WAV AND MP3 COMPARISON | FEATURES AND WHICH IS BEST
The development of digital audio distribution has led to the fact that there are now several dozen audio file formats on the market.
Each developer tried to come up with their own encoding method and encryption algorithms, and then make them popular. But now, in 2019, it has become clear that MP3 has won the battle of music formats.
And even if the developers no longer support it, that’s fine. Anyway, music in files of this type can be played on any phone, player, computer, radio, TV, and even some models of smart watches. However, when you buy high-quality audio equipment, such as headphones and a sound card for a total of 1.5 salaries, the disadvantages of MP3 start to show.
It seems that the technique is good, but still the music sounds somewhat “flat” and boring. This is because MP3 cuts parts of the audio stream. And then you want to choose a higher quality format. For example, a slightly less common WAV, which will help the technique to “open up”. But is this WAV really that good? Let’s compare two formats, WAV and MP3, and choose the one that suits you best! What is the difference between compressed and uncompressed music formats? Since WAV is a sample uncompressed music format and MP3 is a compressed format, it is worth understanding what compressed and uncompressed music formats are to understand the key difference between the two. We are not going to go deeper, we will also talk about sigma-delta modulation, just “let’s go over it.”
Uncompressed music formats were one of the first to emerge. They involve the sequential recording of every sound captured by the microphone in the studio, every note, every attempt by the vocalist to hit eight octaves in a single song. As a result, the file is incredibly detailed as all the sounds are listed. There are only a couple of problems. Due to the high level of detail of the audio file, it is huge. On average, a three-minute song in a WAV container “weighs” about 60 megabytes. As a result, it’s good for a gigabyte flash drive if it fits at least one artist’s album. And at a time when a 1GB hard drive was an unattainable luxury, it was at least unwise to waste precious hard drive space for songs.
The second problem is that to decode this type of music you need a powerful and agile processor. That is, the chip has to constantly take a digital signal and convert it to analog that goes to the speakers. At the same time, there are many digital signals – we remind you of every sound. Therefore, the performance of the chip must also be high. Thus, engineers and programmers were faced with the task of ensuring that a Robbie Williams fan could keep his entire discography (14 albums, 3 collections, countless singles, 8 DVDs) without having to buy a server. This is how compressed formats appeared, of which MP3 is an example. Compressed formats involve additional music transcoding. The audio stream is divided into separate frames, then they are pasted, the details are partially lost (for example, two loudness peaks are pasted into one), perhaps, as in MP3, some frequency ranges are cut off …
As a result, the file is much smaller. On average, a three minute song in a high bit rate (320 kbps) MP3 file “weighs” about 10 megabytes. In other words, a full EP (mini-album) in MP3 will “fit” in the volume of a song in WAV! And if you reduce the bitrate, removing even more frame-parts from the audio stream and significantly degrading the quality, then the entire discography of the long-suffering Robbie Williams may be “cluttered.” On the other hand, the loss of quality cannot be said to be too significant for the listener. MP3 320 kbps provides enough quality for listening to music, watching movies, etc. The listener ignores “missing details” or “ponders” them to create a complete acoustic picture. In addition, the quality of the equipment also affects the quality of playback. On computers with a weak built-in sound card and Chinese speakers that MP3 64 kbps, that MP3 320 kbps, that WAV will sound just as bad. But just get a multichannel audio system, an amplifier, a discrete sound card with a 192KHz DAC, and the sound in WAV flourishes. But MP3 will seem too flat and with little detail.
