 kbs, but performs very well at 96 kbs. At 160 kbs it supports 5.1 audio.
The next issue is that pop and rock music is absolutely useless for evaluating any audio system and especially codecs. As I have stated before you really only can sort these codecs out with classical music, and especially choral music in ambient cathedral spaces, especially with high descant treble voices when accompanied with significant bass. This is the absolute torture test for lossy codecs and what I always use to evaluate them.
So what have I noticed.
MPR recently ditched mp3 streaming and have gone to AAC plus for live streaming and archive material, except for the Pipe Dreams archive, which often has the material I referenced above. That is streamed at 320 kbs. I can tell from my bit meter, they are not using MPEG DASH.
There sound is much better than when they used mp3, and the 96 kbs stream I think just bests analog FM. The HD radio stream is now sounds identical to their Internet stream now. That is a good thing as LED light bulbs have rendered the S/N of analog FM no longer a serious contender.
The BBC US iPlayer is AAC plus with MPEG DASH and is better than the MPR stream. Not quite good enough for the weekly Choral Evensong broadcasts, OK for pretty much everything else.
The Metropolitan Opera Met Player, does not state what they used. Sound used to be the weak feature but is now much better. I suspect it is AAC plus. The bit rate is higher than 90 kbs. It is hard to tell as they use MPEG DASH. I can be pretty certain the average bit rate is in the 160 to 190 kbs range, for their audio only steams and I suspect the same with there HD video streams. These latter sound better, but these are pretty much all later recordings.
BBC Radio 3 UK use AAC plus 320 kbs and MPEG DASH. With BBC first class engineering, the sound is better then most CDs and even BD. The weekly Choral Evensong form the Cathedral spaces around the UK are absolutely superb and atmospheric and to me are of the best if not the best engineering and sound of this sort of program. They should be good at this now, this program has gone out every week since 1923! Never missed a broadcast even during WW II.
I'm glad to report that the great British Choral Tradition remains at this time very much intact!
The BPO say they use AAC plus at 320 kbs. They are using MPEG DASH as do Meidici TV. Audio quality is excellent.
AAC plus can be combined with DTS for surround sound streaming.
These codecs have improved out of all recognition over the last three years I have been really interested in streaming technology. In my view native decoding by Windows 10 is also and advance. I have my FLASH player currently disabled in my HTPC.
I can't stress enough that for streaming with MPEG DASH, having a huge amount of RAM really improves quality. Off the shelf streaming devices are handy, but can not compete with the obsessional custom approach.
I think you would be just staggered by what I can now get out of Internet audio and video streams now.
I have attached a couple of papers for your consideration.
These are my views on where things stand right now, and yes, MP2 and MP3 are well past their sell by dates.
