better then mp3's for home audio ?

[Reorx]

I was reading CE-Pro and came across a article about Musicgiants. Supposedly they offer music much like iTunes, but at 470-1100kbps instead of 128-192kbps. It's supposed to be geared towards those with decent home audio systems, and not have the horrible compression, and tinman sound normal mp3's have.

http://www.musicgiants.com

Has anybody heard of this or have any kinda comments?

Reorx

 

[MDS]

It says right on the home page that they use Windows Media Lossless as the encoder. A 'lossless' encoder is akin to Zip for compressing other types of files (although the algorithm is different and takes into account characteristics of audio). No data is lost - only the file size is smaller.

That is in contrast to 'lossy' encoders such as mp3, wma, aac, etc that use 'perceptual coding'. A lossy encoder throws away data that its model deems inaudible, so not only is the file smaller, but the data is different than the original.

A file that has been compressed using a lossless encoder will sound identical to the source from which it was encoded.

 

[avnetguy]

It's supposed to be geared towards those with decent home audio systems, and not have the horrible compression, and tinman sound normal mp3's have.

I don't have any problems listening to properly encoded mp2 or mp3 at bitrates of 192 or higher, sounds just like the source (PCM) material to me.
Just stay away from low bitrate or badly encoded versions then sit back and enjoy the music.

Steve

 

[Hi Ho]

Napster offers 192k WMA and it sounds just like the originals to me.